Level The Playing Field
How Does Your Ball Bounce?

I learned at an early age (grade school) that just looking different opened myself to physical and verbal attacks that I’m guessing a majority of you have not experienced. The threat of these continued through my first year in high school in East Country Portland, Oregon. When Bill Rice blindsided me and sucker punched me off of a railing I was sitting on waiting to attend my very first “Soc Hop” dance as a freshman at David Douglas High School. I have since learned not to let others do that to me anymore.

It wasn’t until my early 20s that my Father shared with me the atrocities of his youth; being imprisoned in an American Concentration Camp during WWII in Twin Falls, Idaho along with over 120,000 people of Japanese Ancestry. Many of who were U.S. Citizens like my Father and Uncles.

“I can only imagine what it must be like to be able to look past a person’t racism because it won’t affect you.”

I have little tolerance for such things these days while my communities are being attacked, threatened, and marginalized.