I’m white and I’m married to an ethnically Chinese- Indonesian man who we’ll call Tony. We live in a comfortable and generally accepting area that’s getting more diverse every year, but our son Zach has historically been victim of some degree of racism throughout his life. He’s relatively popular at school with a strong support system of a diverse group of friends, but it wasn’t always this way.I don’t want to sound like I’m being disparaging or fetishizing, but I have to say this because it’s relevant to the issue at hand; Zach takes after Tony strongly while our two daughters take after me. Meaning, Zach looks overtly Asian (many people would never guess that he’s biracial) while our daughters are more white-passing. This was not a problem for me, nor for anyone we knew, until Zach started kindergarten. He noticed the other kids would exclude him during playtime, some kids wouldn’t talk to him at all, and then the insults began. Zach tried his best to brush it off until he was about eight years old and he couldn’t take it anymore, not even with a sympathetic teacher who contacted us to talk about his social isolation. Zach would come home crying about all the names he was called, and how he basically became the punching bag of both white kids and other minorities who wanted desperately for someone “lower” than them to pick on.At the time, I leaned very heavily on my husband for help because I had very little experience in dealing with racism, while my husband faced much of it as an ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (his family moved to the US after his family business was burned in a race riot). Tony stepped up and took the lead, I remember the first time Zach broke down in front of him describing what happened at school. Tony held him, comforted him, and did some crying himself. The important thing to my husband was that Zach remained proud of his Asian side that others hate so badly, and that Zach does not allow racism to blow him off course in his goals. Tony took a much greater role in mentoring Zach than I have for the past nine years, and it seemed to go very well. Tony is a Judo black belt, and he began training Zach at around this time to learn self defense and self confidence. And we also enrolled Zach in jiu jitsu and kickboxing classes at a local MMA gym. Zach became an extremely ambitious and headstrong kid with an interest in mathematics and French literature, he has a 3.9 GPA, takes advanced courses, is involved with the quiz bowl team, and has become very popular as a wrestling standout in school. The bullying has largely stopped, much of it due to the fact that he’s now 6’4 and 190 lbs, but also because of a change in attitude that I have more recently become more concerned about.Zach is very well aware of the fact that his outspoken and occasionally arrogant behavior can be intimidating when coupled with his size. He’s not afraid of verbal conflict with anyone because he knows that if the other person escalates it to a physical fight, Zach’s odds of winning are in his favor due to his years of training. Just yesterday we were driving back from a restaurant when an impatient driver behind us expected us to turn right in front of a group of kids crossing the street. After the third honk, Zach got out of our car to accost the driver. Zach yelled at the driver and called him a bunch of terrible names before challenging the driver to “make us move”. He eventually calmed down and got back in the car, and I was shocked at what transpired.I briefly got upset at Zach because what he did was stupid and dangerous as the other driver may have had a gun or may have chosen to run him over. But eventually I calmed down and asked Zach if there was something he’d like to talk about. Zach said he was tired of people thinking they can push him around, that society does not care about the issues surrounding Asian men until Asian men start getting more aggressive, and that all he was doing was what Tony encouraged him to do. I talked to Tony that night about what happened, and I was surprised at his nonchalant reaction. Tony believes that the lessons he taught Zach are necessary, and that they’re especially necessary for Asian men who are seen as pushovers and weaklings by American society. When I tried to point out how unhealthy it was to encourage our son to be aggressive, Tony dismissed my concerns saying I wouldn’t understand what it’s like because I’m a white woman who doesn’t suffer from the same issues that they do.What can I do here? via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2NvsQc0
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