By Sarah Varney, Kaiser Health News, May 10, 2021
The beer bottle that cracked over Christian Pean’s head unleashed rivulets of blood that ran down his face and seeped into the soil in which Harold and Paloma Pean were growing their three boys. At the time, Christian was a confident high school student, a football player in the suburbs of McAllen, Texas, a border city at the state’s southern tip where teenage boys — Hispanic, Black, white — sung along to rap songs, blaring out the N-word in careless refrain. “If you keep it up, we’re going to fight,” Christian warned a white boy who sang the racial epithet at a party one evening in the waning years of George W. Bush’s presidency. And they did.
On that fall evening in 2005, Christian pushed and punched, his youthful ego stung to action by the warm blood on his face. A friend ushered Christian into a car and drove through the bedroom community of Mission, passing manicured golf greens, gable roofs and swimming pools, to the well-appointed home of Dr. Harold and Paloma Pean, who received their son with care and grace. At the time, even as he stitched closed the severed black skin on his son’s forehead, Dr. Pean, a Haitian exile and internal medicine physician, believed his family’s success in America was surely inevitable, not a choice to be made and remade by his adopted country’s racist legacy.
Christian’s younger brother, Alan, a popular sophomore linebacker who shunned rap music and dressed in well-heeled, preppy clothes, agitated to find the boy and fight him. “Everybody shut up and sit down,” Paloma ordered. Inside her head, where thoughts roiled in her native Spanish, Paloma recalled her brother’s advice when they were kids growing up in Mexico: No temas nada. Eres una chica valiente. Never be scared. You are a brave girl. She counseled restraint, empathy even. “Christian, we need to forgive. We don’t know how the life of this guy is that he took that reaction.” This is a country that recognizes wisdom, Paloma thought.
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