The Day My Outrage Went Viral

Racist attitudes against my Brown daughter energized me to raise my voice

Illustration: Jo Yeh

Not long after arriving in the United States, I took my daughter to a playground in Bethesda, Maryland, the D.C. suburb where I grew up. That day, the only other children there were a pair of white girls, who sat side by side at the top of a green plastic slide. When she saw them, my daughter smiled shyly and raced over to play.

Before my daughter could say anything, though, the older girl pointed to my child’s curly black hair and proclaimed, “We’re blonde, you’re not. You can’t play with us. Go away.”

Immediately, I intervened, telling the girls that they had no right to banish anyone from the playground. I spoke calmly, but internally, I was fuming — not at the children, but at their white caregivers, who watched what was happening without saying a thing. Did they not know what to do, I wondered, or did they secretly condone their children’s behavior? After all, the girls learned this attitude somewhere, and the adults’ apathy made me wonder if the bullying I had just witnessed was a result of xenophobic beliefs the children had absorbed at home.

The next day, stewing with anger, I tweeted about the incident, describing what had happened and why it broke my heart. Within a few minutes, a handful of people liked the post.

Then, more than 25,000 people did the same thing.

Watching tens of thousands strangers validate my experience felt like a gift — but it was also a shock. Before this, my experience of motherhood had been a soul-crushing course in self-silencing. My husband and I adopted my daughter from India while we lived in New Delhi, a place where I had few friends and no family. The only thing that alleviated my isolation was the support I found on Facebook and Twitter, where a quick post would garner a slew of advice and support from my oldest friends. These interactions, though few and far between, were vital for my mental health.

During my daughter’s first visit to the United States, my family and I were detained because of her visa. Since we hadn’t yet completed the two-year custody requirement necessary for petitioning for her U.S. citizenship, my daughter was entering the country as a…