"Write something down and I'll tell you how you're an asshole" maybe isn't the best writing prompt.
It really is a fraught prompt. I was worried it reflected poorly on me that I'd even ask such a thing.
Wait, we're increasingly self-segregating by race? Do you mean, like, on the internet?
I mean I only hang out with other Metal Gods.
I was living in Lincoln, Nebraska in 2000, and I live in Baltimore now.
I'm going to go with "more diverse", but that's just a hunch.
Wood-fired oven pizzas for $15 just reached Lincoln last year.
Such shitty Chinese food in Lincoln. I'm sure there are good places, but they are pretty hard to find.
Anyway, if it doesn't have "sweet and sour" in the name but still has a ton of syrup on rice, I feel justified in complaining.
Usually my vague neutral firings about Nebraska aren't on topic.
Uh, I worked in DC in 2000, and work in Montana now.
I'm not sure about the trend though.
I'm sure the Ft Worth public schools were formally desegregated when I was a first grader,* but the the private schools I attended K-7 were pretty much all white. The public schools I attended when we moved to California were easily 95% white.
* Researching that, I see that my congressman voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to his later regret.
I thought that things started resegregating in the last 15-20 years. Maybe I'm wrong! My research was less than exhaustive.
Apparently the US is segregating strongly on partisan lines. If Republicans are whites-only enough that presumably would entail more racial segregation too.
Here are my intuited from my butt social-statistical guesses: I'd definitely believe that schools are more segregated now than 20 years ago, because of charters, etc. Residential/social-contact/employment segregation, I'd guess, is decreasing, but at a slow rate from a starting point in which America was pretty damn white and pretty damn segregated.
I hate myself for comment 15. Part of what is destroying the world is people endlessly talking on the internet about things they have no real understanding of whatsoever. I have no idea. Maybe someone else does.
Pittsburgh as a whole is getting more racially diverse and less black.
Apparently the US is segregating strongly on partisan lines.
Republicans have affairs with porn stars whom they tell that they remind them of their daughters. You try living near them. It's creepy.
Over the last fifteen years, my neighborhood has become Silicon Valley's Koreatown. (For a while, it was shading toward desi, but that tide has definitely turned.) My neighbors are great. I'd rather eat in Indian restaurants than Korean restaurants, but that's my problem.
It's good you know you have bad taste buds.
Our neighborhood has become visibly more Asian in the last decade, largely but not exclusively Chinese. Yay! However, black neighborhoods remain segregated from of the rest of the city, at a finer layer of granularity than what's probably common elsewhere (we have small neighborhoods).
Pittsburgh as a whole is getting more racially diverse and less black.
I've been wondering if this has been happening in parts of the Bay Area that have had predominantly black neighborhoods since the 1940s or earlier, like Berkeley/Oakland. Or if those areas are just getting more white.
Right now I'm living in the second-whitest place I've ever lived. Madison, Wisconsin was whiter, although that was mitigated because my roommate was the token black guy.
Tangentially (sort of), how many of those non-white people in eg. Dalriata's neighborhood identify as non-white? AIHMHB, non-African American POCs have a strong tendency to marry out, and their offspring have a strong tendency to identify as white, though they appear as mixed-race on Census figures. (In the past I've tried and failed to find the paper I got this from.)
My neighborhood is still pretty white but the county/metro area is much more Hispanic than it was in 2000 (about 20 percent these days). The middle school my wife and I work in is around 800 kids, majority Hispanic but 20 percent Tongan.
Anyhow The Rainbow is the best, because it is the only bar in the world with a statue of and memorial to Lemmy outside.
I moved from the Bay Area to Boston in 2002, so, less diverse. My little patch of Oakland between Grand and Piedmont Avenues was just the city in microcosm. Probably could have used a few more Vietnamese. You don't really get that around here. Maybe for brief periods during gentrification.
I was still in college in 2000, though in an interracial relationship. Still, three black kids is more diversity than that.
