I had an aunt Julia growing up and my parents sat me down when I was four or five and they heard me calling her aunt Ju to explain that “Jew” wasn’t inherently a slur, but it could be offensive to people if I just shouted it randomly after my aunt. Based on that, I suspect they would have talked to me about slurs if it had come up, but I never used them.

I did once talk to my grandmother at around age eleven about seeing a huge Afro and she asked if I meant the person or the hairstyle. I complained to my mom about her being racist and she set me straight. Both of my my grandparents taught at colleges in the greater Boston area around the time they were integrated and my grandmother insisted on renting a room in their house out to black students who couldn’t get housing otherwise (for only the cost of meals) throughout my mom’s whole childhood and ended friendships with people who had a problem with it. She was just from another time and didn’t consider “Afro” to be an offensive term, probably because she was involved in civil rights through the seventies, when that was used by lots of black groups as a term of empowerment