“He ended up becoming a dentist,” Monroe said. “We make fun of him now and say we should have been calling him ‘Den’ the whole time.”

Monroe, who is Black, and Dai, who is Chinese American, have known each other since the early 1980s, when they were neighbors in Lakeview.

They spent countless hours hanging out in what is now the Minnie & Lovie Ward Recreational Center, where Dai taught Monroe how to build a slingshot out of a wooden stick and clothes hangers, and nunchucks out of a broom, Monroe recalled.

When they were 8 years old, Dai excitedly invited Monroe to his home for the first time. His mother stopped them at the door and said Monroe could not come in.

“‘We don’t allow Black people in our house,’” Monroe remembered her saying. Doc was furious and refused to go inside. Monroe said he was “hurt” and did not understand.

Three years later, as she had done many times before, Dai’s mother drove by to pick up her son while he was walking alongside Monroe down Mission Street. This time, though, she rolled down the window and said, “Hey, Renard, get in the car.”

Monroe was finally allowed to come over to his best friend’s house.

“I’m going to be honest with you,” Monroe told The Examiner, thinking about the crystal-clear memory 40 years later. “It’s bringing me to tears right now.”

He paused for a few seconds.

“It was life-changing,” he added.

Monroe said his bond with Dai — who now lives in Hawaii, though the pair still talk every week — shaped his outlook on life. It illustrated how a Chinese American family’s “access” to Monroe, gave them the “opportunity” to learn about him and dispel the preconceived prejudices they had toward Black people.

That relationship is especially top of mind for Monroe these days, on the heels of Black History Month coinciding with San Francisco’s Lunar New Year celebration, and as the country approaches the five-year anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd.

The nonprofit Monroe now leads, Youth 1st, is one of several organizations across The City which in recent years to prioritize solidarity between San Francisco’s Black and Asian American populations — communities with a historically complicated relationship, rife with both conflict and unity.

“There’s a lot of myths or misunderstandings passed on intergenerationally, through traumatic experiences,” said Sarah Wan, executive director of the Chinatown Community Youth Center, which recently partnered with Youth 1st to build a coalition between some of San Francisco’s Black and Asian public leaders.

“We want to ensure people are really exposed to understand different people’s struggles, their culture, their historical context, how they all come to San Francisco and America,” she continued. “By really understanding the struggles and the differences, we really can see there’s a lot of alignment between our different communities.”

Through the decades, many of the discriminatory policies that isolated the nation’s communities of color placed Asian and Black people side by side, such as in San Francisco’s Western Addition and Bayview neighborhoods.

“We tend to live next to each other, in ways that are under-resourced, divested and with very limited support,” said Shakirah Simley, executive director of Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in the Bayview. “That creates tension.”

That combination of proximity and inequality is at the root of what many sociologists describe as a history of anti-Black and anti-Asian attitudes in Asian and Black communities in the U.S., respectively, which most infamously captured national attention during the Los Angeles riots against police brutality in 1992 that decimated many Korean businesses.

More than 20 advocates and experts who spoke with NBC News in 2022 said much of the news coverage at the time failed to provide context to the history of neglect that contributed to the destruction. 

For years, and still to this day, one of the most common casual Cantonese terms for Black people is “hok guey,” which literally translates to “Black devil.”

“When I was 10 years old in China, I had never met an African American person,” said restorative justice advocate Eddie Zheng. “But I was already taught to call them ‘hok guey.’”

University of San Francisco Asian American history professor James Zarsadiaz said these views were built and reinforced through “American news and popular culture, which often painted Black people in very problematic racial stereotypes or position Black Americans as, ‘dangerous or not to be trusted.’”

“Asians felt like they were not wanted or loved,” Monroe said. “But on the flip side, how do you think African Americans feel when that’s all you show of them on TV?”