28 - False. 3/1 is less diverse than 1/1. Plus if your relationship had been sexier it could have been like 1/1/1/1.
their offspring have a strong tendency to identify as white, though they appear as mixed-race on Census figures
Not my experience at all, and the census wouldn't register people as mixed-race unless they (or their parents, I guess) filled it out to say that, something that only became an option in 2000. Before then you couldn't select multiple races. Outside of the census, many forms don't allow multiple choices so you're stuck with picking just one, a decision that has little to do with how you self-identify outside of the world of narrow forms. I've gone with "other" in that situation since at least the mid-1990s. I'd be interested in seeing that paper and how they define/determine self-identification.
I looked at a demographic breakdown of Berkeley High students a couple of years ago and the proportion identifying as white was slightly higher than when I was there, the proportion identifying as black was a lot lower, and the proportion identifying as two or more races was way up. In contrast, someone attempted to create a student group/association for mixed race students while I was there and I don't think more than ten people showed up.
Unfogged is just about the whitest place I've ever spent much time.
28:I don't know how you want to mark white/SEAsian biracial in your magical statistics but the sexiness level was decidedly 0.
The margins of error are high and the numbers bounce from year to year, but in my census tract since 2010, percent white went from 34% to 38%, Black from 38% to 29%, Asian steady at 12%, Hispanic 10% to 8%, all other races/combinations non-Hispanic 5% to 12%.
Since 2000, the trajectory has been Munich -> Tbilisi -> Moscow -> Berlin.
Munich was more diverse than one would have thought at first glance. The old generation in the building included numerous South Slavs who had come in the 1960s. The new generation included at least one family of Turkish origin along with the disreputable American.
Tbilisi was not diverse, although I was led to understand that the land our rental house was built on (or perhaps the house itself, language was a bit of a barrier) had been vacated by Ossetians during the first war. And there were a smattering of internationals in the immediately surrounding streets.
Moscow was also not diverse. Our neighborhood was, quite literally, the former GDR diplomatic compound. In the new era, though, it offered a rental contract backed by German law, rather than other Moscow possibilities.
Our corner of Berlin also skews not-diverse because units in our particular development are first offered to federal civil servants. (We squeaked in while the property company was still being negligent.) There are some other kinds of diversity, but national origin is not one of them. Schools are a bit different - the middle child's class in the "fast learner" group at a neighborhood secondary school is about one-third families with at least one international or immigrant parent.
My life trajectory has gone: Falkirk (ish) -> Glasgow -> Oxford -> London.
Which has basically meant a massive jump up in diversity each time. One thing I notice about where I live, is that segregation works in slightly unexpected ways. So, we are quite friendly with our immediate neighbours (he's Nigerian, she's Spanish), and also friendly with the Nigerian family across the street. But we know basically none of our Polish neighbours (and there are a lot).
Similarly, the school has an informal social/internet group for parents of new starters at the school, and the fathers have gone out on a couple of boozy drinking nights. Both times, it was racially a pretty diverse bunch. But ... none of the Polish or other eastern European parents came along. I'm not sure if they chose not to, or if there's sufficient social segregation that they didn't get invited. Probably a bit of both. There's a sufficient density of Poles locally that you could live your entire life basically speaking Polish the whole time.
Putting stats on it, for our school district, the school census data from 2011 says:
30% White (of which 16% are of British origin)*
29% Asian
18% Black
8% Mixed race
~14% Other
* Poles and other Eastern Europeans would be a significant percentage of the remaining 14%, then other EU nationalities
Yeah, that's a dynamic I kind of recognize from this neighborhood -- not sure quite how to phrase it, but that the dominant immigrant group is socially insular, whether for internal or external reasons? My neighborhood is maybe half and half Dominican and not-Dominican, and the not-Dominican half is fairly integrated as well, maybe half white and the other half other Latinx, black, and some but not all that many various Asian or whatever. But I'm much more likely to know people socially in the not-Dominican half, regardless of recent immigration status or anything.
