Skin-Color Doesn'T Matter, Part I

I remember when I was young, playing with my best friend Jerome, we had some woods behind our houses, our frontier, where we would go roam. We played soldier, explorer, cowboy, as most young boys are known to do, we were both of us nine years old, so little of the world we knew. Then his older brother came home from some overpriced eastern school, he saw us playing out back one day, and chastised both of us as fools. Said, “Jerome, stop playing white games, all this fascist cowboy bullsh-t, it is not part of your culture, and you don’t even realize it!” At this point his mother called him, the angry young man went inside, saw him argue with his parents, then storm out, his anger alive. Jerome and I just looked confused, neither of us knew what to say, our skin-color didn’t matter, we just wanted to run and play. I remember as a young teen, I was a nerd, and into games, after school I’d play D & D with other kids who felt the same. We’d role that many-sided die, fight ogres and demons and such, the jocks and hot girls laughed at us, but we just didn’t give a pluck. One thing that did surprise me though, when we stayed after school to play, was the school’s ‘inclusion councilor’ who passed by our meeting one day. She poked her head in through the door, took a gander at out geekish horde, spotted Jerome where he was perched, scoffed, “A token…you need much more.” Now we were all confused at this, took a while to understand, outside Jerome we all were pale, and for this reason we were damned. What that had to do with the game, or adventures in fantasy, was not that apparent to us, we liked dragons and quests manly. That was what united us all, and she just could not comprehend our skin-color didn’t matter, next to quests we’d see to the end. When I was a few years older I fumbled much concerning girls, I played no sports and in high school that seems like the entire world. But I as more the thinking type, went to the math Olympiad, and met there a young girl named Lin who didn’t see such skills as bad. I fell like a love-struck child, that is exactly what I was, finally, I had a girlfriend, and I was quite happy because it meant that I got to have sex, the holy grail of all young males, back then I did think happiness was a steady supply of tail. But her father, an immigrant, was not the biggest fan of me, feared that if I got her pregnant the baby would not be Chinese... CONTINUES IN PART II.