My experience is that red scare style smearing of Marxism is still the rule, and until very recently when it's been coopted "socialism" was indeed a dirty word, implying that the person wasn't just subversive, but also probably immature, naive, emotional, etc. (Certainly many of the uppermiddleclass liberals I know now who bandy the word "socialist" around frequently would have been horrified by the term just a few years ago). I was born and raised in New York City.

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As a young POC I bought into the "Marxism is a European philosophy that doesn't engage with most of the realities of my life/race/gender etc" line hard. Most of the white Marxists and socialists I met confirmed that view, but more than a few didn't. The work of many artists/thinkers of color, many of whom started in a similar identity-centric "cultural nationalist" background like I did but who abandoned it for Marxism (Amiri Baraka, Fred Ho, Assata Shakur, Vijay Prashad, Fred Hampton many others) without repudiating the good of those movements liberated me---especially as their work and thought was demonstrably more incisive after that move, and freed me from much of the hypocrisy that plagues large aspects of those "cultural nationalist" anti-oppressive movements.