Open Thread: What Does Your Community Look Like? at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture

Open Thread: What Does Your Community Look Like?

by Latoya Peterson

So, now I am curious. When I made a comment about my life being one big PoC party on this thread, I got back a response that I didn’t anticipate. A few people (on the thread and on BFPs thread) expressed the desire to belong to a PoC community in real life.

I admit, my first thought was “What’s stopping you?”

Then, after I thought about it, region plays a large role. But other things do as well. My friends are fairly diverse, but we are tied by some common threads. A lot of my friends I met in the open mic/art gallery scene in DC. Others I came by through getting into dance and yoga. A couple of them, I met on the internet - I was trying to locate other girl gamers in my area, but I ended up finding a couple comics fans to boot. Most of the people I met where other PoCs, not sure how pre-exisiting selection biases factored in with that one.

My community became diverse on its own - South MoCo is where the minorities are, generally speaking. I recall being one of a handful of brown kids in kindergarten - by the time I hit middle school, the schools in my area were majority-minority. The neighborhoods have kept that mix, even as gentrification is sweeping through my area. And work was kind of an accident - I wasn’t aware the office was predominantly black before I began the job.

However, that has me wondering about you, dear readers. What do your communities look like? (And feel free to divide your communities into friends and work, or home life and social life, whatever.)

Comments

Gouw wrote:

Halfway through high school my parents decided that my 50% Latino 40% black 10% Asian town wasn’t going to get me to Harvard so they shifted me over to a school ten miles away that’s about 10% Asian 5% black 5% Latino and the rest white although the surrounding community is really only like 3% Asian because a lot of Asian parents like mine decide to shift over to school their kids and then leave.

However I declare this measure to be bullshit, the moving I mean, because not only have I had a harder time fitting in to my new school (to be fair though this is mostly because I moved in halfway through a school year from a completely different environment) but I definitely had better teachers at my old place. I still keep in contact with dozens of friends from there and I’ll probably keep them longer than the ones I’ve made here.

Anyway, I’m an incoming freshman at Duke University, and I couldn’t find one for the class of 2012 but the breakdown for the class of 2011 is:

Asian, Asian-American, or Pacific Islander 28.4%
African-American / Black 9.3%
Hispanic / Latino 5.9%
Native American, American Indian, Native Alaskan, or Native Hawaiian 0.2%

Pretty typical of this kind of college I think, tons of Asians, a percentage of black people similar to the one of the country as a whole but probably Africans and richer black Americans are overrepresented. Low representation of Latinos and probably a sizable chunk of the few Natives are the kind of white people who like to say “my grandma was an Indian princess.”

But I remember reading an article that rates Duke as the best university for a person of any color to thrive in. So I’m kind of excited, leaving in less then a month haha

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 11:17 am ¶
m dot wrote:

I LOVE my communities because they tell the story of my life, and you know what? It’s been a GOOD life.

I think my community reflects what I’ve been through, and most of my friends who are white are people i worked with at some point. Other than that, my friends are caribbean, black american, african - the hodgepodge group of immigrant-families that came together in places that have and continue to shape my life in NY… people from my neighborhood, church and schools.

m dot

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 11:32 am ¶
bfp wrote:

I think out in the midwest, it’s incredibly difficult to find spaces like what you mentioned. Sure, you could go into Detroit and find all black communities, but dang, you can also find no jobs. Most people are trying to get the hell out of Detroit, because there are just no jobs anywhere–but running out to other cities doesn’t really help much, there’s no jobs out there either. The job front being what it is in Michigan makes it pretty impossible to find stable communities, much less communities of mostly people of color who “get it.”

and then you get into northern areas of Michigan and smaller town Michigan, and it’s really hard to be diverse when there’s only 2000 people in the entire town to begin with. Kinda like how Dave Chapelle said about his tiny community that it was hard for the all white community he lived in to be racist, because there weren’t any black people to be racist to. that’s what it’s like living in really small town Midwest–but just because people aren’t blatantly racist, doesn’t mean that you aren’t lonely as shit, you know?

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 11:36 am ¶
atlasien wrote:

I stick out in my black-and-white world. I’d like to live somewhere with more Asians, but I’m spoiled by the South… I wouldn’t want to deal with the housing and job situation in Hawaii or LA.

Atlanta demographics from Wikipedia:

“The racial makeup of the city was 59.39% African American (Black), 33.22% White, 2.93% Asian, 0.18% Native American, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 1.99% from other races, and 1.24% from two or more races. 6.49% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.[59] The city also has the third highest percentage (12.8%) of gay, lesbian, and bisexual couples among the fifty largest cities in the United States.[60]”

I work in the predominantly white north of the city. My work environment is very white. Where I live is predominantly black. My father is Asian, my mother and husband are white, my son and niece are black.

Atlanta is a decent city in terms of race relations. People are still very segregated though. Most of the Asian and Latino population (they’re now much larger than represented in the statistics above, I think) are recent immigrants and are still establishing their ties. White conservatives stay to the northern suburbs, white moderates, progressives and GLBTs stick to established gentrified intown neighborhoods. African-American neighborhoods are separated along class lines that often fall culturally too (native Atlantans versus more recent and richer Northern and Western arrivals).

Even weighing in some really ugly anti-Latino initiatives, I think people get along well in Atlanta, at least compared to other places like Miami where I noticed all races and ethnicities seemed to hate each other… but they don’t mix that much. When people move here from California, they generally say that where they’re from, there’s more cultural integration.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 11:52 am ¶
Philly Phil wrote:

i grew up in a northside neighborhood in chicago. back when i was a kid, it was a healthy mix of working class-to-poor mexican, puerto-rican, blacks and whites. the public school i went to was a few blocks down from me but in the 5th grade, after a long teacher strike, my dad transferred me to a catholic school in wrigleyville. helloooo adversity! it was the first time i realized i was in the “minority.”

now, the neighborhood i grew up in is gentrified like a motherfucker. more whites than anything. those of us who managed to hang on to our piece still thrive. the neighborhood is a lot safer and cleaner, i must admit, but any sense of community, as i know it, is gone.

my inner and outer circle of friends is predominantly latino (mexicans & puerto-ricans). it’s just the way chicago is laid out, demographically speaking.

at work, my co-workers are white but the families we serve are latino and black. the college i went to, especially in my major (creative writing), was predominantly white. but i’ve never really felt out of place (especially at work) and only a few times have i felt like an outcast amongs other writers at school. mostly it was due to the latino literature we’d read. i disliked that most of the focus was on south american writers and hardly any on US Latino writers. but whatever. my objections to our curriculum led me to meet sandra cisneros, denise chavez, and luis rodriguez!

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 11:55 am ¶
browne wrote:

I live in downtown LA, it’s odd. The service staff at the restaurants is mainly Latino, the clean up crews and security is half Latino and half African-American, the homeless (which is a huge population in downtown LA) largely African-American.

The professionals, people hanging out at bars mainly upper middle class white people with some minorities that have white partners. There is a population of gay men that are poc, but they are very educated and are dressed very professionally and they have to restate their resume every twenty minutes, so that people don’t confuse them to being one of the bad POC or the worker POC.

I am in the latter group of the poc with a white partner.

It’s weird, because this is unlike any section of LA that I have ever seen. LA is changing in a bad way. It reminds me of the South in the 1950 (the way it was in books anyway) with an odd San Francisco pseudo liberal mentality.

The few POC I run into refuse to acknowledge the obvious separation of race and class down here, as if they are afraid that this will some how make it worse? Odd way of thinking.

I find it frustrating, but good for writing material.

Browne

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:00 pm ¶
Silvah wrote:

This is an interesting question for me to answer. I feel like I’ve got a lot of different communities that I’m a part of. I grew up in Miami, FL and still reside here over the summer. My neighborhood is like 90 % hispanic, but there’s a lot of diversity within that anyways, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Argentinians, Peruvians… and then there’s a handful of white people and a fingernailfull of black people (my family housing most of them). Then I go to a black church when I’m here so I’ve got a lot of poc in my life at home, which is great.

But when I go to school its very different. I’m going to a private Christian school in Nashville, TN that’s about 90% white, 5% black, and the other five percent is mostly made up of international and Asian-American students. So at school I have my white circles of friends and I have my black circles of friends but they never really intersect. It is kind of sucky sometimes because when I’m hanging out with my white friends it can sometimes just feel very stressful, especially the more I become aware of various racial issues. But when I hang out with my black friends, I feel weird just cause I’m kind of outside of the norm of the black people I hang with, and its not that they’re not accepting, but I don’t share common interests with a lot of them. Nevertheless, I enjoy all my communities, I just wish there was a way of creating a more diverse community when I’m away.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:00 pm ¶
Cynthia wrote:

I’m in Toronto, Ontario, a very diverse city with people from all over the world. However, my social and work life do not reflect that. In general, people in my life are either white (primarily WASP, non-eastern European Christians or Jewish) and Chinese. Toronto is diverse culturally and it’s diverse when it comes to socio-economic class as well. In general, middle and upper income families tend to be white (Anglo and Jewish), East Asian and South Asian). They also don’t usually live in the same areas. Markham, Ontario has a lot of Chinese Canadians, while Brampton has lots of South Asians. Being the child of (upper) middle class suburbanites, my social circle reflected that:

Residence: My building is primarily white and I think many are Jewish. Significant minority of Chinese (mostly immigrant generation) as well.

Work: Primarily white and female

Volunteer: All female and overwhelmingly white (and upper middle income).

Facebook Friends: Mostly white, but significant minority of Chinese Canadians.

Family Friends: Chinese Canadian (either immigrants from Hong Kong or Canadian born Hong Kongers). They are primarily children of people my parents knew in high school and/or university who’ve come to Canada, almost all in the 1970s.