But in the kids' age bracket it all seems integrated regardless.
I might win the diversity sweepstakes. I went from living in the most diverse neighborhood in the US (maybe the world) to one of the most diverse city/country's (really city-state) in the world and one where I am definitely a minority, albeit a fairly privileged one. I love it. And while it's true almost all of the people working in service positions here are from the subcontinent, Nepal, or the Philippines, a lot of white collar jobs here are also held by people from those regions.
I remember interviewing at UNC-Chapel Hill for grad school way back in the day and being struck by how white it was. With the exception of the service people who were almost exclusively African-American. It felt very weird.
city/country's
Been writing and copy editing all day. Fried. Had beers. You figure it out.
Chapel Hill is affluent white people personified and given a bunch of nice restaurants. Durham is (or was*) about 50% white, 50% black. Except for the growing percentage that was Hispanic. Going to mass where I lived in Durham was all white people from the north who moved south for work in research. Going to mass near where I worked was all very recent immigrants from Latin America. Going to mass on campus sometimes meant you'd see Mike Dunleavy. He was much taller than your average immigrant from Latin America.
* In 2000, so I'm on topic.
When we moved off our all-white block, Lee sold the house to a white woman whose young adult son is biracial, so at least there's a trend there. She's on a block in her new town that's almost all white, which she prefers. The girls and I are on one that's majority-black, though I think with only one owner-occupied house besides ours. There's an apartment building across the street that's almost exclusively Guatemalan immigrants and then the rest are white renters and one older white couple who own and are slowly fixing up a house but live elsewhere. There's one house of hipsters and I assume gentrification will change some of this, but it hasn't quite happened yet and I'm prepared to lobby as hard as I can to keep that from happening.
Selah's kindergarten class is one of the two where English Language Learners are clumped to make their pull-out instruction logistically easier, so it's half Guatemalan kids and half white/black/biracial. They identify their peers as black, white, mixed, or Guatemalan/"Spanish speakers." "Mixed" is usually a guess and I know some other kids classify Selah that way though she identifies as black (there's apparently a white grandparent on the side we don't know) and the little girl next door thought that I was white-presenting but not white just like she's often seen to be. Mara and Nia are typically the darkest in their classes, which also get noticed by peers.
One thing that strikes me here is how rare it is to see single-race groups of teens. Most high school students walk to and from school and there's surprisingly little racial self-sorting. This is true at my daughters' ages too but I know traditionally that changes over time.
There's one house of hipsters and I assume gentrification will change some of this
It isn't gentrification that changes hipsters. They just get too old to manage the extra effort required for hipness.
re: 39.last
Same here. The local high school is near our flat, and that pretty much universally holds true. It can be striking when one of a group of friends is wearing a hijab, and the other is wearing ... whatever the diametric opposite of the hijab might be. Even the irritating groups of 10-14 year olds who hang out in our building's park, and are loud and destructive little arseholes in the way that kids of that age can be,* are very mixed.
* and I probably was.
I have lived in such white places in the US (Madison (WI), Maine, and super segregated Auburn, AL) and have just moved back home which is the whitest yet!* Although less white then when I grew up. The only exception was a few years in the Bay Area.
*89.6% white**
(3.8% Black; 1.8% Chinese; 1.8% Arab; etc. (and 0.3% Latin American would explain why I cannot find any chilies, corn tortillas, or even canned chipotles))
**technically better than St. John's (96% European) but worse even then Saskatoon (80.2% European)
In 2000, I lived in Vermont. Now, DC. More diverse.
My immediate neighborhood has actually become more white since I've been there, which in this case means more diverse.
Daycare is diverse. Grade school and higher, I'm sure it's more diverse than the one I grew up in, but I have no idea if they're as diverse as they should be. Not sure yet which school she's getting into, of course, she's only 2 and a half. Our top choice has only 5 slots open. Apparently it's the top choice for a lot of other people too.
