I lived in Japan for a couple years. I was close-knit with a bunch of other foreigners. We all needed the community to find English speaking doctors or working out our internet bill etc. We were all discriminated against by Japanese and every meeting at a bar would eventuate into everyone telling a story about how they’d been discriminated that week.

Because of this environment, we had so much more in common with each other than with Japanese. It didn’t matter nationality, sex, gender, race. While I was in that community, I was truly blind to those things. then I returned to America and almost instantly I could feel the racial undertones again. It’s almost never a conscious decision. You’ll just see how class and race are so interlinked and how people treat others they consider beneath them. It’s not something I can put a finger on but I can feel it.

If a group of white people are hanging at a bar and a black person walks in, everybody is more aware of it than they otherwise would be. I visited an unknown bar and realized I was the only white person. I wasn’t treated poorly, just differently. This divide will take a couple generations to heal but I think America will get there.