School/camp friends (that I still keep in touch with): mix of Hong Kong Canadian and white (mostly white when it came to camp). Through the years, many of my BFFs have been Jewish, including my BFF in kindergarten and high school (two different girls). Lost touch with kindergarten BFF and high school BFF and I have really different schedules My high school, which is independent, had a significant number of Asian students, though most of them were foreign boarders or immigrants. Both sets were rather spoiled and the first girls to wear make-up and high heels were of Asian descent, not white. I also went to a university that many people consider to be “very white.” I guess they have a different definition of “very white” because there were plenty of East Asian and Middle Eastern students at the school (especially in engineering.)

Being in Toronto means I can find foods from my parents’ culture very easily. I live downtown, so I’m pretty close to Chinatown, and the closest T&T supermarket (supermarket that sells lots of Asian goodies…this isn’t an old fashioned Chinese grocery store, but a REAL supermarket) is just a short drive away. In fact, the closest T&T isn’t even in a primarily Asian shopping area.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:10 pm ¶
DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:

My family is South Asian and always have South Asian Muslims over at the house. my parents dont really socialize with Hindus,which is weird considering that we are INDIAN, not Pakistani.

ummm… most of my friends are punkers, so they tend to be white, feminist, and/or mixed.

My best friend is a black hip-hop artist who is NOT into punk rock at all, so people always give us weird looks when they see me, a brown skinned Deaf punk with a mohawk, hanging out with a black dude, downtown. heh.

My work environment is veryyyy racially diverse.There are East Asian Americans, South Asians, Latinos, white people, and black people. I love it.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:14 pm ¶
DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:

oh and I’m from Missouri.

here in small towns in Missouri, hip-hoppers, hippies, feminists, and punks, tend to stick together. Weird, I know, but that’s just how it is. I like how we all stick up for each other.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:16 pm ¶
gatamala wrote:

I don’t consider my part of DC a diverse group of people…I consider it a random assortment of characters.

I live at the junction of 3 neighborhoods (Mt. P, AM, CH). This area is a mashup of historic DC segregation, immigration and gentrification. We have homeless people, working class and solidly comfortable families with kids, professionals. The main languages are English, Spanish (several accents represented) with a smattering of Amharic, Arabic, Korean and Cantonese. There is a German speaker, a Dutch guy and a French speaking African in my building (which is a mashup of new professionals and older residents who had to do battle with the mgmt over illegal evictions). The liquor store guy is a middle aged white native DCer of Romanian extraction. I believe his boss is from the Phillipines. Their clientele includes plastic jug rotgut and Belgian Wit drinkers. The corner market owner is Armenian. You can go to Carvel, Rita’s or that dude w/ the nieves stand (the nieves competition is fierce). Most of the adults are from Somewhere Else (El Salvador, Nebraska). We have several schools (daycare to highschool) in the neighborhood. There are gay, lesbian and transgender people who live and work in the neighborhood. People push H2s, bikes and shopping carts to get from here to there. I’ve seen W stickers, W countdown stickers, socialists, Church folk, santeras and Latinos for Obama. Some people speak, some don’t (it depends for me). The Latin American parade marches past my balcony and I get to hear congas from time to time.

The other day I saw a middle-aged black man playing a Casio keyboard while riding his bicycle. There is a Marxist cafe up the street. Dora the Explorer (I shit you not -she has the blunt bob and her mom always dresses her in pink) lives in my hood too.

As random as this area is, we all look like roadkill to South MoCo drivers.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:17 pm ¶
cosmicsistren wrote:

I grew up in a neighborhood that was very mixed. I had white neigbhors, latino, neighbors, and black neigbhors. The apartment I lived in with my family just had black people in the building. My childhood best friend was asian. The high school I went to was mixed and I had more friends of different races. My family is from Jamaica so I tend to graviate towards people from the islands (still do today). I went to Northeastern University in Boston and had more interaction with whites and asians. I only met a handful of latinos though. That is where I started learning about other cultures.

I now live in a predominately black neighborhood in Brooklyn. Thanks to gentrificiation I am starting to see more and more whites coming into the area. In my work experience I was used to seeing more whites than any other race. Now where I work there are more people of color. My bosses are still white though. As for my circle of friends. It is very small. I have associates of different races but that is online only.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:24 pm ¶
Jus Plain Ol Me wrote:

I’ve run the gambit:

Grade school: Midwest, K-8 Catholic-School with only 2 white students

High School: Southern boarding school where I was one of very few blacks; roomed with people from Antigua, Dominican Republic and Taiwan. Befriended people with varying backgrounds: Jamaica, India, others.

College: Midwest Catholic school with limited minority student (and faculty) representation.

Law School: Top tier southern law school with decent diversity - at least it was better than my college. Roomed with students from Jordan, South Korea and China. Still friends with many of those folks. Became friends with a student who is half-Irish and half-Indian. One of the ushers at my wedding was a fellow student who is half-Black and half-Korean. Two other friends (one Indian and one white) got married and just had a baby. In other words, it seemed like to best melting pot ever.

Professionally: In my six years in law firm life, I had one other black co-worker. Neither of us are still at that firm. Now I work at an academic institution in a large city in the Midwest. It’s more diverse than the firm ever was, but still nothing like my law school experience. The city offers opportunities with Greek festivals, Asian Festivals, Juneteenth events, Festival Latino, and more. But honestly, I’m not adventurous enough to dive into those environments when I don’t really know anyone there. I’d rather track down my old law school friends and visit them where they live (such as D.C., Vegas, San Diego, Atlanta, etc.) It’s not necessarily because those cities have more to offer (even though they may). It’s primarily because I already have a relationship with those individuals.

My social circle is usually a mixture depending on the event and/or the host.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:31 pm ¶
Noah wrote:

Rogers Park, Chicago, IL. By taking a 20 minute walk you can go through several very distinct and compact communities. Whether it’s Southern-African immigrants, Polish, Indo-Pakistani, Black, Mexican, Orthodox Jewish, and a college community for Loyola thrown in for good measure. There s a thriving artists community right in the middle and a well-balanced mix of gentrification-inspired condo complexes to local apartment buildings. But like the rest of Chicago, the neighborhood is profoundly segregated. There are very hard lines for these communities, which at times can be a little troubling. Still, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:33 pm ¶
Phil Deeze wrote:

I’m an oddity: born and raised in Washington, DC. I’m like that penguin from the old Bugs Bunny cartoon that he tries to take to the South Pole when it turns out the bird is from Hoboken. (EWWWWW, I’m dyyyyyyyyying!!!!)

Anyway, I lived in Mr. Pleasant and Adams Morgan in DC. Very racially mixed neighborhood of immigrants (Central America and Africa, mainly,) post-college age white kids and a smattering of black folks that lived in the neighborhoods from ways back. Yuppie was a new term in the 1980’s and this was before the condofication of the District.

I went to college at UVa. Culture shock for me. Not as mixed, socially as what I was used to in HS and I went to a private school. How weird is it that I go to a private school in the 1980’s in a very parochial city, then I go to Mr. Jefferson’s University and the college kids there are more close-minded. UVa was a large white school with a little HBCU tucked right in the middle of it.

I live in PG County, Maryland now. It’s a study in contrasts, really. On one hand, you have some VERY wealthy black folks here in this majority-black county, but there are also some VERY poor black folks here. The public schools are awful; therefore, the wealthy black folks don’t send their kids to them, opting for private schools in and around the DC area all the way up to Annapolis. The crime is always in the news here and Ta-Nahiesi Coates has an interesting theory on that: the wealthy black folks allow a little police brutality as long as their Rollster doesn’t get jacked.

My friends are pretty much half and half. I have white friends (mainly work colleagues that I’ve known for a LONG time) and black friends that live in and around the DC area. I keep in touch with my college roommate, who was white, and I’ve known him for almost fifteen years. Since I was recently married, my wife won’t allow me to make new female friends, but I’m an outgoing guy regardless. I’d say I meet lots of white folks when I travel for work (I’m on the road 50%,) and it’s mainly airport/sharing a cab/business-related.

I’ve been the “designated black friend” quite a few times at dinner parties and social functions, but as long as someone doesn’t try to touch my hair (I mean, really, WTF) or comment that I speak so well (do I look like Colin Powell to you), I’m usually a pretty relaxed person and I don’t have to go all “Nat X” up in therre.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:51 pm ¶
Arturo wrote:

To be honest, I feel I need to move. Let me describe my communities (and apologies, this may take awhile).

My most immediate community, my neighborhood, is a mix of blacks and latinos, seemingly unified by a lack of hope and resources. Any given afternoon, I walk through what smells like a small cloud of pot on the way to my apartment, pass by anywhere from 4-7 kids with unkempt hair and clothes and tune out the gangsta beats blaring from any of my downstairs neighbors’ homes. One morning, one of them saw me in my shirt and slacks, heading out to work, and said, “Daaaaamn, you FBI.” Any given night, I turn up my television so I don’t have to hear the Latino family’s teenage daughter YELLING about the drama of the week BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY VOICE SHE CAN GET ATTENTION IN. Any given night, I try to get away so I can do something productive, so I can escape the life-sucking feeling the place gives me. My roomies and I are moving out by summer’s end — and if they’re not, I am.

My work community is 90 percent Latino, but 90 percent of them treat me as some sort of Uncle Tomas. I’ve been called pocho twice in the year-plus I’ve worked here, because I speak English without an accent — I learned it growing up in Tijuana — and don’t go clubbing in Tijuana like the other folks my age here, who dress and talk like Fresas.

My primary community of friends is mostly white, due in large part to it coming from the Rocky Horror community, and sometimes racial issues chafe between us. During a camping trip in May, a couple of folks complained, honestly, that they felt tired of being “blamed” for the racism of prior generations. And I almost flipped my lid when another remarked on the phone (not with me) that a black friend of ours “didn’t talk like a typical black guy.” I find myself drifting away from them for this and other reasons.

