>The emotional experience of dealing with racism is tough, especially if you’re the target. I think what’s worse, though, is not dealing with it and not being g

>The emotional experience of dealing with racism is tough, especially if you’re the target. I think what’s worse, though, is not dealing with it and not being given any tools for dealing with it—to experience the injury and then not know how to deal with it. This. I am of mixed South/Southeast Asian descent, but I frequently get confused for being Hispanic. Growing up in SoCal, one would think this is not a problem. My best friend was a Persian-American Jew, and my first crush was a Japanese-American boy. Ironically, the times when I felt most out of place were when I was around either side of my parents' relatives who were not mixed, and more culturally homogeneous. And yet, I will never forget the summer I spent on Catalina Island, during the early 1990s and the heyday of Gov. Pete Wilson and the anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric of Prop. 187. I wandered into a gift shop, and was just walking around looking at items, and the white store owner's first words to me were, "If you're just browsing, please be aware that we have cameras all around." I remember not knowing how to process what she said. It was only later that I realized that she had misjudged me. It was deeply hurtful, but I swept it under the rug, not knowing how to deal with it. 10 years later, I would experience the same type of hurt in my high school geography class, hearing my classmates mimic South Asian accents and ridiculing the names of places like Lahore. And I still did not know how to deal with it. Sometimes, even growing up in an ethnically diverse environment is not enough to steel one's self against the insidious nature of racism. Thanks for posting this.