There was a time as a young engineer intern when the pain of getting up for work super-early was overruled by the need for free parking in downtown Los Angeles.

One morning, I chanced upon an argument between my boss and his boss. My boss’s boss was saying that my boss had too many Japanese people in his shop. My boss fired back that he hired people to meet demands to get things back on schedule and now was being told to get rid of folks because there were too many of a certain kind.

After the argument, my boss came out and saw me making the first batch of coffee. He looked at me as if I were a ghost. All I said was, “Good morning.” Nada mas, but sure enough, it didn’t take long before one of the Japanese-American workers in the shop was reassigned to a different office.

As a young hire, I also remember a time I was driving two managers to a meeting. The gate guard was an African-American man who directed us to the guest parking area. One of the managers advised me that, as I moved up, I needed to remember never to hire an African-American into a position of authority. The other manager reinforced the sentiment. As shocking, sad and scary as their comments were, as a young man living in Pollyanna, I remember thinking, “Wow! I must be passing as white!”

Now I look back and wonder: If these things were being said to me as a person of color, what more might have been said to up-and-coming workers that were not? Interestingly enough, when I do the math, the managers of that day would have been the generation of “hippies” staging “love-ins” and the “peaceniks” protesting the war in Vietnam and marching with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On the other hand, there were also those among that generation who would fire upon fellow citizens at Kent State University and spit on African-American students trying to obtain higher education.

Late in my career I was at a conference where we pushed hiring the best, with the idea being that the pool of top graduates was becoming a diverse population and thus hiring the best would translate into a more diverse workforce (for context, there weren’t that many females in my engineering class, so diversity meant both ethnicity and gender). A manager there took me aside and told me that a person could have all the degrees and qualifications in the world, but if the village idiot attends the manager’s church and applies for the job, the village idiot would get that job every time. I wondered, in this new day and age, how many more were getting groomed with that mindset.

Try as some might to ignore that there is still discrimination in our society, it does not make discrimination disappear. Just when it seems that there is magic in the air, the unmistakable signs of discrimination come flooding back into view.

An African-American man named Barack Hussein Obama wins the Democratic nomination against pseudo-American royalty in the form of a Caucasian woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton. On the strength of young voters, women voters and minority voters, Barack Hussein Obama doubles down on the improbable and defeats Caucasian Vietnam War veteran John McCain fair and square.

“Swift Boat” attackers and Supreme Court electors need not apply. It seemed like a monumental day that many believed would never happen in their lifetime.

Then, without fail, discrimination came flooding back into view. Politicians, male and female, made clear their distaste for our African-American president. From a startling shout of “you lie!” in the halls of Congress to the “birther” charges attempting to undermine his legitimacy, as well as a disrespectful display of angry finger-wagging in his face, they sought desperately to build a hateful audience against our president.

As our nation reeled from an economic meltdown, hate filled their hearts to place a failed, four-year priority effort on denying him a second term. Given the amount of suffering across our nation, it took an enormous amount of hate to ignore it all and do nothing but obstruct every attempt to do good for our country.

Every generation brings with it a diversity of philosophical views. Our current generation of young voters has an opportunity to shape this nation in the manner that they choose at the voting booths.

I hope that a vast majority of them see that their world is being narrowed by a very active and vocal minority of hateful hardliners.

Our youth will decide whether or not diversity is to be feared and marginalized or embraced and celebrated.

Hiroshi Eto, a homeowner in Federal Way since 1988, returned in 2012 after retiring as a civilian member of the Army Corps of Engineers. He serves on the Federal Way Public Schools board as Director, District 5, and serves the city of Federal Way as a commissioner on the Diversity Commission.