The American society thrived off the sweat and pain of unpaid labor throughout the years of slavery with the most modest of pangs of "conscience" made public by free thinkers.
Essentially, by treating black people as utilities, chattel and denying them human status (except by invoking fractions) the imprint on "white" consciousness was that of making excuses for this behavior.
When you deny a people the right to read and write and separate families at will for whatever cause you may summarily and arbitrarily choose--you are not just a racist. You are a sadist and scoundrel with societal approval.
Even further...the churches heaped mountains of "scripture" on their sadistic racism by declaring blackness was the stamp of the disapproval of God himself!
Generations of white people breathed this noxious air from their mother's breast to their dying day fully convinced that blackness was not unlike leprosy or mental retardation!
You cannot find much basis for excusing this inhumanity and this blindness on the one hand or for parsing it into good/better/best examples on the other. Racism is a blight upon rational human thought and cannot be dismissed, excused or watered down by explanations of social consciousness.
The Watchtower, its publishers and the white people who read it were steeped in the very deep waters of racist philosophy. I have no doubt they thought themselves loving, kind and benevolent toward blacks, but, it does not change the insidious monstrosity of their racism.
The Watchtower, had it represented a God of good will and loving kindness at any point in its history would have led a campaign of high alert to inform the world that Christianity cannot exist in a state of racism.
They not only missed their chance to be a beacon of loving kindness--they were blind to the nature of their social depravity altogether.
Racism has not been thwarted by Jehovah's Witnesses in the vanguard of social justice at any time or any place in its tortured history.