How Our Parents Make Us Racist

The day before Nora entered pre-school, her father took her to an orientation party so that she could get to know her very first classmates. They lived in Jamaica, Queens at the time– a neighborhood in New York City that was split by a South Asian community on one side and a Black community on the other side. When they got home later that day, her father– a South Asian man– specifically told her not to engage with the black children in her class because he thought that they would be a bad influence on her. “Don’t talk to them. You’re a good girl. Good girls don’t talk to bad kids like them,” he said…