Mind you, this isn’t meant as a sob story. But it’s a snapshot of where I’m at now: fighting to keep my head up, to keep my eyes and my mind open, and glad to have this site here as a place where I can learn, to relate and feel related to.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:00 pm ¶
Nadra wrote:

I grew up mostly in a Chicago suburb called Evanston. When I grew up there, the town had a fairly large black population. The high school was nearly half-black/half-white. However, I lived in a neighborhood there that was overwhelmingly white–more than 90 percent. The elementary and middle schools I attended were probably about 65 percent white, 25 to 30 percent black, with Asians and Latinos rounding out the rest. Unfortunately, I went to a private high school in Winnetka that was nearly 90 percent white. The black, Asian and Latino kids stuck together for the most part. For college, I chose Occidental College in Los Angeles. At that time ,we had the only black president of a private liberal arts school in the country. The school was about 60 percent white, 18 percent Asian and Latino, 6 percent black, with others rounding out the rest. In my current workplace, which has about 14 people, I am the only black person. There was another black guy, but he quit several months ago. However, the publisher of the paper is a multiracial Asian woman. The head of the advertising reps is a Chinese man married to a Chicana. We also have an administrative assistant from Hawaii, who looks completely white, but is a sixth or eighth Asian and has a Japanese surname. The church I attend is headed by a fair-skinned Latino married to a white woman. However, the congregation seems about evenly white and Asian, with about 10 percent Latinos and fewer than 5 percent black people. Generally, about half of my friends are Asian and half are black, with some Latino friends. My boyfriend is white. All in all, it can be racially isolating being a black person in L.A. I went to an event in Inglewood Fourth of July weekend, and that was my first time being in a majority black setting in more than a year.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:00 pm ¶
chi wrote:

LaToya! I need to meet up with you then =)

I live in Columbia, Maryland, a town of upwardly mobile families and professionals. Fun fun. Growing up, I found that cliques were very segregated but coming back to the area after college though, I’ve seen more interracial couples and interracial groups of friends than ever. It’s a great thing =) These things notwithstanding, Columbia still has a lot of issues to resolve — institutional racism, particularly in schools, socioeconomic barriers (there’s a large gap between the rich and bar), etc.

Now if there were only things to do around here…

-c.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:08 pm ¶
meagan wrote:

I’m half-white and half-Puertorican, and I live in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. My neighborhood is historically entirely Puerto Rican, so I’m completely surrounded of people of my own partial ethnicity. There’s salsa music, PR pride events, traditional boriquen cuisine restaraunts, and Spanish spoken everywhere. It’s wonderful. My friends are almost entirely white, but my family and community is entirely Puerto Rican. I feel like a have struck a good balance between the two parts of myself, which often conflict.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:20 pm ¶
Wren wrote:

I live in the Midwest–in a factory town…. I moved from a bigger Midwestern city where my kid and I weren’t the only PoCs on the block. Our neighbors were Dominican, Nigerian, Ojibwe, African-American, Cherokee and Mexican… There were several multiracial families–and we chilled in our small enclave. We played dominoes, told stories on our respective porches and exchanged plants for the gardens out back–I mean, it wasn’t a Brown “Leave It To Beaver,” but there were ever-strengthening tendrils of community. .. It was real–this cross-section between private and public–this neighborhood that affirmed and uplifted our lives–became family… My kid and I had to move a few months ago and I’m reeling from the loss. The factory town where I live now is much smaller and rolls on this insider-outsider vibe. And I’m an outsider. My kid is an outsider. I am asked daily about my “funny accent.” The kid and I get dirty looks if we speak Spanish to each other in the park or at the grocery store. The weird thing is, I grew up near this factory town and my childhood neighborhood was much more ethnically diverse than it is now. We were Mexican, Black, South Asian, Biracial, Appalachian, working-class–and now the neighborhood has undergone gentrification–White retirees dominate the landscape. Thus, the outsider vibe…. Home is not this concrete idea–it’s this shifting idealism I carry with me–this idea to be with “like,” to be in a space that is dominated by the familiar creature comforts–and then I chastise myself for not reaching out to the older White folks to the left and right of my house, I chastise myself for being annoyed when they water their yards and mow them in neat, diagonal lines…. And I’m buying into this dialectic–this constant opposition, feeding this insider-outsider vibe. And maybe I miss my old neighborhood so much that I’m idealizing it, while I remain divorced from the new incarnation of my childhood homescape–even the physical markers are changing–a willow tree that I treasured as a preschooler has been removed–monster truck houses dwarf the few econo houses that remain, like mine.

I’m having a really rough time giving voice to and dealing with these changes. Feeling kinda unmoored…. And I apologise in advance for my long post.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:21 pm ¶
sejw wrote:

As a biracial Black woman, I am used to experiencing White and Black cultures in different instances. I work for an African American cultural organization whose staff is almost entirely people of color (and within that group of PoC, almost entirely African American). Most of our work is with African American audiences, so for my work life, I spend 40 hours a week in the company of various brown folks. Part of the reason why I feel so connected to my job is because it is one of the first and only places in my life where I collaborate with PoC on a daily basis. It’s wonderful, and when times have been difficult, this is one of the reasons why I stay.

At home, I am married to a White man, and because of the circles of friends that we have (from our experiences at mostly White high schools and colleges), and the neighborhood in which we live, I experience a mostly White social life.

In my work in the activist and art communities, it’s a mix of White, PoC, GLBT, disabled, etc.

So it varies, depending upon which hat I’m wearing.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:28 pm ¶
Thea wrote:

I live in one of the most diverse cities in the world but it was only a few years ago that I started to make POC friends through a creative arts group for Asian youth. I never realised how much I needed to have other POCs (or just folks who understood the immigrant experience) in my life until I found some - I think the lack of it was too painful to consider, until it wasn’t a lack anymore, and therefore not scary anymore.

I now have a very mixed group of friends - my roomies, bf and neighbours are all POC but most of my friends from university are white, and most of their friends are white. The research org. I work for is all white, but has a very thoughtful and meaningfully anti-racist outlook so I’m happy.

I do have a lot of sympathy for POCs who have trouble making other POC friends, even if they’re living in a place that’s super diverse. Like, how do you go about making POC friends if you don’t have any? If I hadn’t stumbled into my creative arts group I don’t know what would’ve happened.

When I first starting making POC friends there were times when I wanted to distance myself from white spaces. It took me a while to realise that, at least for me, separating myself from all white folks/ being angry at white folks solely on the basis of race/culture was only harming me - being angry as much as I was required a lot of energy and hurt me. And also I’m half white…

Now I’m equally grateful for my white friends because even the ones who weren’t open to my transition to seeing myself as a WOC initially are now really supportive. We have a lot of good conversations about how white people can be good allies.

My mix of friends keeps me open-minded and helps me to remember that aligning yourself according to race/background doesn’t always make sense - it’s more important to align yourself according to ideology. Having said that a lot of the time my POC/immigrant/mixed friends keep me sane!

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:30 pm ¶
Philly Phil wrote:

@ meagan - i used to work in Humboldt Park for about 7 years. i worked at one of grammar schools there and at Clemente for about a year.
Humboldt Park is on the verge of getting wiped off the map by gentrification. Pilsen is hanging on a lot stronger than the good people in Humboldt.

@ nadra - i just finished telling one of my kids that evanston is the only suburb i’d ever move to. going to see batman at the e-town theatre tonite!

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:32 pm ¶
Thea wrote:

I forgot to say something (though from the length of my comment that doesn’t seem possible…) I’m about to move to Houston to go to school and I’m a little stressed about maintaining a mixed community. I know Houston is really diverse which is part of why I picked it, but is it also really segregated? If anyone knows I’d appreciate tips…

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:36 pm ¶
Jamerican Muslimah wrote:

I live in Minneapolis which is growing as far as diversity is concerned but it is still pretty White. (Esp. compared to where I’ve lived before- Chicago and South Florida). Nonetheless, you’ll find neighborhoods that consist mostly of PoC. And of course there are the predominately White, don’t-you-even-think-about-moving-here neighborhoods.

Where I live is predominately African-American and Chicano. There are a few Whites who are same sex couples.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:40 pm ¶
Jamerican Muslimah wrote:

P.S. sewj I wish I had a job like yours!

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:41 pm ¶
shah8 wrote:

I live out in the suburbs of Atlanta. Northeast Cobb. Just north of the worst of the petite bourgeois that gives Cobb County the bad impression.

I also have no car.

the internet IS my life.

As far as growing up…well, I first went to Atlanta Speech School, which had a few black students. Then through a parade of public schools where blacks were about 2% of the population, and there were NO asians, NO latins. The diversity of Morehouse College, for all that it was an all guy, predominately black school was higher than my public schools.

Work is predominately black, notable sprinkles of asians, but then I work in a building off of Buford hwy, where the largest concentration of Atlanta’s east asians are.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 1:46 pm ¶
wantout wrote:

what’s stopping me from belonging to a poc community:
- i’m a black/biracial tra, who was raised by the whitest people possible in the whitest environments possible.
- though i now live in a somewhat more diverse, big city (mpls) it is EXTREMELY segregated and there is NO established black middle class.
- the small community of poc with whom i might actually have something in common with that does exist here is tiny, insular, and seems a bit exclusive. and as i am not an academic, artist, activist, grad. student, etc. and as i don’t buy into a certain reductive strain of identity politics, i doubt that i’d be welcome.
-and no, i am not willing to swathe myself in kente cloth in order to convince these people of my blackness. i have to deal with white hipster types telling me how black/not black i am all the time, i don’t feel the need to take that shit from poc (and ‘conscious’ poc at that!) too.
so, what does my ‘community’ look like?
-lonely

Mod Note:

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:00 pm ¶
Arturo wrote:

Addendum to my work community: One of our sales reps, born in Mexico, just told a client, “I’m working like a black person to pay the bills.” When I asked him whether he didn’t think that was a little insensitive, he replied, “I didn’t know you were black.” At which point another rep, who’s from Colombia, said, “Well, they don’t work.” I’m agog.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:04 pm ¶
Renee wrote:

I reside in the tiny city of Niagara Falls which is largely an Italian and Serbian city. The few blacks that are here have a tendency to congregate. Even if we don’t know each other intimately we always acknowledge one another and there seems to be a drive to suport any businesses that we own.
My friends are diverse. I don’t have a lot of black friends but that is because there are simply not alot of blacks here.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:13 pm ¶
yorubella wrote:

jus plain ol me:

curious, what college did you go to specifically? I’m just wondering because I go to a midwest Catholic school that sounds a lot like yours, although I have a few guesses.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:14 pm ¶
Ron wrote:

I live in the ATL - in Gwinnett County which happens to be the most diverse county in the state of GA.

