A Kind of Racism We're Not Used To NEW YORK - When I told my children we were moving from Russia to America, I promised them paradise, more or less. My parents had done the same when they brought me here 33 years ago, to escape anti-Semitic discrimination. Over the years we had spent waiting for our exit visas, they pored over Soviet émigrés" letters by the yellow kitchen light and culled good news to use against me. Like when they said, in response to my repeated requests, that I could not have a pair of American jeans, which cost a month's salary on the black market in Moscow, because once we emigrated to America they could buy me jeans for $10. As a young teenager I was equally concerned about not owning a pair of Levi's and about being Jewish; both circumstances made me a misfit. I was concerned that we were exchanging one country in which Jews were a minority for another. The émigrés" letters contained little information on this: Unlike the price of jeans, ethnicity - we thought of our Jewishness as an ethnicity, not a religion - seemed to be a nonissue. I was skeptical, but I had no choice about following my parents out of the country. In Boston, where I went to high school, I quickly learned the very peculiar fact that being Jewish meant being part of the majority - the white majority. Many Soviet émigrés, buoyed by this discovery, adopted rabidly racist attitudes. This embarrassed their kids, the people of my generation, who, as they became American adults, usually moved steadily to the left of their parents. I did that. I also became a journalist, went back to Moscow as an American correspondent in the early 1990s, stayed, restored my Russian citizenship, eventually started a Russian family, and then, a few weeks ago, found myself emigrating again - this time to escape the Kremlin's anti-gay campaign. And, just like my parents before me, I found myself promising my children that America would feel different because, for the first time in their lives, they would not feel they were different. My oldest son, like me, looks distinctively non-Russian and has known this his whole life. All of our three children stand apart from the crowd because they are being raised by lesbians. I promised the kids that in America they would just be free to be themselves, unmarked. I didn't mention that life without labels, which they have never known, is always the prerogative of the majority. We neighborhood-shopped and chose Harlem - among other reasons, because many people who are roughly my age and in roughly my field of work are moving to the neighborhood. Soon enough, I was speaking to one such woman. She mentioned she sometimes sensed resentment from Harlem's old-timers. She said she had been the target of "racist remarks." I cringed. This woman was white, and the remarks had been made by people who were not. And I knew there was no such thing as "reverse racism": You cannot be the object of racial discrimination if you are a member of the powerful majority. I had learned this as an American before I became a Russian again. The day after that conversation, my 12-year-old daughter took her toddler brother to a playground, only to return very soon and very shaken. This park is Harlem in miniature. There are two playgrounds, less than 300 yards apart, an old basic one and a new shiny one. In the new playground, well-dressed toddlers of different races, most of them minded by dark-skinned nannies, played together. At the old one, a few black kids played while their older siblings kept reluctant watch. A couple of drunken men loitered nearby. Apparently, one of them had lashed out at my daughter, calling her a "white bitch." He then collected his kids from the playground, making it clear this was done on her account. "Isn't this racism?" she asked me, shocked. Somehow, my model, which denied the possibility of racism directed against the majority, could not account for the power dynamics involved in being a child being berated by an adult. Back home, the first contender for the position of the toddler's nanny showed up for her interview. She was a Russian speaker who has lived in New York for many years, and as soon as she walked through the door, she started berating black and Latino nannies, who, she said, can't even take care of their own children. I ushered her out as soon as I could. This kind of racism we were used to, and it was a good starting point for the complicated conversation I'll be having with my kids as we all learn to live in America. Masha Gessen's latest book is "Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot."