I’m lucky enough to have always grown up in mixed race environments and I myself am half Vietnamese. I’ve had friends and family from all types of different backgrounds. Despite this, I have seen a few examples of racism. I was too young to remember this, but when I was living in Toledo, Ohio, there was an old racist couple living across the street. I’m not sure exactly how old I was at the time, probably around 3 or 4, but I was told by my dad that I was playing outside and the old couple, who were always posted on their porch, started calling me a “nigger baby”, to which my dad promptly stomped across the street and threatened to fight the old man. From then on I don’t think they ever said a word to me or my family again. My mom is clearly Asian and not black, so their insult didn’t make sense, but I guess they just didn’t approve of race mixing.

Another time I witnessed racism was junior year of high school. I went to 2 different high schools, and this was the one with a whiter population and a little “hick” section. One of the “hick” kids posted on his snapchat story on Martin Luther King Jr. Day something along the lines of “we get off for nigger day but not for veterans”. Obviously, he got a lot of backlash very quickly. The school sent an email out to all the students and parents about it, saying that those type of statements are not tolerated by the school. He posted it outside of school so the administration couldn’t really punish him, but the next day in school a couple of African American students bitched him out in the hallway and threw their lunch at him. I think this is when he realized he had fucked up. Not to mention, his mom worked at the school as a nurse and was very embarrassed. Other schools in the county also caught on to this and he quickly became infamous as the “nigger day” kid.