I would say that majority in Gwinnett is probably white but that is changing and becoming more Asian, Hispanic and Black.

The Asian influx has really been a boon to the schools.

We have plenty of money coming in from China, Koreatown (L.A.) and Seoul and experiencing a commerical building expansion.

My neighborhood is predominately white but slowly becoming Asian, Hispanic and Black.

I was born and raised in South L.A., Inglewood, and Compton but I call Inglewood my home.

The people in Atlanta are generally friendly but racial divisions exist.

My work place is mostly white and black with a sprinkling of Asians and very few Latinos.

I have mix of friends from everywhere in the world.

My wife is BA.

Sometimes I attend a predominately white church.

The masjid I attend is predominately AA as well.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:24 pm ¶
Abu Sinan wrote:

I wont get into my past.

I am a white American convert to Islam married to a lady from Saudi Arabia. We have two kids together, two kids from her previous marriage in Saudi.

We live in the DC area and it is VERY diverse. I am not a big fan of the area, but it’s diversity is the one thing that sells it.

Our circle and community is about the most diverse you can image. Morrocans, South Asian, Sub Saharan African, Europeans, Arabs, Central and South Americans.

We tend to hang out with other Muslims, but also have Jewish and Christian friends. I guess what makes our cut is your dedication to any religion. Ancestry, race, colour, none of that means a thing to any of us.

DC is like other biy cities around the world, Paris, Rome, LA, London, in that there is a glorious mix of people from everywhere and people are so used to it, it doesnt even give a momement for pause.

Venture 60 minutes in any direction outside of the DC/Northern Virginia area and you are in a completely different world, but here it is just wonderful.

My kids dont have to worry about having a “weird/foreign name” because 50% of everyone else here does as well. My wife and her family dont have to worry too much about being assaulted because they cover their hair, or about not being able to find employment because they are Muslim. It just isnt an issue here.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:52 pm ¶
Nadra wrote:

Arturo, it’s interesting your friend said, “They don’t work” about black people, considering that the phrase your other co-worker used is rooted in how hard blacks have worked historically. When he said, “I’m working like a black person to pay the bills,” your co-worker was using a more sanitized version of the expressions “I’m working like a slave” or “I’m working like a nigger.” I wonder who exposed him to this. I actually have some black relatives who say this from time to time.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:55 pm ¶
Faith wrote:

I live in Cleveland. My situation is similar to bfp. I moved here two years ago. My neighborhood is predominately AA with a few whites here and there. I guess the problem is that PoC I live around don’t “get it” as bfp put it and it would be really hard to just hang with most of them. So I don’t have any friends in my neighborhood at all. It was completely different in Philly, which is where I lived most of my life. Just about all of my friends were black and I’m still friends with two black women that I met in high school.

As far as school goes, the percentage of black people at my university was really small so I was mostly surrounded by whites and also by a good number of Asians and South Asians. The people I hung around were with were white and female. At the other colleges I attended, however, I usually hung around black women. Basically, I just gravitate to whoever I can have intelligent conversations and seem cool and decent.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:58 pm ¶
Josh wrote:

I live in the Temescal section of Oakland. Oakland has been ranked as one of the two most diverse cities in America, and my neighborhood is very diverse. It’s mostly white and African-American, but there are also several very vibrant immigrant communities, particularly Eritrean and Korean. It’s also quite an economically diverse neighborhood - there are lot of rather upscale blocks around, but there are also areas that have been hit hard by the subprime crisis. Gentrification is underway in some parts of the neighborhood, but it’s not as far along as in some other Bay Area neighborhoods.

We’re also sort of at a crossroads - to the west are mostly black neighborhoods, while to the east is Rockridge, a very affluent and mostly white community. Beyond that are the Oakland Hills, which are even more affluent and white. We’re not too far from Oakland’s Chinatown.

Oakland also has the country’s highest concentration of lesbians and the third highest concentration of gay men, behind San Francisco and Seattle.

Though I’ve moved a lot (I’ve lived in the Bay Area, Central New Jersey, NYC, Western Massachusetts, and Chicago, all before the age of 30) I’ve pretty much always lived in diverse areas. The one time I didn’t was a few years in high school when I lived in a very, very white Bay Area suburb. In my graduating class of about 250, there were 4 black students and 5 Latinos.

While I’m not naive enough to think that living in a diverse community makes me more enlightened and anti-racist and wonderful, it is important to me, especially since my family is multi-racial - I’m white, my wife is Chinese American, and we have a young son and another kid on the way. It’s important for us to raise our kids in a diverse community and one where being multiracial isn’t considered unusual or strange.

When my son was first born, we lived in Chicago - in Uptown, that city’s most racially diverse neighborhood, actually - I got a lot of frustrating assumptions from random people that I was “babysitting” or that I’d adopted - lots of “Oh, where did you get him?” questions. That completely stopped when we moved to Oakland, and I don’t miss it.

Oakland often gets a bad rap, either for crime or for not being as glamorous as San Francisco. But for its problems, it’s still a really fantastic, beautiful, underrated city and I love living here.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:58 pm ¶
Liza wrote:

Latoya, just copying over from your other comment thread to me: “I am interested in why you used the word envy when discussing my PoC filled space. Why is that? Is it something that is unattainable in your area?”

As a diversity educator in a predominantly white environment, I am rarely (aka “never”) in a room with another person of color - at work. And, being that most of my day is spent at work, I am envious of the amount of POC’s that surround you naturally each day.

When I go home, I am only surrounded by POCs - my very multiracial extended family. But, we don’t always talk about race. I wish I had a professional group that DID constantly reflect on race and other -isms.

I did choose to live in a small city. So, my neighborhood is also diverse racially, economically, educationally, etc. But, we don’t always interact due to the fact that we all work long hours at our jobs. Summertime usually brings people out to the front stoops, but not on a regular basis.

So, reading your post, it sounded like you had POC’s everywhere- including yoga class.. nice. Wish I had more time and access to diversity. And, since most of my day is spent at work at a PWI, I just wish I had more POC’s there to interact with during my 12 hour work day.

We do what we can (ie - the city we live, the place we get our groceries, etc). But, our meaningful interactions with other POC’s (especially biracial/multiracial) is limited.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 2:58 pm ¶
Jus Plain Ol Me wrote:

yorubella :

Univ. of Dayton. I almost went to Notre Dame (which may not have been much different), but UD offered a full ride.

As part of the guessing game, I guess there would only be so many Catholic universities in the Midwest: Dayton, Xavier, Notre Dame, DePaul, St. Louis, Marquette, Detroit Mercy, John Carroll, Loyola-Chicago. I’m not sure which other ones, if any, would qualify as diverse. [I know there are a few in PA, but I consider that East Coast.]

Let me just say that when my frat (Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated) crossed a line of 4, it seemed historic. (I was a lone dog.)

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 3:01 pm ¶
Jus Plain Ol Me wrote:

Quick clarification:

[I went to] Univ. of Dayton. I almost went to Notre Dame (which may not have been much different), but UD offered a full ride.

TO CLARIFY: By “not…much different” I meant in terms of diversity. I realize that the networking at Notre Dame is hard to match.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 3:03 pm ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:

@All - Thanks for the illuminating responses. There are so many different experiences represented and I like that.

@Liza - I really do. My yoga studio is still fairly white, but very inclusive feeling. In addition to race, other sexual orientations and sizes are represented. And - as something that is somewhat rare in the studios I’ve been to - a mix of men. Including men of color!

I suppose I’ve been in a diverse environment so long that I forgot how it is. I spent 5 days in North Adams, Massachusetts once and never felt so bored and alone in my life.

I couldn’t imagine what it’s like for all of you who live that on a daily basis.

Please, keep the info coming.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 3:06 pm ¶
ragamuffin wrote:

as a fairly new transplant to south MoCo, maryland (as latoya puts it), i’ve been seeking out a more pan-PoC crew.

growing up in philly, there was no shortage of diversity, but once i moved to small-town florida, i often found myself the only PoC in the bunch, if not the only african-american.

so far, i’ve only met fellow black folk to hang with in DC, which is cool, but hopefully that’ll change soon. i’m the only PoC in my office, which is still quite uncomfortable.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 3:36 pm ¶
Jorge wrote:

Originally from Tijuana, Mexico, I’ve been living in the Bay Area for almost a decade (yikes!…age check).

I’ve lived in Berkeley, Oakland, and I’m now in downtown San Jose, near what is left of Japantown. Lived mostly in predom. white neighborhoods, with a spattering of minorities here and there.

My area of downtown San Jose is pretty much Mexican / Latino and Caucasian. There are some Asians, but they are mostly concentrated around South San Jose. I think its mostly middle, upper middle class white people and middle class to lower middle class latinos.

The majority of my friends, with the exception of my friends from college, are gay. Mostly asian, with a sprinkling of latino, black and white.

