A Cop Stopped Choking Me When He Realized I Was White
How a traumatic encounter with a racist police officer 26 years ago still affects my life
Milpitas, California, was a strange place to grow up. With a population of 50,000 at the time, it was a small town by Bay Area standards. Located just north of San Jose and 45 minutes or so from San Francisco, Milpitas used to be a factory town, but the Ford plant closed years before my family moved there, leaving a host of environmental issues in its wake.
What was once a White town became a multiethnic melting pot. A Vietnamese family lived next door to us; a Filipino family lived across the street. Several Indian and Latino families lived on our street as well. One Black family lived on our block and a handful of other White and Asian families.
As far as I knew, there weren’t any racial tensions in our neighborhood. Most of the White people I knew growing up thought racism was an artifact of a different time and place — something from Nazi Germany or the Jim Crow South. Racial tensions might exist in Oakland to the north of us or parts of L.A., but in multiethnic Silicon Valley, we were too chill to have race issues.
I knew something most of my White peers didn’t, though: Racism was alive and well in Milpitas. There was a…
