Naive Comments on Race

This isn't about Katrina.

When we moved from Berkeley to Red State, I was startled to find myself in an environment where race was black and white. In California, race was white and Black and Chicano and Asian (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Filipina, South Indian, Nepali, Tibetan...) and, especially, mixed. But when we arrived in Red State Capital City Suburb in the summer of 1997, there were Black people and there were white people. In our neighborhood, there were basically white people, except for my white friend M's Black husband and their two mixed kids, who none of the other kids knew were half-Black, until they met their dad. By the time we left this past summer, there was a sizable Mexican contingent, but still, everyone was something obvious: white people were white, Black people were Black, and Mexican people spoke Spanish (though a good friend of mine who is Black insisted that a lot of the white people in Red State Capital City Suburb were in fact Black and deep into passing).

One of the many reasons we moved was because we didn't want our kids growing up in an environment where, as Jewish kids, they were diversity. And they were. M was the only Jewish kid in her school. There was an Indian girl whose parents owned the motel north of town. There were a few Black kids, including my friend M's boys. And then there were lots of white kids, most of whom went to church, all of whom were very nice.

When we decided to move back to East Coast Big City, we agonized a lot about where to live. There are the "diverse" neighborhoods, most of which are simply midway through gentrification, as the middle-class white people uproot the low-income people of color, and few of which have viable school systems. There are the largely white suburbs with lots of rich people and excellent schools. There are City and Other City which are technically diverse as cities, but not so diverse by neighborhood, and have highly dubious schools. And then there was Town.

It's hard to describe Town, and one of the reason I almost stopped blogging when we moved was that I felt like I had to write something about Town, but I couldn't. Basically, one end of Town is urban and the other end is suburban. To put it financially, the PTO at the school at the other end of town, where everyone lives in ranches and colonials set in the midst of big yards, raises $100,000 annually, most of it through a silent auction. At M's school, in a neighborhood of two-family frame houses, apartments, and projects, the PTO struggles to raise $15,000 a year, and the idea of a silent auction is laughable. But even this is an exaggeration, for our neighborhood itself is well into gentrification, though ironically its gentrification is bringing more middle-class people of color into what had been a lower-middle-class ethnic (Italian, Greek) neighborhood.

Overall Town is very white, but M's school is strikingly diverse, especially after Red State Capital City Suburb. After the first day of school, I asked M about the kids in her class. She said there were white kids, and a Chinese kid, and a lot of brown kids. What do you mean? I asked her. She repeated what she'd said before: there were a lot of brown kids.

The next morning when she went to line up with her class before school, I realized that she was right. The school has every which kind of kid, but in her class there are some white kids, a few Asian kids, and a bunch of kids who can best be described as brown: some, I think, are Latino, some are light-skinned Black, some are mixed, but you can't tell by looking. At home, she learned that day, kids in her class speak English, Chinese, Nepali, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and sign language. The girl she likes best moved to Town a year ago from Nepal. Today there was a new girl who moved here from Another East Coast State, but moved there from Sudan.

Not sure what my point is here, except perhaps to note the difference between the coasts and the middle--though even that would have to be modified, if one looked more carefully at recent immigration in the middle, from the Hmong in Minnesota to the Somalis in Ohio. One also could consider the class implications of color--surely visible in all the images of poor Black hurricane victims. But I don't feel up to theorizing tonight; I'm just glad my middle-class Jewish white kids are now simply part of the mix of the crowd.