Ideally, I would love to have a good mix of gay professional men of color, but those are kind of hard to come by outside of San Francisco. Then add that nice layer of racial issues in the gay community and forget about it.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 3:39 pm ¶
Marge Twain wrote:

I grew up in a majority-white Southern college town. I had mostly white and a few Japanese and black friends in school but my very strict Indian parents socialized mostly with other Indians and the children of their friends were the only kids whose house I would get to visit or who would visit me at home.

When my mother left my abusive father we were ostracized by the Indian community who all sided with him. At that time I was 11 and getting into Nirvana and Hole and Bikini Kill. I rebelled against my parentally-enforced nerdiness and was inducted int the ranks of the cool kids. We were also extremely poor at the time so it was convenient that all the cool white slacker kids dressed like they were homeless with old sneakers and the same flannel shirt every day. Of the very few Indian kids I went to school with, I felt compelled not to be too friendly with them both because people always assumed we were related and because I didn’t relate to them: They appeared to have strict home lives with a deep love of academics and I was trying very hard to not fit the stereotype.

I stayed friends with a small group of mostly white with some black and hispanic girls and boys. They are my closest friends. I married a white guy and recently moved with him to a majority white Southern California beach town where I still don’t know anybody. I feel a little more cultural affinity now with other Indian Americans when I meet them, but no more with other POCs than I do with white people. Actually the white people I have known have been more sensitive about race stuff than my black friends, maybe because they think they can’t be racist?

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 3:48 pm ¶
Sanguinity wrote:

Portland, Oregon, here. Which, due to a number of exclusion laws during Oregon’s history, is whiter than both Salt Lake City and Oslo.

I’m in a mostly-white working-class and low-middle-class neighborhood in outer SE. We’re bordered by an affluent white neighborhood (I should specify that the adults are white; there’s a lot of transracial adoption happening in that neighborhood), an extremely poor white neighborhood, and a largely-immigrant neighborhood with at least three distinct immigrant populations (Ukrainian, Mexican, and Vietnamese).

The composition of my neighborhood is changing somewhat — we seem to be losing the Ukrainians who lived here, and gaining a small number of Black families. I suspect both changes are linked to urban renewal projects, both the brand-new one in this neighborhood (which is pushing the Ukrainians out), and the quite-advanced gentrification in Albina, Portland’s historically Black neighborhood. Additionally, the “border” with the immigrant neighborhood appears to be moving, with my mostly-white neighborhood expanding, and the immigrant neighborhood moving farther out.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 3:51 pm ¶
crogirl wrote:

My parents immigrated from former Yugoslavia, and landed in in a town in central NJ that is predominantly white (there was no one of our heritage within 50mi of us, and we only found out where they were 6yrs ago!). There was only a small handful of black or Latino in our neighborhood, and they were usually people crossing the boarder to get out of the ghetto in the city to which we were a suburb (which is getting worse and worse by the day, unfortunately. Beautiful city, and no one doing anything about it. But I digress). Growing up I’ve always gravitated towards people of color, or minorities in general. I was always friends with the misfits, outcasts, people who didn’t fit in (racially, culturally, or the ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’, etc.); I guess because I felt like there was no one like me (culturally; aside from skin color) so clung to those with similar feelings, and I think also because I recognize a lot of prejudice and ignorance in a lot of the white people I come across and choose to not associate with them. There’s sort of a segregated history here, and the whites from my town look down on POCs because of the stereotypes of the city and its inhabitants.

High school was approx. 2/3 white, 1/3 POC, but most of my friends were Black, Puerto-Rican, West Indian/Caribbean, Pakistani.

In my industry it’s predominantly white women, with only about 5% male, and maybe about 25% POC. However, I now work from home so I don’t really interact with colleagues outside from conference calls.

Most of my social friends are people I met from work, or from school, and are about 1/2 white, 1/2 POC (African American, Latino, Caribbean).

My dating resume looks like the UN roll call, but the more serious relationships were POC. I’m single now, and am surprised by how much prejudice sits within the white communities around me. It’s disturbing me greatly, and I’m finding it difficult to date white Americans who are from this area whom I can tolerate (and who aren’t turned off or intimidated by my dating history). I’m itching to move as well; to somewhere there’s more of a social scene (it’s hard to get out there when you’re in a suburb and Whole Foods is the most excitement around) as well as more diversity.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 4:09 pm ¶
Mickey wrote:

I grew up in what was a mostly Black /Latino community in Dallas. Low to mid income, though you could walk a few streets up and over and hit half million dollar homes and the blue bloods.

My elementary school was 80%+ Latino; I was the only Black kid in florkorico. Cinco de Mayo meant a day out of class learning about Mexican food, life and music.

I grew up with taquerias, panderias and tamales at Christmas. I learned how to merengue before I learned the electric slide.

I wouldn’t trade those early years for anything. It taught me to appreciate a culture and group that was different from my own. It made me comfortable with branching out and trying new foods or engaging with people who don’t look like me. I’ve made some great friends this way.

I’ve always chosen neighborhoods with diversity though where I live now (small conservative Texas town) was out of necessity. I plan on moving back to the old neighborhood after I graduate.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 4:44 pm ¶
Afroamerica Writer wrote:

I live in South Florida and it is an international melting pot. Yes, there are little pockets in some areas where I feel I’m in another state (read vanilla state).

But also there are different communities such as Little Havana, Little Haiti and the Caribbean community. Also, there is where I live, a mixture of everything - absolutely great.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 4:59 pm ¶
Mammith wrote:

I’ve grown up in London in the UK and my group of friends are generally from all over. I had the fortune of going to college and being in the one class where people didn’t segregate themselves by race (yeah it was very depressing, the break areas where just full of all-white, all-black and all-asian groups huddling together). I kept most of my friends from college and it’s nice to be in such a diverse group of people.

I live in a working class area thats always got shifting populations, so I’ve always seen different people come and go over the years. I myself am second-generation from a Eurasian background.

It’s depressing but over the years I’ve found I can only be close friends with other POC or white people as long as they are working class. Theres way too many presumed power issues going on and condescending attitudes when it comes to straight, middle-class white males. I’ve only ever met one person who’s gone against that (but his parents raised him in a very unusual manner which probably contributed to his awesomeness).

One more note, has anyone else who lives in a very diverse area with a minority of white people found that most of the jobs they/people they know have, that their bosses are mostly white?

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 5:41 pm ¶
thesciencegirl wrote:

I live in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, which is largely full of recent college grads, young professionals and young families. It is VERY white and very yuppy. While I love the location, convenience, local shops/cafes/restaurants, safety, and fairly reasonable rent, I hate the homogeneity. I chose this neighborhood because I moved to Chicago from Maryland, not knowing the city, and I was told that LP was a safe and convenient alternative to the neighborhood where my school is located (which is super expensive and touristy). I am close to the park and Lake Michigan and several bus lines, and there are trees, so for that reason, I love it. But it is sorely lacking in diversity. I will note that Chicago itself is quite diverse (though very segregated, just like most other cities) I have seen more interracial couples here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived (small town Maryland, suburban Maryland, Boston). Everywhere I have ever lived has been very white, so it doesn’t bother me all that much, but the lack of racial diversity combined with the lack of economic diversity makes it all a little too bland for me. Wiki tells me the breakdown is: 85% white, 5% black, 5% hispanic, 3% asian, 2% other.

I would like to move to the Uptown neighborhood at some point, but at the moment, with my early and/or late hours as a med student, and no car, it is just not convenient.

My med school class is pretty diverse, with a breakdown of approx. 50% white, 35% Asian (prob. about 1/2 are Indian), 7% black (prob. about 1/2 are African), 6% Hispanic, 2% Native/Pacific Islander.

My social group/friends are a really mixed group.

My church is all black. Throughout my life, church has been my weekly dose of being part of a black community, and I took that for granted for a long time, but I actually really appreciate it now.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 5:53 pm ¶
sylvie wrote:

from wikipedia, my hood is 75% white, 17% Asian, 5% Latino/Hispanic, 2% African American, 1% Pacific Islander, and less than half percent Native American.

the bay area is very diverse. i just happen to live in a less diverse section, a section that i only live in because of it’s proximity to work. sigh…

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 6:02 pm ¶
Bob Simpson wrote:

I live in Oak Park Illinois which is about 75% white, 18% black and the rest the famous “other” designation. Oak Park civil rights activists fought for desegegration in the 1960’s and into the 1970’s and to some degree succeeded, which in Chicagoland was a major miracle. I call this Oak Park’s heroic period.

Since we moved here in 1988, the racial breakdown has remained remarkably stable which has led some cynics to declare that there is an unofficial quote system to keep the black population from going above what is called privately “the tipping point”, where whites would start fleeing in droves.

There have been major battles in the schools over race, especially in the high school where black students are mostly in the lower tracks and rare in the elite AP track. There is a pretty militant black parents group which fights the good fight in the schools with their few but feisty white allies.

Bitter cynics in the Village of Oak Park (like me) feel that the ongoing racial discrimination in the high school is partly engineered to discourage blacks from moving here. The high school is rated one of the best in the state, but if you are black, what’s the point of moving here for the schools if your kid isn’t going to be in the elite track where all the action is?

Oak Park is undergoing wrenching condo-ization and gentrification now so there are complex class issues going on. For example working class people are being pushed out by the shrinking rental market and the savage real estate taxes. Hmmm….a lot of the rental apartments that are going condo have significant numbers of black renters. That just makes cynical old bastards like me go, “Hmmmmmmm”

All of the same kind of shit is going on in Chicago which is right next door. A very smart college prof named Pauline Lipman has done academic studies about race, class and Chicago in the age of globalization. If you want the ugly details about Chicago, she’s the go to person.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 6:34 pm ¶
Ruthi wrote:

So I grew up and still live in a primarily white university town (I’m white and going to college there). The neighborhood I grew up in and elementary school has always had a large number of Asians and is now something like 51% Asian. My friend now reflect that too: Most of my friends are white and Asian, with a few small exceptions. I’m also Jewish, and a disproportionate number of my friends are also Jewish. Part of this is because I have met them through synagogue and Jewish social events, and part of it I think is also cultural.

