Talking to Immigrant Parents About Racism

Some of the hardest conversations I’ve had with my parents haven’t been about school, my career, or moving away for law school. They’ve been about race. From talking with friends who also grew up in immigrant families, I’ve realized many of us have some version of the same story.

At home, racism rarely came up as a direct conversation. Instead, it showed up in passing comments, warnings about certain neighborhoods, or assumptions about people we didn’t know. At the time, I usually stayed quiet, mostly because I didn’t have the words yet to explain why those comments bothered me.

Higher education eventually gave me that language, and it also gave me a reason to think harder about the experiences that shaped my parents’ own views. They built new lives after growing up in a country marked by war and uncertainty, learning an unfamiliar language and culture along the way. Stability and opportunity were necessities for them, and understanding that helped explain why some of our conversations felt like we were speaking from two different starting points, even when we cared about the same things.

Asking questions has taught me more than trying to make a point ever has. When I ask my parents where a belief actually came from, the answer is often a story I’d never heard before, about feeling excluded or struggling to find work in a country that didn’t always welcome them. Those experiences add context that makes the conversation easier to approach with empathy, even when they don’t excuse repeating harmful assumptions about someone else.

I don’t expect every conversation to end with complete agreement, and most of them don’t. But over time, I’ve realized that progress isn’t always measured by changing someone’s mind in a single discussion. Sometimes it’s simply continuing a conversation that neither of us would have known how to have a few years earlier.