Last Friday, I posted some thoughts about the Minnow and his future. I expressed concern about how he would have to live his life, and the racism that he might face. It was a generally well-received post, but one comment that I heard was that I didn’t offer anything concrete. Instead, it was more of the same generalizations. After all, I don’t truly understand. I know all of the arguments about white male privilege, and to a large extent, I agree with them. It is easier to be a white male than it is to be anything else. That does not, however, mean that I have never experienced racism, or that I cannot help him.



I had left home to spend a year as a Rotary exchange student during my junior year of high school. I had thought that I might end up in Tokyo or another exciting city. Instead, I lived in a small town known for its sake breweries, rice farms, and mud huts. I was one of very few foreigners (one of 3 who lived in the city, as far as I knew). I did not assimilate fast enough, and struggled to assimilate at all – I was, and to an extent still am, a counter-culture anti-authority sort of guy. I was also very in the minority. What’s more, I was the low man on a status-crazed totem pole.

Living in this country, I have seen homophobia and antisemitism directed at me (being an ally is close enough sometimes). I have seen racism but never really directed at me or a member of my party. But I’ve known racism. My freshman year of college, I was friends with an RA; she was tall, blond, white. A black student challenged her, asking what she knew about being discriminated against. After all, she was white and in a white society. She’d spent a portion of her life in Korea.

In my year in Japan, I handled overt racism, including threats and punches. I rolled with them. I also tolerated more subtle incidents. I am in a number of pictures from that year, when people wanted to pose with the foreigner. I still remember one person calling friends over telling them that the foreigner was over. You let it wash over you. You move on.

In the grand scheme of things, most of this was benign and irrelevant. These people had no effect on me in the long-term. Still, I will carry lessons for my children from this time. You can’t win a fight when it’s you against 5 – so you are best served by extricating yourself and finding another way to stick it to them (for me, it was dating all of the girls they were interested in). Sometimes humor is the best way to deal with bigotry, especially when it’s unintentional. Some people will change, but others won’t; focus on the former group and ignore the latter. A parting shot, after you’re out of firing range, is only satisfactory if you can find out about the damage.

Those are my lessons, and yet, I am not sure that they will help. I dealt with a different type of racism, a generally non-violent one. I worry that for him, it won’t be that simple. I worry that he will have to face violence, American-style violence, with its guns and bullets. I have no real advice for that.

I will raise him to be strong, and proud of who he is. I will raise him to be confident and to ignore those who would think less of him for his skin color, or his religious upbringing. I will raise him to be smart, and quick-witted, and to recognize the fights that he cannot win and how to handle them. And I worry that will not be enough.

The world today is so very different from the one that my sixteen year old self faced. The racism of today, and of this country, is of a very different tenor. So I will do what I can for the Minnow.

I will teach him from my experience. I will learn from his. Together, we will find a way for him to move past the challenges he faces. Together, we will move past any racism he faces.

And I’ll be proud of him. No matter what.

This post has been edited.