I currently studying math and physics and there is an extreme lack of diversity in those fields, especially math. In pure mathematics, I would say that less than 10% of students are PoC and most of those are Asian (women also fair badly - I’d put it at less than 20%). Actually, if I think about it I have yet to see a black, Latino, or Native American student in pure math (there are a few in the physics department). I came to college thinking I would see MORE diversity there than at my high school, and have found that within mathematics anyway, it is even worse.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 7:18 pm ¶
Sulyp wrote:

Gosh, reading all about how some of you get to be around POC really rocks, but it makes me even more aware of how much I lack in that. I am from Minnesota, went to college at the U of M Twin Cities, and there enough black people there that I could find to get my does of “blackness”. There was an office in the Science/Engineering school dedicated to serving the interests and needs of the PoC, and that was great!

The man I married is as white as one gets (culturally speaking), but because we just ‘get each other’ on a deep level, it works. Right now, I’m in southern California, and my husband is going to grad school. Most of the school population is Asian. Most of the rest of it, is white. Maybe a sprinkling of Hispanic, and a teensy dash of black every once in a blue moon. It’s gotten so bad, that I get visibly excited whenever I see another black person.

I have friends and acquaintences in my local area, but they are all white and Asian. I am so hungry for a black female circle right now, I am trying to put myself in places where I can be more successful in this, but they are so few and far between, and when I do see them, they’re at a good distance away.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 7:56 pm ¶
waxghost wrote:

Where I live now is a relatively diverse island in a sea of whiteness. We live on the opposite end of town from the majority-black area, but this is probably the only neighborhood around that has black, Latino, Middle Eastern and South Asian families. If I wasn’t so shy, I would know more than just the one white neighbor.

The city I live in is very different from where I grew up. My “hometown” is Seattle, but now I live in Tulsa, OK, so I am usually quite comfortable around Asians and Native Americans but stupidly awkward around African-Americans, who are a small and usually very separate group in Seattle.

My friends at school are a half-Jewish girl and a second-generation Latina. Other than them, I know several Native Americans (and I was actually raised believing I was Native American so I’ve always known a lot of them) and a white girl. I’ve always had a fairly diverse friend group for a white person, from the only black girl in elementary school to a Chinese-Mexican girl with lesbian parents in a very white high school, etc. My best friend for the past seven years is half Swedish, half Malay. I, too, have always felt very different from most people so it was easiest to befriend the other people in my communities who were different as well.

One of my workplaces is predominantly white, but that’s partially because I work with my husband’s family and partially because it is menial labor which is loaded with racial connotations that the whites take advantage of and the blacks understandably hate. My other job (which is in music so is also very community-oriented) is online, so I don’t know how diverse it is, although certain real life gatherings have lead me to believe that it isn’t much more diverse than most of the communities I’ve been a part of. Though we have a lot of people from different countries involved, most are still white and middle class. I wish I had more diversity in my work life, but still haven’t figured out how to try to correct that.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 7:58 pm ¶
NancyP wrote:

I am white, and grew up in what was then (1960s) a functionally “restrictive covenant” all white expensive suburb. I knew exactly one black peer, the girl who was the first black at my private school. She was the daughter of two doctors and became a doctor herself. At any rate, the environment struck me as being limited, and I wanted something else. I was a socially backward 15 year old when I started at a small town liberal arts college which was about 85% white at the time, with about 5% Hispanic, 5% Asian, 3-5% black. I had considered a major urban university well known for pressure cooker atmosphere and suicides, but did not think I would be able to handle pressure cooker, very large classes, school 90+% male, and an unfamiliar urban environment, all at once. So there was a limit to the new experiences that I was willing to absorb at once, coming from a sheltered environment.

I then moved to urban neighborhoods in small to medium sized cities for work, grad. school, work. The cities have been rated quite segregated on various statistical measures. I have situated myself in flats in nice older edge yuppy / buppy/ guppy-ish neighborhoods with 20-25 % black, 10% Asian, negligible Hispanic, and 65% white, with a surplus of LGBT folk and of students or university employees (one of the other criteria for a neighborhood was the proximity to univ.). The tone of the neighborhoods have been culturally white and university oriented. The city is about 45% each black and white American born, 10% Hispanic (Mexican), Asian (mostly Vietnamese), African-born (mostly Eritrean), white Muslim (Bosnian), reflecting the waves of refugees established here. My church is predominantly LGBT and is about 1/3 black. Professional colleagues (faculty and graduate level students) at my workplace are predominantly white, with large numbers of Asians and Mideasterners, and noticeably few non-African blacks, maybe 8%, considering the surrounding city. Technical employees have a much larger percentage, maybe 35%, of blacks. I like the diversity of an academic workplace (urban medical center). I don’t have a huge amount of social life, but what little I have revolves around people met at work, church, an amateur women’s chorus, or at volunteer work.

I have never asked to touch a black person’s hair, btw. My white-bread parents in a white-bread suburb raised me to have better manners - it seems bizarre to me that people would think it an OK thing to request.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 8:40 pm ¶
PaulPortland wrote:

Like a lot of upwardly striving Asian immigrants, my parents settled our family while I was growing up in mostly white neighborhoods. In NYC, we lived in Forest Hills. In Cali, we lived in Irvine. At the moment, my wife and I live in Bayside, Queens, NY, but we’re planning on moving to Portland, Oregon in the summer of ‘09. Yay, more white people!

Up until junior high (in NYC), most of my friends were white, I guess, although in reality, the majority of those friends were probably more like acquaintances or were part of the “cool” crowd that I wanted to be accepted into. But my truly close friends, even when I was going through the self-hate period that many ABC seem to go through, were PoC - two Cantonese kids and an Ecuadorian/ Argentinian kid. Once I got to high school (in California), my political/ cultural awareness kicked in with a vengeance, and my circle of friends consisted ENTIRELY of PoC - East Asians (Chinese and Korean), Indians, Latin@s, and Black. I did not make a single close white friend throughout high school or college, and that streak remained unbroken until I became good friends with a Jewish guy in my section and also until my sister married a white guy who I now consider one of my best buds. But aside from those two fellows, my circle of close friends is 100% PoC.

Don’t get me wrong, I get along very cordially with white people. In fact, most white people think I’m great! They think I’m very eloquent, very polite and kind, very funny and easy-going…yet, for some reason, those relationships with white folks never goes beyond the acquaintance phase. And it’s not that I have nothing in common with them. My interests run the gamut. I think the primary reason I haven’t made any close friends with white people ever since my political awakening, for lack of a better phrase, is because I’m a fairly proud guy with a somewhat short fuse when it comes to race-related issues, and I’d rather not put myself in a position where I have to choke a bitch (in the famous words of Wayne Brady).

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 8:56 pm ¶
PaulPortland wrote:

edit: “a Jewish guy in my section [at law school]” it should read.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 8:58 pm ¶
babybro wrote:

I was raised in the ghetto streets of detroit. It was an all black community, and it was very rough. It was strange because it’s was like the black folks were on one side of the street, and the white folks were on another. The neighborhoods were literally seperated by a street.

I honestly hated that place to death, solely beacuse I didn’t believe the US was suppose to be like that, with everyone so seperated. I was tired of justing have friends of one race, and I was fornunate enough to gain the opportunity to move to San Diego. Oh my god was I in heaven. Hispanics, Asians, Caucasian, Pacific Islander, all of them hanged out together and I dived like in like a swimming pool. In southern san diego, it’s very multi-cultural with a healthy balance of each race. In northern san diego, though, it’s mostly caucasian and asians.

Overall, I would not give up san diego for any other city in the world. I have learn so much from this true definition of a melting pot that will shape the rest of my life forever.

Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 11:07 pm ¶
Mike wrote:

I live in the Crenshaw District of southwest Los Angeles. My corner of the neighborhood is about half established black families and about half recent immigrant Latin-Americans: mostly of Mexican origin. The Latinos, being new, primarily speak Spanish. The wealthier parts of the neighborhood to the south and on the hill (Baldwin Hills) have a higher concentration of black residents. I’m white. My workplace is in west LA and is entirely white. My friends are 50/50 white and east Asian.

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 12:31 am ¶
Katlin wrote:

I am third generation Japanese and was born in raised in Hawai’i.
I suppose you could call this place a “melting pot,” but we really don’t have an even distribution of ethnicities. A large chunk of the population is Asian. Pretty much all of my friends are full blooded (Korean, Filipino, Japanese…) and then the rest are a mixed plate (I have cousins that are part Hawaiian and some are half white).
This is very unscientific, but I would say that those living here that are white or black are mostly military or rich white folks that live in the expensive parts of the islands. This is one of the places in the US where you will feel out of place if you’re white. If you’re white, locals think you’re tourists or you have no respect for the ‘aina (land) because they tend to be rude and loud (again, another huge generalization), which results in a resentment towards ‘haoles’ (what we call white people). A lot of this hostility towards tourists or white people stems from them first coming to the Hawaiian Islands and eventually taking over the fields and the Hawaiian Kingdom.
I’ve grown up with ‘minorities’ all around me and never felt out of place because of my ethnicity or my background. This past year I lived in Corvallis, OR and it was really an eye opener to be a minority. I remember walking around at night once and some guys yelling out Japanese words to me, I speak very very little Japanese that I’ve learned from friends, I thought it was rude and demeaning. Another experience that sticks out to me is when my teacher pointed me and my other friend who is Vietnamese out in a lecture class because she thought we were her Taiwanese exchange students that she herself taught during the summer. I was so embarrassed and couldn’t believe she didn’t know our faces of her own students. During my stay there I hung out with minorities (blacks, latinos) and they expressed a dislike for white people, didn’t want to go to white-centric parties where people hung around and drank beer (they wanted the parties with loud music and people dancing all night) and thought beer pong was for white people. I could feel my dislike for white people grow as I hung out with them, and really hated that this was happening because this was also a form of racism. I try to see the experience and views from each side of the story, but it is hard because I see how white people have ruined the lives of so many ethnicities in Hawai’i, especially Native Hawaiians. They really did steal their Kingdom and were heartless in doing so…

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 6:20 am ¶
Cynthia wrote:

I should add that at one point, I had a Chinese Canadian BFF. We were both very “banana-ish” and talked about shows like 90210 and how we hated the NKOTB (this was circa 1991-92, when it was no longer COOL to like them). Then, around 1994-ish, she dumped me and I think it was because I wasn’t “Chinese enough.” By high school, she had started to like HK pop culture, and I was only so-so about it at most. She was one of a few CBCs who gave up white/mainstream pop culture almost entirely during high school. Interesting, since she can’t read a word of Chinese. How did she even read the gossip rags?

