Brittany Price
I was in the fifth grade when I started listening to hip-hop, way before it became a norm for white-suburbia. My parents outlawed any cd’s with those black and white stickers and frowned at the hours I spent in front of the tape deck trying to learn all the lyrics. In high school my dad and I got into a huge fight and it was the first time I didn’t keep my mouth shut. Like most parents, even when rock and roll was the victim, he blamed my behavior on music and flung my entire cd rack over the banister. I watched as my beloved collection crashed to the floor as I heard my dad yell something about ‘n****r music.’ I was shocked, I couldn’t believe my dad was a racist.

Maribel Rosas
I was born and raised in a part of Oakland where Spanish was the only language that existed, at least to me. So when my father decided to move us to Hercules, a city that predominately consisted of Caucasian and Asian people, I freaked out. As we approached our new city, a family of four stood outside of their house anxiously, awaiting the arrival of their new neighbors, the Rosas family.
Although I was not able to communicate with them because of the language barrier, their faces said more than their mouths could. For once in my life, I was greeted by a group of people that did not judge me by the color of my skin, or the accent that I spoke with. Unfortunately there have been more negative experiences with racism than good ones, but this one taught me a lesson, which was to not judge people and treat people with respect.

Jennifer Tarantino
The first time I ever experienced racism was in kindergarten. I went to a school mostly made up of Asian-American and Pacific Islander children. I was one of the only children of mixed heritage but I really wasn’t aware that my parents were different races and as a product of them, that I was too. One litte girl asked me if I was Filipino and I asked, “What’s that?” She quickly responded, “Me.” I looked around the schoolyard, noticed skin color for the first time and that I clearly looked different. I responded, “No” and she immediately said, “I can’t play with you, my daddy told me so.” When I went home that day, I asked my mom what I was and she was shocked because it was never an issue before.

Toungvi Tran
It was a hot summer’s night between sophomore and junior year of high school, and my friends and I were parked in a school parking lot. Like all self-involved teenagers, we thought we were the shit drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes and singing along to The Used in my silver Jeep Grand Cherokee. Out of nowhere, two police cars parked behind us and ordered us to get out. I was the first to be interrogated and then cited—also, the only “oriental.”

Len Vinas
A class of over 120 students in a black studies course at SF State were divided into their respective ethnic background to discuss which ethnic group had it easy and difficult. After the discussion, the teacher asked each group, African American, Latino, Asian, Arab, and whites to rank which group had it difficult and easy. Unanimously, the class felt the group that stood as the one that had it the easiest were the whites and the hardest were the African Americans. The whites stood at the highest level above every ethnic group in the class.

Melissa Vu
It all started in the third grade when I began to be aware that such a thing as racism existed. My grandmother, a Vietnam native, used to pick me up from school wearing her cone-shaped straw hat to protect her from the sun. One day, a boy asked me where my ching-chong grandma was with her funny looking hat. The same kid would call me ball nose because mine doesn’t have a strong point. Throughout the rest of my life and still today, people ask me if I speak Mexican when I tell them that I am half Colombian-- a situation the ignorance angered me. Another term such as “beaner” would infuriate me because beans were a staple food that my family ate on a daily basis. I never had a serious situation where I felt unsafe, but as in my examples mentioned, I had experienced the unconscious racism exerted by the general public and my peers.

Roxanne Webber
Zahara lived up the hill from my house. From the time we met at pre-school, we were inseparable, running around our yards, picking blackberries in the woods, and hiding out from our older brothers. Then came the dreaded day: Kindergarten. We carpooled to the first day of school with both our moms, toting tiny insulated lunchboxes full of our somewhat-hippie mothers’ fare: peanut butter and banana sandwiches on sprouted wheat bread, white cheddar cheese, and fruit. At recess, I reluctantly ventured to the bathroom alone. A girl dressed in her best frilly socks and dress looked up from washing her hands and asked me, “Why are you friends with that weird girl? She looks weird.”

Meredith Jones
I went from a 99% white middle-class junior high school and grade school to a high school where the student body was more than half black, and from low-income neighborhoods in Oakland. Right away I realized I had no idea what black culture was like. I ended up feeling like I had to apologize for being white-- for not knowing little things, like who a certain rapper was or a certain slang word. It ended up being really hard for me to make friends because I couldn’t relate to anyone even on really simple terms. If I tried to talk to people who weren’t white about anything, I was made fun of for being ignorant, and if I didn’t talk to them, I was accused of being a stuck up white bitch. I just couldn’t win.