My home county is 98.86% white, which works out to 119 people not identifying as white. If wikipedia and my algebra are correct, there are three black people in the county, which is an increase.
Our school district is 40% white, but last night we went to our first district-wide concert for one of our kids, and across the three groups that were performing it was maybe 90% white.
The district I grew up in was probably >95% white.
I just looked it up and now it's only 84% white. Only 0.9% black, 8% Hispanic, 4% mixed.
Current district:
White 39%
African American 28%
Hispanic 13.5%
Asian 12.5%
Multiracial 6.4%
Native American 0.4%
Pacific Islander 0.2%
The rule in Pennsylvania is basically every town under 25,000 people is 97% white, and every city over that size is seen by white people as having a scary downtown full of scary black people. In eastern Pennsylvania the downtowns are also full of scary Hispanic people who are seen as having introduced crime to the area from New York City. In the last decade Hispanics are also moving to smaller towns in eastern Pennsylvania, which terrifies the native inhabitants who have nothing better to worry about because they are all retired, driving many counties to swing from Obama to Trump by about 20 points. Of course there are also various non-white immigrant communities (also in the cities). And some of the smaller "mill towns" where all the jobs have disappeared (all near Pittsburgh, except Coatesville) also have a lot of black people. Please let me know if any of this is incorrect.
Sad but true: As a white person from Pennsylvania it honestly seems miraculous that I now live in a fairly integrated place (in Maryland). It's like something doesn't compute. Near our townhouse we can be surrounded by black and brown faces, it's not a college campus or an affluent area (most people are renters), and yet we don't feel out of place.
True: There's nothing sadder than a white people from Pennsylvania.
Beirut -> Chicago. I hang out with more white people now, but I'd have to say my surroundings are more diverse.
50 is me, but with the signs reversed.
Now that I think about it, my household was 40% Hispanic for most of 2017, but a month ago reverted to 100% white.
In short, Heebie is right.
In 2000, I was in Austin, and my grad school life and neighborhood was certainly majority white, although a reasonable amount of diversity. If I had to ballpark, maybe 60-65% white?
Since then, I moved out of Austin to Heebieville. In addition, our kids went from daycare to public school. Finally, Heebie U has become much more Hispanic since 2006 - we've been majority-minority for the past few years, but somehow this year it's been really visible to me that most students aren't white. My classes are often 1/2 Hispanic, 1/4 black and 1/4 white. We have fairly few Asian students, Indian students, Native American students, or anyone else.
At some point in the past five years - becoming more involved in Heebieville, the change at Heebie U, and kids going to public schools - it's become very clear that this is a Hispanic world, and I'm a minority here. There are some uncomfortable aspects, such as how the power and authority are concentrated in the hands of white people, though. Especially at Heebie U - the racial composition of faculty and staff is lagging far behind the racial composition of the students. But aside from that, it feels great and interesting, and I feel like a novice student of Hispanic culture who's gradually learning more and more.
I should say specifically Texan-Latino culture. Not pan-Hispania.
In 2001 I moved about 15 blocks north farther away from campus. I'm not sure if where I live now is more or less diverse -- just fewer students and almost all the students that live in my current neighborhood are graduate students. We have Hispanic next-door-neighbors, and there are black and Asian people around, but mostly white.
I live in the Pacific NW and my city is as white as the stereotypes would suggest (70-75% non-hispanic white according to the census). That hasn't changed much in the last 10 years and it's disappointing. I imagine that it feels so much like a white space that it's not an attractive place for minorities to move.
My experience is even more white -- most of the places that I spend time feel like 90-95% white, which is a sign of the amount of self-segregation (when I go out to the mall, for example, which I don't do very often, there is a much higher percentage of visible minorities).
I like this city for a number of reasons but it's occasionally distressing to me that choosing to live hear has meant living in such an overwhelmingly white environment, and that I wasn't really conscious of that aspect of the choice 15 years ago.