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 6:39 am ¶
JD/ formerly J wrote:

I have a very diverse circle of friends from college that I am holding on to for dear life cos where I am in Boston there isnt much diversity left. I live in an area with a lot of Young professionals and college students and every day on the T, I count the number of other POCs for fun. It is quite a brief game unfortunately.

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 9:13 am ¶
Chris wrote:

I spent a good chunk of my life in Prince George’s County, Maryland. It has some rough spots (Oxon Hill, usually any place with “Heights” in the name, Eastover, etc.) but there are pretty decent ones as well (the Tantallon area of Ft. Washington, places further north like Bowie).

The thing that sorta irritates me, though, is that any time I run into someone from Maryland and I say I grew up in PG, they’re always taken aback by how I managed to “survive.”

One guy gave me a similar statemend, and went on to say “I played football games there sometimes in high school, and the only white people in the entire area were me and my coach.”

I guess the old adage applies here.

In addition, in regard to Gouw: I knew a guy who was the salutatorian of our class, scored a 1600 on the SAT, was involved in every extracirricular activity imaginable (Odyssey of the Mind, It’s Academic, Mock Trial, to name a few) and was rejected from Harvard.

My guess is that, while he was in the most prestigious program available to high school students in PG County (the Science and Technology progem), at the second best high school in the entire county, he was still in the second worst school system in the second worse state ranked ranked nationally for education, and therefore Harvard could’ve held that against him.

Had he gone to high school across the Woodrow Wilson bridge in Fairfax County in north Virginia, and had the same accolades, I’m willing to bet he’d look a hell of a lot more impressive on a college application.

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 10:25 am ¶
gatamala wrote:

When he said, “I’m working like a black person to pay the bills,” your co-worker was using a more sanitized version of the expressions “I’m working like a slave” or “I’m working like a nigger.” I wonder who exposed him to this. I actually have some black relatives who say this from time to time

trabajando como un negro/esclavo

I know that phrase too and I hate it. Black = slave, then dude had to throw in the lazy too!

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 10:59 am ¶
Adonis wrote:

Progress should never be organic. Actively seeking out a community of POC seems a tad bit elitist, self-righteous and a throwback to the 70s. I am black and I think the best i can do for myself and any other member of society is to be open, forthright and fair. If we all do this, white folks included everything falls into place. Life is not a club and it strikes me as odd to seek a community not based necessarily on interest but on color, since there is not necessarily a congruence.

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 11:09 am ¶
Sulyp wrote:

@ Adonis

Aren’t you being a little self-righteous with your statements? How do you know that we are trying to make life a club for ourselves? From what I saw, many of us want to have a group of friends that directly reflects the diversity of our interests, even if it’s just for solidarity purposes. Sometimes a black woman wants to have a great black girlfriend to hang out with, commiserate with, or to help with hair when there is no black hair salon around for many tens of MILES to go to for special occasions.

We could try to do the whole “organic friendship” thing. This is what many whites have been claiming to do for years, and look how *well* the majority of them have done. Everything most certainly does not fall into place or we would have moved on from this eons ago.

White people in the USA can have the option of just being around other whites, and basically the only they worry about is whether they can find other people with similar interests. We PoCs are not so lucky all the time, and have to be content with just “being open forthright and fair” and hope that the people we deal with that actually do have our similar interests won’t marginalize us for who we are.

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 1:16 pm ¶
Arturo wrote:

Gatamala (and whoever offered that initial response, sorry, but I couldn’t find it on the thread):

Good question, indeed, since both co-workers’ defense was, “Well, it’s an old saying, it’s very accepted.”

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 4:22 pm ¶
Joseph wrote:

I can understand how it could happen that a person could have only one racial or ethnic group represented in their circle of friends and also why for some that might be preferable.

But not me.

I am uncomfortable in homogeneous groups–even when they are all like me. The times I have tried to cultivate relationships based primarily on shared ethnic identity have been disastrous. (I am flashing back on the worst date of my life, with an Arab-American girl I had so little in common with that we were left making awkward small talk about our families. Sexy…) I actually decided against moving to Chicago in the mid-90s because, even though I like the city, it is too racially polarized for me. I don’t want to look around and see only white or black faces, but never an ethnic mix.

I grew up in Philadelphia (or as my friend Crystal calls it “the only place I have ever been called a nigger to my face”). But while the city itself is hardly a racial utopia, I always attended racially and ethnically diverse schools. As a teenager I went to a magnet High School that had an international focus and drew kids from all over the city–including from some of Philly’s historically racially mixed neighborhoods. I can see now what a huge influence it was now that I am an adult.

I became an artist and moved to New York city–so while my strong preference is for a diverse community, my life supports that. I would be terribly unhappy in a city that didn’t.

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 5:28 pm ¶
Jenny wrote:

I’m from South MoCo as well - 16th and Georgia - I never *felt* part of a majority as a caucasian woman, even though I realize now that I was. My circle of friends in HS was tiny, tight knit, and mostly white. After leaving the area in 1996 then moving back to almost the same neighborhood, my circle has expanded in general, not just in number of persons but in number of POC - not sure whether it was because of a “we’re all back in town so let’s hang out because at least we know we have a common background” thing or what, but most of my friends now attended the same high school as I did, and we didn’t all hang out back then. I’m certainly now in the racial minority.

My street is mostly white - 1 Orthodox Jewish family, 1 African American family, 1 Hispanic family. A walk down any of the larger streets in the area would definitely make it look like the neighborhood was more diverse, but I only know my immediate neighbors so I can’t vouch for that. Walk around our CBD, though, and it’s REALLY white. And that just annoys the living daylights out of me, because I know it wasn’t that way when I was growing up.

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 7:24 pm ¶
emily wrote:

I grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, MO. What some would call racial diversity was non-existent in my community: the only people of color at my high school of 2700 were either adopted or part of the desegregation program that bussed in kids from the city because of the sad state that the St. Louis City schools are in. Five years ago I moved to New Jersey to attend Rutgers University and I haven’t left (after graduating last spring). My freshman year at Rutgers most of my very close friends were outside of my race; Filipino-American, Jamaican, Guyanese, chines-American, Peruvian, the list can go on. Of course there were times when I would sit in the dining hall and see each table with persons of only the same race sitting there. Throughout my time at Rutgers, I was “exposed” to so many different cultures and backgrounds…I can’t even imagine going to a school that was not as diverse as Rutgers. Although segregation exists everywhere, I tell people out here that in St. Louis, it is severely segregated. Probably not as bad at some other more Southern states, but segregated nonetheless. The diversity of New Jersey is one of the reasons I am still living here and plan on staying for the near future.

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 9:21 pm ¶
emily wrote:

i forgot to mention something else. i am a white female, whose mother currently lives where I grew up in St. Louis. After my parents divorce, my mother re-married a black man. She had a child with her, who is now my little sister. My mother is raising my sister in a mostly white community (as mentioned above). I believe it may have been after one of my classes when i was taking an africana studies course at Rutgers, that I I called my mother and was upset with her with having a child with my stepfather, only because I knew that my little sister would have to face so many identity issues as a bi-racial woman. My sister is 13 now, growing up extremely fast. But I still worry for the issues she will have to deal with..

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 9:26 pm ¶
Cass wrote:

I’m a Eurasian living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and its diversity is an aspect I have a newfound appreciation for (more on that later). My hometown of Sunnyvale is predominately White and Asian, but my neighborhood itself (often referred to as “the ghetto” since it’s less affluent than the other neighborhoods) is mostly Asian and Hispanic with many being from Mexico, India, China, and areas of Southeast Asia.

I attended high school in Victoria, BC, Canada, a city at the opposite end of the diversity spectrum. Much of the population is White with a speckling of East Asians and First Nations. My alma mater claims that there are students from 20 countries and that 50% are international students when its student body is actually 80% White, 19% Chinese/Japanese/Korean, 2% Other (Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Biracial), and only 1 Black person (from Utah). The day students (all very affluent) make up the White majority while the boarders (those whose families can afford $45,000/year tuition (I was on a major scholarship and financial aid :P)) make up the minority, and from those stats, you can see that there’s not only little ethnic diversity but little socioeconomic diversity as well.

As for my newfound appreciation of diversity… In high school, I was a bit of an outlier; Whites saw me as First Nations or Hispanic and Asians saw me as White or not “Asian” enough. The concept of being biracial was totally foreign to them. Being part of the minority the past several years reminded me how much I missed ethnic diversity at home: the inclusiveness, the different backgrounds and perspectives, etc.

I’ll be attending McGill University in Montreal, QC, in the Fall, and from what I’ve heard, the area is also predominantly White with Black Canadians contributing to the largest minority group. The school itself also boasts the largest number of international students (20% of the student body), which, from what I can see, is true, and I’m very excited to be part of that community albeit small.

