Sitting in my cell on a mandatory precautionary quarantine, I'm still finding it difficult to make sense of everything that's going on.

Today, as an adult who is all too familiar with the discrimination and disparities of this world, I know that hate is not a mistake. It is an intentional action meant to lacerate, maim, mutilate, disable, debilitate, impair, and every other goddamn verb my thesaurus has for causing pain.

Nine months into the pandemic, ain’t nothing changed about the racist shit. I’ve seen news reports coming out of Seattle's Chinatown-International District about vandals targeting Asian businesses. They have broken shop windows and put up White supremacist stickers and posters. I’ve also seen an account of a White man who was arrested in Ballard. He had been looking for Chinese people and harassing employees at a Thai restaurant.

These incidents are terrifying to me and my family. The other day, I called home to speak to my eldest son. He's 16 and recently got a car. The conversation started as just the usual father-teen son dialogue: me asking how things were going and him avoiding every question.

But then my eyes filled with tears as I expressed how, after all of the anti-Asian racism I’ve been seeing lately, I was concerned I was for his safety out on the road by himself. My son listened reluctantly as I went through the do's and don'ts of his reaction if he ever found himself in a sketchy situation. I wondered to myself if this was how generations of Black parents have felt when they had to have another version of "the talk" with their sons.

Read the full article about anti-Asian racism experienced in prison by Felix Sitthivong at The Marshall Project.