I’m not Black.

I was 10 years old, sitting in the back seat of my friend’s mom’s car. My friend had a walkman; he was a year older than me, and probably out of guilt more than anything else, his single mother bought him typically whatever he wanted.

In this case, an album on cassette, with the infamous “PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT LYRICS” label.

It was N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton”.

To be honest, outside of whatever videos played on MTV, it was my first exposure to real rap. Real gangster rap. And music with real raw lyrics that I wouldn’t even begin to understand until I was older.

We listened together, sharing a pair of headphones, leaning in toward one another, eyes wide as we indulged in what was more than a guilty pleasure for a pair of middle-class Asian kids in the suburbs. It was a sin. A delicious sin. They cursed in the music. They said fuck tha police.

Highschool

I grew up mostly in San Mateo County here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I lived in a pretty diverse area, grew up with friends who were Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, Middle-Eastern. We had a commonality of coming from lower-middle to middle-class families, living in the suburbs where very little crime happened, and as a result, we rarely saw the police unless somebody was getting pulled over for speeding or they were visiting our school to tell us to stay away from drugs.

Not all of San Mateo County was middle-class or affluent back in the late 80’s to early 90’s, though. A notorious outlier at the time was East Palo Alto, or E.P.A., clocking in with a murder rate per capita highest in the nation for a short running, filled with gangs, and a population demographic of about 30% White, 40% Black, 30% Hispanic, a far cry from the current demographics.

E.P.A. didn’t have a highschool. After middle school, kids were portioned out and put on buses to be sent off to different highschools in the county. Including mine, Carlmont.

Sup, rogue

Sure, we’d grown up with diversity in our little area, but what we lacked was the idea of economic diversity. We hadn’t been exposed to crime. To gangs. We didn’t know what any of that really was, outside of what was shown on TV.

Here we were. Freshman, between 14–15, coming to our first year of highschool and seeing kids from E.P.A. who were bigger than us, seemed more mature and wise, rugged, tough, and dressed in ways we’d only seen in MTV videos. They had slang that we didn’t. Words we didn’t understand. The Bay Area may have invented “Hella”, which was a universal local slang term, but us kids had no idea of anything these other kids were saying.

Rogue. That was the big one. People said that a lot. Rappers on TV may have said “dog” a lot at the time, but with E.P.A. it was rogue. Sup rogue. How you doin’, rogue? Man, bitch-ass punks from mid-town tryna steal my weed, rogue. Shanked that nigga, rogue.

Culture Shock

My first class of the day was Social Studies, held in a classroom in a long building by a baseball field named after my dad’s P.E. teacher (he had gone to the same school back in the 60's).

“Class, today you’re going to interview your neighbor. There’s a sheet of paper on your desk with the questions. Ask them and right the answers down.”

I don’t think I truly understood what was going on at the time, but in retrospect it’s highly unlikely that the school didn’t recognize the issues they were going to have to deal with, or the opportunity to expose kids to diversity of more than just race.

The girl next to me was Black. Her hair was pulled in tight braids, up in a high ponytail. She had her nails done, big hoop earrings. And she was my age. In my neighborhood, girls my age didn’t dress like that.

Her name was Mercedes. That was the first question.

She was amused, I could tell. She had a little smirk on her face like she knew so much more than me, and she was just going to enjoy this.

“What kind of car do you want to drive when you grow up?”, I asked.

“A four-door mob.”

“A what?”

“You know, a four-door mob. Like a Buick or Oldsmobile or something.”

No, actually, I did not know. I wrote it down.

“What do you want to do when you grow up?”, I asked.

“Grow up alive.”

It didn’t even strike me how profound that answer was as I wrote it down. I didn’t really understand it until years later when I graduated highschool and went off to college just how meaningful that statement was.

Hip Hop

I dabbled a little in my youth, but much of my angsty teen years was spent listening to Grunge bands like Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, or angry industrial like Nine Inch Nails over the Hip Hop and Rap of the day. My parents had gotten divorced at the end of my freshman year, and I wasn’t in the best place emotionally.

College was different though. In the middle of my first year at San Jose State University, I had discovered the radio station, KSJS, and decided to join.

In the mid-90’s, underground Hip Hop music was at its pinnacle. While I spent most of my time in the production booth creating promos and other audio shorts, I also produced a morning show with a Filipino guy who lived and breathed Hip Hop.

The music was staggering. This wasn’t your commercial radio stuff. It was highly political, or charged with emotion, or representative of the street culture that was being glorified simply because there were no other folk heroes in those poor communities.

The pieces began to fall together. Between my already idealistic political views that were both highly liberal and highly constitutional, the conversations I had with the many intelligent people with opinions about the world they grew up and lived in, and through the music, I really began to understand.

The pieces fell together.

Fuck the police. She just wants to grow up alive. These kids growing up in highschool calling me O.G. and rogue may have been making fun of me, but at the same time they were just trying to show me what it was like.

Privilege card

Growing up half-White, half-Asian is pretty much like growing up White. Let’s face it, for the most part Asians in an area like the SF Bay Area, at least, get to enjoy that sense of White Privilege. I don’t worry that cops are going to come up with guns drawn to my window when I get pulled over. I don’t see people giving me sidelong glances as I walk into the store.

That privilege card is kind of funny, though, when you’re not actually White. There’s fine print on the bottom. It’s revocable at any time by the authorities. I can’t tell you how many times I was pulled over for the suspicion of an “illegally modified car” during the Fast’n’Furious era of the early 2000’s, because I was rolling around looking Asian. It’s not an assumption, either.

I’ve been sat on curbs and asked to exit cars and pop hoods. And as soon as the cops took a second look at my ID and saw my name and my age, decidedly white and decidedly older than the usual street-racing punks, the promises of incredibly punitive actions turned into simple fix-it tickets or warnings. My White friends just got warnings through the window, typically. They rarely had to exit the vehicle.

I’m not Black

I’m just a halfie growing up in a diverse area. I’ve got a gay father married to a Black stepfather, a White fiancée with a lesbian mom and a half-Mexican child. I’m principled, and I believe in the right of all people to be equal. I’m fully aware of just how different America is for Blacks (and in some areas, Latinos) than it is for Whites. I believe in our right to protest, to speak our minds. Most of this country is completely blind to what life is like for people who aren’t White.

I don’t care if you think these statements are divisive or racially insensitive to White people. The truth is, they aren’t- you just don’t understand, and you’re being defensive. If you don’t like it, you can go fuck yourself, because I’m listening to N.W.A. telling me to Fuck Tha Police.