Thread. Story time, girls & boys. @soonergrunt’s story of racism in his family jostled a memory from the old brain case. It’s no secret that my parents’ generation of Korean immigrants is, largely, racist towards Black people.

2. Growing up, I thought nothing of my parents referring to Black people as 껌둥이 (kkum-doong-ee), without realizing that they’d turned a generic term for Black people into a slur. The closest comparison in English is how some Southerners turned the word “Negro” into “Nigra”

3. When I was about my son’s age (11), I realized that not only did my parents not have any Black friends, my parents chose not to associate even with our Black neighbors, about whom more later.

4. It was puzzling, to say the least, for a kid whose parents always stressed that we (Korean Americans) had to work 2x as hard as white people in order for whites to see us as a peer. For reference: https://appafortwo.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/never-let-them-see-you-sweat/

5. I’m 15, so my dad sat me down for a talk. By this time, I had a long-running flirtation with our Black neighbor’s daughter. We hung out after school, had joined the same geek clubs (chess, debate), but neither of us had the courage to take the next step.

6. The talk went as well as Paulus’s siege of Stalingrad. My dad chose that time to identify to me which races he felt were acceptable for me to date. I wasn’t just horrified, I was mortified down to my toenails.

7. Obviously, Dad preferred that I date a Korean American girl. Even within that demo, he preferred that I date a 2nd gen (child of immigrants) like me, rather than a 1st gen or 1.5 (immigrated here as a child). Yes, there are subsets you these categories. Who knew? I didn’t.

8. Not *as* acceptable, but whatever, were girls of NE Asian heritage like Chinese or Japanese. And wait! There was a hierarchy!Below NE Asia was SE Asia. Then white girls. Then, at the bottom of the list, were South Asian & Black girls. That, my father said, he couldn’t abide.

9. Well, I thought, shit. That put a damper on things. It also didn’t help that my friend’s parents disapproved of her spending so much time with me, & not a Black boy. Noelle, wherever you are now, holla at your boy.

10. We didn’t work out, not least because she didn’t like jocks, & I was turning into your typical East TX “even the gods worship me” football player, which made me even more insufferable, & not just in her eyes.

11. I continued to date, but had become circumspect with respect to whom I’d allow my parents to know I was dating. They met & approved of Dee, a KA girl who was my straight-guy version of a “beard”, because I was cover for her Black boyfriend.

12. Long story short, I decided at a young age that my parents’ ideas on race had no place in my life, or how I lived it. Could I have used my old man’s advice now & again? Sure, but given that he was stuck in the early 70s, to what end?

14. By the time I finally (thanks to years of therapy) opened myself to accepting advice from Don Kim, he’d already been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. To my eternal regret - & because we’re both Korean & therefore obstinate as fuck - he never met his infant grandson.

14a. There were a lot of other family factors in play with him not coming to NY to meet Junior, which could be the subject of another thread. But I figuratively piss on his grave enough already.

15. The lesson in all this? As I told my son, my only criteria for approving of his friends is, “are they an asshole?” All else is secondary. I don’t want either of my kids to grow up thinking that race has any place in my approval or disapproval of someone they associate with.

16. Sorry, got long winded there. I occasionally wonder what Dad might’ve said about other partners I’ve had, who weren’t his ideal in terms of race. But then I remember that, in this regard, I stopped seeking his approval in 1988.

17. As Bill Preston & Ted Logan famously said, be excellent to each other. That’s really it. Here endeth the lesson.