Still, Zarsadiaz also stressed that the two groups also have a deep history of connection, specifically in San Francisco. Black and Asian activists formed coalitions during the Third World Liberation Front in the 1960s, marching together while pushing for education reform at San Francisco State.

In addition, Zarsadiaz said, Black Americans came to the aid of Japanese residents returning to the Fillmore following the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Still, historians and advocates say they saw long-held tensions — much of which is based on myth — between the Black and Asian American communities bubble again during the racial reckoning in America at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the summer of 2020, Black communities and their allies poured onto the streets to protest police brutality following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, unarmed Black people killed by police that spring.

As racial fractures reemerged in 2020, Zarsadiaz said he simultaneously noticed “a lot of renewed energy around Asian and Black solidarity.”

The social environment pushed The City to host its first-ever joint Lunar New Year and Black History Month celebration in 2021. This year’s fourth-annual event, held at City Hall last month, featured dances, poems, speeches and book readings from a series of Black and Asian American public figures.

“It came out of a sense of collective grief and pain,” said Simley, whose Bayview organization has been one of The City’s primary partners. “I think 2020 was really a reflection of the struggles, discrimination, and racial inequities that our communities have been facing.”

The Chinatown Community Youth Center, or CYC, has been one of The City’s leading nonprofits to prioritize getting members of both communities in the same room. Last month, the organization hosted its 15th-annual joint Black History Month and Lunar New Year celebration, in partnership with the Bayview YMCA.

CYC one of the only Asian American nonprofits in the neighborhood despite its large Asian American community. Zheng, the restorative justice advocate, was an instrumental voice in convincing the organization to open an additional office in the Bayview in 2009.

He was incarcerated for more than 20 years after robbing a family in Chinatown when he was 16. While at San Quentin, Zheng earned his GED and dedicated himself to crime prevention.

Zheng joined CYC shortly after his release in late 2007.

Three years later, amid a rash of crimes involving Black and Asian victims and perpetrators, CYC partnered with other neighborhood groups to create the event, honoring the convergence of two of each culture’s most important celebrations on the calendar.

Zheng said they wanted to provide a space for Black and Asian people to learn about their respective cultures and “learn about the commonalities we share,” services San Francisco severely lacked.

He said roughly 70 people attended the first tandem Black History Month and Lunar New Year celebration. The Asian people sat almost exclusively on one side, with Black people on the other. Gradually over the years, though, those lines blurred.

Zheng said as many as 400 people attended the event each year before the pandemic.

Monroe met CYC’s Wan at a speaking engagement at The Commonwealth Club in 2021, where many of The City’s Black and Asian community leaders convened to discuss how they could alleviate historical racial tensions they acknowledged had resurfaced during the previous few years.

Wan and Monroe jointly founded a new annual event called “Communities Together,” hosted for the second time in late January. He said the two leaders hope to make it a quarterly gathering.

Organizers estimated that roughly 200 Black and Asian American seniors attended this year’s event to support local San Francisco food vendors which served soul, Creole, Chinese and Samoan food, engage in group discussions and forge connections.

Mayor Daniel Lurie, Police Chief Bill Scott, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, Rev. Amos Brown and Supervisors Shamann Walton and Chyanne Chen all stopped by.

“As someone who went away to college for undergrad, going to Georgia, it was really just mainly Black and white for the most part,” said Walton, the only Black member of the Board of Supervisors. “So growing up in a state like California, and growing up in the Bay Area, we have the benefit of several different cultures and a benefit of understanding how important it is to know each other’s culture.”

These events are meant to show, as Simley said, the full range of how the two communities’ relationships “have been painfully complex, messy, interconnected, meaningful — and delicious.”

Simley said leaders like her aim to illustrate commonalities through even relatively minor customs, like a shared preference that guests take off their shoes before going into a house or the importance of rice in each group’s cuisines.

“The beauty and connection comes from the smallest connections,” Simley said. “It allows us to see ourselves in each other. For me, with my lens, empathy will always save the day.”