This is not a simple matter. The basic operating principles and mechanisms are pretty simple, but we as humans have a raft of emotions and conditioning that complicate things a lot.

Back in 1957 my roommate at U.C. Berkeley and I once had a discussion into the wee hours of the morning, discussing a variety of things, and ended with a discussion of WWII and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At one point in a heated moment he yelled, “But we were fighting the Japs…!”

Ouch! He didn’t realize what he’d said or that it was hurtful to me. We talked and he later said he didn’t think of me as Japanese, he didn’t think of me by the color of my skin, he was color blind. I accepted his apology for what it was, the confessions of someone who believed he was raised right and not racist, and getting to know him I believed it. Ignorant and as a result sometimes insensitive maybe, but not racist. I’m fine with that.

When Barbara and I moved from Berkeley, a multi-cultural multi-ethnic city where half the population is non-white, to Eugene where the minority population is 10%, which means the Asian population is but a wee bit of that, I had some reservations. Not that it would have kept me from moving here, but my race-radar would be working overtime till I got the lay of the land.

Our initial house inspection gave us one of several matters to clear up, replacing the glass shower doors in our master bathroom with safety glass. I put the two sliding doors in the back of our station wagon and delivered them to a business that dealt with such matters and asked to have the glass replaced with safety glass. The owner was a gruff man, curt in his dealings with me, and horribly dismissive of me when he pointed out the industry icon in the bottom corner of the doors indicating that these were indeed safety glass. I felt belittled and mistreated and attributed this to treatment by a man with a racist streak. On later consideration I decided he may or may not be racist, I didn’t really know, but more likely he was just a mean-spirited jerk who treats most people as he did me. I decided my initial thoughts were premature and hasty based on my feelings being hurt.

One day I returned from the final day of the NCAA Track and Field Championships here in TrackTown USA, Eugene, OR. Time and again over the four days I witnessed something that’s been a common occurrence with the track and field crowds here: the entire audience rising to give a standing ovation with thunderous clapping to an individual performance. To every athlete, regardless of race. To see an entire stadium of mainly white spectators stand to applaud a single performance of excellence by an African American athlete is relevant to my topic here. It’s heartwarming. I’m sure it happens elsewhere with track and field venues, and that’s a good thing.

Over the years I’ve encountered far worse and been treated much more harshly, and behind those incidents there was an intent that was much more hateful and hurt much deeper. Growing up immediately after WWII in a largely white farming community in central California, with only a smattering of Mexican Americans and African Americans, being an American of Japanese descent came with a price. My parents were hyper-conscious of our status in the community, and because of that I think back on my home with an American flag in the living room, a Holy Bible on the coffee table, and crocheted doilies on the backrests of our sofas with “In God We Trust” and “God Bless America,” as 200% American in post-war 1950s America.

Thankfully there were families that were our friends, both peers and leaders in the community or things could have been much worse. I grew up with a healthy appreciation of race and what it meant to be a minority, and with the instruction by my parents learned that it was the person inside me that counted, not the color of my skin or the slant of my eyes. This was easily said by knowing parents; not so easy for a child to live out on the playground.

I make a distinction between racism of the benign type and the more hateful destructive kind. My Cal roommate was the former, and I can live with it without losing any sleep or worrying about educating someone like him, though I may make a comment in the moment to educate. I believe his heart was in the right place. The latter I feel a need somehow to respond to more directly, but it isn’t just that simple. As I say, human emotions play a role, mine included, and it becomes a complex maelstrom of currents.

In my mind I hold the racial survival mechanism of perception of differences as relevant to the discussion of racism. I use the word “racism” or “racist” liberally in my regular speech. I try to keep it clean by using them only with the destructive and hateful utterances or actions of others but not with instances like my roommate – Like the hateful responses to the Cheerios ad.

It is difficult to speak civilly with a hateful person, but this is the issue, isn’t it?