I grew up racist. I still support Black Lives Matter.

“Where were the black people when the Asians were being harassed during COVID-19?”

I heard this comment from an acquaintance recently and it brought me back to a different statement I grew up with similar intent.

“Don’t make friends with black people.”

My parents often told me this throughout my childhood in the late-80s. My brother and I grew up in Brooklyn, the children of first generation immigrants from China, and one of the only Asians in our primarily black and Hispanic neighborhood around the corner of Knickerbocker Ave Station. This was before Brooklyn became the wet dream of every hipster from here to Tokyo. We shared an apartment with two other families, the four of us cramped into one of the two bedrooms. My mom ironed shirts for 8 hours a day in 90+ degree conditions in a factory that was a sweatshop in everything but name, while my dad delivered Chinese take-out every day until midnight and then woke up at 6AM to bike to his NYU lab assistant job in the morning because he couldn’t afford the train fare.

We grew up poor, but my parents always led us to believe we were better off than the other minorities in our neighborhood — that despite the half-rotten $1 discount produce my mother always picked through at the deli and our hole-covered underwear that somehow we…