Jennifer King
The silence is deafening. The disappointment in the room looms making the knots in her stomach twist tighter, and the tears swell up in her eyes.
“We just want what’s best for you,” her mother says sweetly, “you know that Mexican families don’t raise their children the same way, you should start seeing other boys”
She’s tired of trying to prove her point that his skin color and culture doesn’t matter. Ever since her parents found out she was dating her Mexican friend, Alex, the silent disapproval began growing into a gaping crevice; they were arguing all the time.
“You need to meet new friends, maybe a tall blonde haired boy, a doctor!” her mother exclaims, “with blue eyes!”

Jennifer Kreager
As white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes I cannot say that I have ever been on the negative side of racism but I have seen how those close to me who aren’t of Aryan descent are treated by society and those in authority. One of my ex-boyfriends is black and the whole time we were together we acted like the whole world owed him something. He made a good amount of money and would use it to get special treatment everywhere we went. We always went to the best restaurants and hottest clubs but never waited in line. He refused to wait in line for anything. The longer we were together the more it annoyed me. I eventually began to understand why he felt this way through his stories of harassment an injustice he experiences growing up black in Washington D.C. and now living and working in Orange County. I had never been treated the he was for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was usually offered help instead of harassed. The longer we were together the more I understood him but the less willing I was to live my life with an angry man who felt he deserved special treatment.

Julie McCollough
For as long as I can remember I have always been the new kid and being picked on and made fun of was something I expected. While playing baseball during PE in the fifth grade, one boy spit on me, called me names and threw dirt at me in front of the whole class while the teacher did nothing. I started to cry as he continued to laugh and scream hurtful things about my appearance. I was so upset that I dropped my bat almost hitting him on the top of his foot. For the rest of the year I was forced to go to counseling because the administration was convinced that my reaction to this mistreatment was based on the fact that I was a white girl and the boy who hurt me was African-American.

Christa Miller
“Hey! Hey Casper!” They laugh. “Casper, is the carpet the same color as the drapes?” She doesn’t know whether to feel offended or deserving of the embarrassment. She might be the perfect backfire target. She’s a quiet sixteen-year-old, alone at a table with a handful of people who may feel so oppressed by people like her that they feel no reservations about replacing her real name with that of a ghastly cartoon character. She decides that laughing about her translucent skin with them is the best way to respond. For a moment she thinks about retaliating, but she soon realizes that in her world they are not racist—they are vindicated.

Caitlin Moneypenny-Johnston
Boarding a crowded bus on the corner of Fillmore and Lombard streets anytime between 3 and 3:30 p.m. means you forsake any promise of a pleasant ride, because invariably a gaggle of middle and high school adolescents would crowd the seats and standing space. This particular afternoon, a group of Asian youths, dressed straight out of a Fubu ad caused a rowdy raucous at the back of the bus. Frustrated from a long day’s work, I take my seat among the noisiness and random body parts splayed across the benches. These kids were throwing a certain racial comment around in playful conversation, a term that has been “reclaimed” and freely used in the African-American community. These kids couldn’t help but let this certain N-word bounce out their mouths every chance they got, but the moment an African-American guy walked on the bus, the whole lot of them shut their traps and kept their racial epithet to themselves.

Chelsea Ozawa
The scrapbook was old and dusty, covered in a thin, peeling, layer of plastic that hadn’t done a very good job at keeping the pages pristine. They were browned and frayed, crinkling softly with every turn. Sketches were lightly penciled onto the pages; a mess hall, a bedroom, a sitting area, a church, all done in exquisite detail. These pictures, my grandmother explained one evening, were the only things she wanted to remember of her time in Japanese Internment Camp. Everything else, she felt, was seen through someone else’s eyes. But the pictures she had drawn were hers and her family’s; their real experiences, and no one, she swore, could alter them.

Arwen Petty
It is the deepest shade of the nights, made terrifying because she is alone and young and running. The weeds scratch and irritate her bare legs, her tears are blurring the monstrous shadows of the field; it is why she stops, her breath a ragged series of gasps, the moving shadows and rustling and whispers suspect her own wild imagination.
Then: a hand at her throat, she is face down in the dirt, she knows she should have never run alone this part of town, cloth is ripping and a flurry of foreign and biting words fill the darkness.
Now she is facing the endless sky, her sternum stretched, when she understands, We’re going to kill you, little white bitch, and she feels the cold steel puncture the skin over her heart, feels the trickle of blood, hears the dogs barking, and she is alone again.
A decade later it is only a scar, a reminder that somehow, by birth, she is wrong, and she owes the world her apologies.

