One of those hard conversations...

My grandfather called this evening.

I love my grandfather very much. He is an amazing man. He has pulled himself up from nothing. He was born blocks from the local stockyards, the son of an alcoholic mechanic and a garmet seamstress. He is now a millionaire who owns a sliver of land on Clearwater Bay in Florida.

He is also the most racist man I have ever had any extended contact with.

This evening we finally started discussing what I was spending all this time working on.

"It is called the Other Race Effect. It refers to the way that people of one race are able to remember faces of their own race better compared to faces of another race."

The response I get is a longwinded talk about how the cells in the brains of asians are closer together than the cells in the brains of the caucasians, which are closer than the cells in the brains of blacks. And that, you see, is why asians are better at math. He read it once. But people stopped talking about it because it became taboo.

I was basically speechless. I tried to explain synaptic branching, but it is hard without bringing up rat research. And everyone knows animal research doesn't matter, since we are God's Children, not "glorified apes".

It is stunning to be working on research on prejudice (explicit or implicit, neuronal or cognitive) and realize that your own flesh and blood embodies exactly what you are fighting.

Not that this is really a fresh realization. But it still hurts.

I love you, Grandpa.