Kelly Ghaisar never thought to teach her son, Bijan, to fear the police. She didn’t see the need. After arriving in the US as a young girl fleeing the Iranian revolution in 1979, she had led a charmed life in her adopted country, building a prosperous and happy family with her husband and raising her two children – Bijan and his older sister, Nageen – to believe in the American dream.
“We had just lived our life in this bubble, this very lovely bubble,” she says. “Even though we’re both from Iran, we never felt we had to teach our kids that they were different. They were American and we taught them to believe that they were equal and free, the values we thought this country stood for. I never thought that Bijan, a young man of colour, would need to know what to do if he encountered the police. We taught him they were there to protect him, not that he would ever have to protect himself from them.”