Samantha Barclay-Saxon
I was 14 and it was my first time lifeguarding at the local swimming pool. My boss’s son was working out front as the cashier, and would fool around in the office when no one was watching. When I walked in for my first break he ran over and pointed to some black guy who had come in. And then he switched on his stereo. I froze in place: I can only describe it as Confederate Army music, and it started to fill the office and leak toward the pool deck. He looked at me, scared and excited at the same time. I shouted to turn it off and he danced around in mock army foundation before spooking, unplugging the stereo and running back to the front lobby. I couldn’t look at the men in the pool. What if they had heard? What if they had seen me standing in there with him—two white kids—listening to that garbage? On my second break a young Mexican kid was standing spread eagle in the office, his shoes off, and two white police officers were searching his pockets—he had been caught stealing in the men’s locker room. I felt tainted when I walked in. He looked at me with a mix of resentment and humiliation. I was aligned with the white police officers, and I was aligned with the cashier and his racist music. And I didn’t like it at all.

Heather Becker
I was raised in a small, mostly white, middle-class city nicknamed “Hangtown,” ever since the Gold Rush days. Each day I strolled through the town’s quaint Main Street, I passed the local watering hole priding itself in housing the stump of the tree they used to hang “outlaws” from in the old days. On the outside of the bar, which sits among cute cafes, antique stores and old-fashioned storefronts, hung a dummy from a noose dressed like a cowboy, with black boots hanging. This dummy was finally criticized for appearing to be black-skinned and over the years was changed to appear… My friends and I used to roll our eyes and laugh about it while growing up, but now I shudder to think that I could be judged from such a city…

Darren Chapel
The biggest moment hinging on race came when I set foot in my first college course at SFSU. I came from a small town in Northern California that was 99% white, and there was only a handful of students with different skin pigment at my high school of nearly 3,000. When I sat down in that huge lecture hall and looked around, I found that I was, for the first time in my life, not a majority in the classroom. That experience hit me hard, and I had no idea it was coming. It wasn’t necessarily a life changing moment, but it opened my eyes and humbled me to the fact that this country is home to people from all across the globe of all beliefs, ethnicities and origins.

Arya Hebbar
“Whoo hoo! Driver! This f***ing bus is slow!” the taller white boy shouts as he and the shorter white boy walk noisily to the back of the bush where we are sitting. They were about 10 years old, maybe 12. My husband and I watch the pair and listen to them cuss repeatedly. The bus stops at Palo Alto. As we step down the Samtrans bus, we hear the older boy say, “bye, you Negroes.” We are shocked, mainly because we don’t know what to make of it.

Tony Fantano
Out on the playground I specifically remember a boy named Hassan, he was new and different, from Pakistan. I distinctly remember that the members of my class would comment behind his back about the way he smelled. It wasn’t necessarily that he was Pakistani, it was that he was new and looked dirty. He showered just like everyone else but specifically the prissy girls in the class would talk about him and make him look like a lower life form. The guys always tried to impress the girls, so the girl’s judgment of Hassan became the boys opinion of Hassan.

Brooke Dunn
When I was twelve years old, I was on the phone with my grandmother and we were talking about marriage. She told me, “I just don’t want you to marry a Black or one of those Hispanics.” Oh I won’t, grandmother. I became really angry at her. I was twelve years old! I wasn’t even thinking of boys at that age, let alone what color his skin would be. I really hated that feeling of oppression and I couldn’t understand why she would say such a terrible thing. I was extremely close to my next door neighbors who were a mixed race couple—they had a happier marriage than my own white parents did. I don’t believe that race really entered my consciousness until that moment.

Christine Joy Ferrer
“Hello, bitch, why do you hate black people so much?” she hissed over the phone. I had just gotten to work, at the Children’s Place. This was the third or fourth time she had called and hung up, threatening that she had slashed my manager's car tires in the lot. "You Chink, Filipino Chinapino, ya'll all the same"-- she said something to that extent.
Earlier that morning, my manager said that the same woman had come in with a friend and had gotten upset because they asked her to show ID. The woman claimed it was because she was black. My manager explained that she had fit the stereotypical description of the people who usually come in and steal or return stolen merchandise. "They pulled the race card," another assistant manager added.
The phone rang again. I knew what I had I do.
"I’m sorry, I know the system is fucked up,” I said. “I'm sorry if we were racially profiling you. And I will never know what it's like to struggle the way you do because I'm not black, but I am trying to understand and trying to get other's to understand too."
Then, silence. I began again.
"I know the government hasn't done you right either. And it's not really a big deal if people do steal from corporations because they're screwing people over in China anyway. But if someone is stealing, it's my responsibility as an employer to do something."
Tears began to well up in my eyes.
Our conversation went on for a bit.
"If you want to vent, tell me, I’ll hear you out," I said.
She didn't want to talk to me anymore and asked to speak with my manager. I asked her why. "You sound cool," she replied.
I didn't know what to make of that, but she didn't call again.