When my son was in kindergarten, there was a girl in his class named Miranda.

About six weeks into the school year, Miranda decided that she wanted to kiss my son. She started to chase him around the playground at recess and after school trying to catch him and pin him down. At first I made light of it, telling him that he was good looking, charming, and kind. Of course, girls are going to like him. He will need to learn how to manage it.

He will need to learn how to manage it. That is what I thought at first.

I thought that to be true until the day that he got off the bus and crumbled into my arms in tears. “Mom,” he cried, “I never get to play at recess. All I do is get chased around. It’s not fair. I want to have my own play time.” He was not wrong. It was not fair.

So I went to the school to discuss the problem.

And what I got were Administrators who laughed. They knew full well about Miranda’s behavior. Their response was to laugh and to say “Well, she’s got older brothers. What do you expect?!” I wasn’t sure if older brothers were the answer to why she was a bully or the answer to why she seemed so sexually aware at too early an age. Either way though, all I knew was that it was no excuse for my son not getting to play at recess. The classroom teacher was sympathetic, and acknowledged that Miranda was the problem, but she also chalked it up to her older brothers, and dismissed the idea that anything could be done about it.

I went into the school administrators several times during the kindergarten year. Each time the administrators gave me excuses about how Miranda was “mature” for her age because she had older brothers, and they laughed at how sexually attracted she seemed to be towards my son … who, after all, was – in their words – a very handsome and kind child. “How could she not be attracted to him?” is what they insinuated. The year ended with no resolve, and on the last day of school I had a kindergarten graduate who expressed relief that summer was here and that he would finally get a break from all the playground harassment. Something felt unsettling about my kindergartener correctly labeling Miranda’s behavior as harassment.

First grade came and as bad luck would have it, Miranda was in the classroom again. I guess she had learned some new tricks from her older brothers over the summer because her playground “game” now included enlisting her friends to help her pin my son down. By the end of the first week of school, there were five girls after my son, with Miranda having a prize for anyone who could catch him and pin him down long enough for her to get there. It was less than a month before I was back in the office again, and this time, I played the race card. “If this were 5 black boys chasing a white girl, you wouldn’t be laughing at anyone’s behavior,” is what I said. And I said it over and over and over again. “My son just wants to be able to play at recess. What can you do to make it stop?” And the answer was always nothing. “This harmless little girl was just a little sexually advanced, and my son could deal with it” was the message, over and over and over again.

I was at a loss as to what to do.

Then, one afternoon, the principal called and asked me if I could come to school as soon as possible. And I did. Finally, I thought, some forward motion. In the principal’s office though, nothing was as I expected. My son was in tears, and the principal was angry. But Miranda was nowhere to be found. And the principal went immediately to the point: they were thinking of suspending my son…. MY SON. When I asked for clarification, it was indeed about Miranda and the same playground situation that had been happening every day for the last 16 months.. But she was not the one in trouble. As the principal explained, my son had lost his cool. He’d had enough. And so today, when he got trapped in a corner, he reacted. Lost his cool and yelled one word: “Stop!” and pushed his little tormentor away. And now we were having a conversation about my son being suspended, and the principal was throwing around words like “aggressive” and “menacing” and “threat” and I just about lost my…. words.

And I tell this story now, in the context of bias, because it’s easy to say that the principal was acting in a racist way, but I think it is important to name that there was bias happening with more than just my son. There was bias at play in the way Miranda was being treated as well. The persistent notion that this was a sweet little girl… who was in actuality a holy terror… is just as much biased thinking as the idea that my son was menacing. To continue to presume that Miranda was sweet and innocent, even after months of behavior proved otherwise is just as flawed in its thinking as it is to presume my son was some kind of menace.

Bias is funny that way. Its irony is that it is non-discriminatory. We carry biases for everyone. And that’s the problem. And in this very specific case with my son, not only were biases against the black kid at play, but so were biases for the white girl too. That she was harmless. That she could do no wrong. That she was just learning from her older brothers. That she was somehow the victim in this ongoing, multi-year torture session that happened every day on the playground. And all of those biases would have been at play whether or not my son had been a person of color or not. Bias disadvantages some. Bias privileges others. And I never expected to have to give my son that kind of a life lesson as early as kindergarten. For when I foolishly told him he was going to have to “learn how to manage it” I was naively thinking that meant learning how to navigate unwanted affection. Little did I know, it was a precursor course in what it would be like, to be a Black man in the world, with all the bias that goes with it.

No, ultimately my son was not suspended.

But he also wasn’t a student at the school for much longer either.