Slightly off-topic but on my mind recently… My father, who is White and considers himself a liberal, has begun to believe that ethnic diversity is a negative: it leads to conflicting opinions, he has to “worry about being PC all the time,” there’s “no sense of unity,” some PoC are “un-American and do not share American values,” etc etc. Has anyone encountered someone who shares this sentiment? How do you respond/argue/confront it?

P.S. - First-time commenter, long-time lurker since the beginnings of “Addicted to Race.” Hi!

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 9:32 pm ¶
emily wrote:

one last thing. after reading all of the other comments…i am noticing that some people are finding all white communities to be boring. and bland. what do you really mean by this? I only say this because as we criticize the “yuppies” and whites who are participating in the gentrification of urban areas, aren’t the white commentators (including myself) doing the same thing as the people we criticize? Is one white person choosing to live in a community mostly with Poc the beginning of gentrification? Or is it so that they feel better about themselves, as more racially conscious? These are just open ended questions, some I am asking myself, too.

i am a frequent reader of Macon’s blog http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com

this post is somewhat related to the current discussion: http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/2008/04/feel-like-they-belong.html

Posted 18 Jul 2008 at 10:03 pm ¶
yilun wrote:

I like the stories, especially the ones that include facing class privilege while growing up. The classmates I’ve gone to school with, the neighbors that I’ve had, and the friends who I talk to all live in this fairly narrow class. I too live in this circle now. But when I was younger, I grew up in some seedy places - NE DC and the sketchier part of MoCo - and I think I always carry the street cred with me (although my friends would disagree). For someone who can’t shoot straight, I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing ghetto suburban basketball with small time hoodie wannabes (and their cousins from the real ghetto). Anyways, I think my community of privileged POCs is great, except I like to party like a gangsta before heading to my white collar job.

Posted 19 Jul 2008 at 12:57 am ¶
lunanoire wrote:

emily, perhaps what people mean by “bland” relates to the prevalence of chain stores (Star*ucks on every other block before its recent cutbacks) and absence of things they want to do that are culturally related (food, religion, beauty supplies, etc.)

Some of it may be related to white communities that are in rural or suburban areas where the focus is on a slower pace of life. Also, because whites are the majority, it is easier for them to have separate districts for different groups (trendy area for young ppl, quiet suburban area for families, retirement communities, etc. ) rather than smaller groups where a POC family or elder may live a few blocks away from a nightclub rather than a few miles

- in community transition

Posted 20 Jul 2008 at 2:01 pm ¶
Pat Rice wrote:

I grew up in south east TX, near the LA border so segregation was always there and still is. However, my parents ensured that I would always be surrounded by a black community. Growing up I went to predominantly black schools–though not always the best schools, but they represented both the black and latino populations in my city. I then went on to study at a HBCU and now I’ve recently moved to DC area where I’m working and living in northern VA. I’m desperately scrambling for the POC community that has a consciousness far beyond the getting this bread ideal. Apparently, I’ve been dragged out to places where successful black professionals frequent and their conversations are limited. I’m not knocking them, they need their space too. But so do I. Then I again, I’m fresh in the area, a month strong, so we’ll see what happens next.

Posted 21 Jul 2008 at 10:09 am ¶
Sara wrote:

I go through stages in my community-building. At times, I lay back and hope that relationships will happen to me. Usually though, I find that I can’t quite get what I need out of these interactions: probing conversations, the intelligent give and take, intellectual intercourse. This is when I end up feeling stagnant, lonely, and resentful of other people and their communities. This is when I end up going out and seeking communities.

It’s hard, especially in Milwaukee, I’ve found. Because this city is too big to be small-town, and too little to be big-city. Because it’s hard to break people out of the segregated barriers that are so distinctly drawn here. Because Milwaukee is such an odd mixture of Midwestern friendliness and frontier-town suspicion. A lot of times, (and I’m guilty of this as well) you’ll meet someone and really hit it off, and maybe even exchange contact information, but because hanging out with that person would require a complete redefinition of our community-based identities, these potential relationships fizzle out. Too often, I think, we let our communities define who we are and who we’ll grant our time.

So, what does my community look like? Distressingly small, usually.

Until last month, a large component of my commuity included, or centered around, my mom. With her, my 57 year old, Midwestern WASP of a mama, I bought groceries, perused fabric stores, frequented restaurants. This part of my community was tiny, including usually, at most, my mom, my sister and me. We saw many people, but didn’t interact with them much. Insular but dynamic. But my mom has moved to St. Louis recently, and this part of my community doesn’t exist anymore, not the least of which because I cannot afford to do some of these things without her financial assistance.

So I’ve been feeling isolated, broke and lonely. Lacking community. And lacking a community by which to define myself. The lost, post-college, 20-something period of my life in full swing.

At work, my community is an odd one. Non-profit offices always seem to have a strange make-up. My boss is a 60-something Jewish woman, and her relative equal (the only permanent male in the office) is a 40ish southerner. Working down in both building stories and seniority, there is my immediate superior, who is maybe 30, married, with a recent baby, white and from Texas. There is a half-Jamaican, half-Salvadorian 20-something, a Greek 20-something, two African American 20-somethings, me (a biracial 20-something), a 60-something white Midwesterner, a 30-something white Midwesterner, and that’s about it. We’re a pretty feisty and nerdy group (music dorks, every one), with a huge satellite of urban and suburban children (who we serve as music educators and administrators), professional musicians and music teachers, wealthy board members and donors, and all the other expected non-profit usuals. I eat my lunches with the two girls closest to me in age and situation, but have yet to spend much time with them socially outside of the office. There is a barrier there; we may get along at work, but would we get along with each other’s friends? I have yet to find out, and that bothers me.

My roommate is multiracial, and she and I have been friends for many years. I have excused myself from her community of friends, however, because it’s largely Academic and small-town White, two things that make me profoundly uncomfortable because of a feeling of being constantly at odds with their views. My sister’s community is more diverse in sexual orientation than my own and that of my roommate, but that is her community, one that, again, I just don’t feel completely comfortable in. So, my own? My own community outside of work? I’ve been seeing a musician, who is 6 years my elder, and Mexican; and he knows everyone, it seems, in the world. Through him I have met a great many people, mostly musicians, mostly people of color, diverse in gender, race, sexual orientation, but oddly, not in occupation.

My neighborhood is one of the most diverse ones in the city, with many mixed couples, people from wealthy and middle class and low-income backgrounds, people from all over the spectrum, and when I go to a public event in the neighborhood, I’m always delighted to see all the different kinds of people. But this is the hardest thing for me to accept in my community. Because people seem to talk up Riverwest as a Utopia, and I have never trusted a Utopia. Because Riverwest may look pretty awesome and colorful, but it’s terribly impermanent, almost like a college campus; it’s like everyone’s passing through. Which means that everything has the potential to change, and nothing seems to last, including friendships, initiatives, businesses. I don’t know, I may be terribly wrong here; I’m still investigating this place I love to have.

I don’t know yet how I would define my community, or how my community would define me (and sometimes I think the latter is the question that obsesses me the most). For the Midwest, I would say it’s fairly diverse, but it’s also fairly hypocritical, just like the Midwest. It drives me crazy, for good and for bad.

Posted 21 Jul 2008 at 3:28 pm ¶
Ayo wrote:

I am a transracial adoptee. Therefore, I was raised in white culture. Now that I’m older, and I want a multicultural community, I’ve had to learn to see the culture I was raised in, in order to fit in better with people who actually look like me.

I guess what I’m saying is, people who strive for “diversity” often don’t have the first clue on how to get friends of different races because they don’t know how they appear to PoC.

Posted 21 Jul 2008 at 4:14 pm ¶
AgapeA wrote:

I’ve really enjoyed reading about everyone else’s communities. Number 8, Cynthia, talked about Toronto but I think I have a slightly different take on the city which is totally normal for people from Toronto because it’s pretty spread out and diverse to the point where unless you work at it, you can’t really get a feel for the complex social and economic make up of the city. Because Toronto is such an immigrant city, “a city of people born elsewhere” in the words of writer Dionne Brand, it reflects really strongly the source cultures that make it up, including class divisions. I was born here but my parents are from the Caribbean and have been in Canada since university. The community I grew up in (in terms of voluntary association) was mostly of middle class, politically progressive, at least semi-afrocentric black families. In terms of school, my formative years were spent in Scarborough in the east of the city which is really, really diverse both ethnically and economically. I had/have friends from all over the world, the majority of them born in Canada of immigrant parents or were “1 ½ generation Canadians” as in they were young when their family immigrated. Certain groups that are smaller in other places are particularly represented here; for example, there is a big Tamil population (because of the civil war in Sri Lanka). Economically, I had friends with parents who were owned their own companies and friends whose families lived in tiny apartments. Scarborough and several other Toronto neighbourhoods are the type of place that can produce people who know sort of incidentally about the world without realizing that their knowledge of people who aren’t you is notable (once you leave and realize not everyone knows where Sri Lanka is or that Muslims aren’t supposed to drink or recognize the difference is sound between Tagalog and Chinese (real examples), you start to appreciate where you come from). In my experience and from what I’ve heard from other people, Toronto is significantly more integrated ethnically than pretty much any US city. There are neighbourhoods that are associated with certain ethnic groups but these areas tend to be more about what you can get there rather than whom necessarily lives there. Basically, you can go to a certain area if you want to conduct your banking in Portuguese or pick up some regionally specific food and people of whatever associated ethnicity do live around there but there are also tons of people of said ethnicity everywhere else in the city. This becomes more and more the case since born-here folks are frequently less likely than their parents to resist interacting with people of other ethnicities.
Well…this wasn’t meant to be a long contemplation of the ethnic make up of Toronto but it is so yeah. It’s a great place. Not utopian by any means, but I wouldn’t want to raise my potential future children anywhere else.
(maybe I should explain that this the kind of stuff I study so I’ve given it some thought)

Posted 22 Jul 2008 at 11:05 pm ¶