If you can just get those goddamn kids to vote you can save America (meant very literally, the best hope against destruction are Latino kids in Texas).
My broader neighborhood has got to be one of the more diverse in the world. At work, the world of entertainment litigation is getting more diverse as many of the younger lawyers aren't Jewish.
57: I'm in the process of signing up to get registered as a Texas Voting Deputy! There's a ridiculous inconveniently available training thing, and your deputization expires every Dec 31 of an even numbered year, in order to minimize voter registration.
What powers are vested in a Texas Voting Deputy?
I'm assuming you can register people to vote and perform marriages at sea.
What if there's no sea in your county?
Heebie has a sea on a regular basis. She needed stilts and everything.
There's some self-segregation in my life. At work, most co-workers are white. It's more diverse than Vermont but less diverse than my neighborhood. In my neighborhood, the neighbors I see the most of and actually spend time with (as opposed to just waving when we walk by and that's it) are probably two-thirds white, very roughly. (Should I count a family as one unit or as individuals? That might sound silly, but does it matter if I know some of them very well and others not at all?) I feel a tiny bit guilty about this. I can justify some of it for practical reasons, but most segregation could be. But in the end, it's not that big a deal in this case, so far.
What powers are vested in a Texas Voting Deputy?
You are now deputized to vote in Texas. Or registered to vote, as they call it in other states. In Texas there is a 10-weekend training course before you can vote.
Anyway, it's probably a good thing that I think proclaiming virtue based on people you live/work near is unseemly because everybody around me is pretty much white peoples. And not even white peoples from the neighborhoods where everybody didn't go to graduate school.
White people from the neighborhoods where everybody didn't go to graduate school are really stressful to deal with.
69: It's so very true. Texas's Voter-Registration Laws Are Straight Out of the Jim Crow Playbook.
30: I think it was this paper, but I'm not sure and it's making me cross-eyed. If it is I misremembered the the self-identity part quite badly. There are still these bits though:
Moreover, compared to African Americans and Asian Americans, Hispanics have the highest levels of intermarriage with non-Hispanic whites at every educational level, and race is undoubtedly a large part of the explanation. Almost one-half of Hispanics consider themselves to be racially white.Both of which could have big implications for self-identification and consequent politics. (Of course what I have in mind is the faith in demographic inevitability so many democrats have been leaning on so heavily.)
[...]
The melting pot is clearly bubbling, but largely within class-segmented marriage markets, a pattern that represents an additional dimension of the larger demographic process of rising educational homogamy over the past 25 years
Ireland has certainly become more diverse - 17% of our population were born outside Ireland, but an almost identical percentage of Irish-born people live abroad. I've just checked and as I would have assumed, Polish-born people form the largest of these groups - UK-born is the next highest but many of these might be children of Irish-born parents. After that, Lithuanians, Romanians and Latvians, then Brazilians, then the four biggest EU countries in turn, then India and the US. The people I see around me are less white than those figures would suggest but I expect this is partly due to the cities having more diversity and partly due to recent generations being born here. The groups of teens I see do mostly seem to be mixed - the individuals are usually not mixed-race at all, though, either very pale or very dark.
48 is a good characterization. However, I was still a bit surprised by *how* homogeneous the 18th District (upcoming special election--asshole here today to support) is.
95.8% White
2.0% Black
1.3% Asian
0.6% Hispanic
0.1% Native American
0.1% other
It is drawn to combine rural/small town with outer suburbs, but I did not realize how strategically it "crosses" the Mon Valley to avoid the small black mill towns.
I was just reading somewhere (haven't been able to find it) that rates of interracial marriage in the US and the UK were similar which surprised the pants off me b/c it *seems* so much more common here (UK) although maybe that's a false impression created by living in London and watching BBC.
I live in a neighbourhood that seems to have been predominantly 1st & 2nd generation west African immigrants in the recent past (my landlady's parents were from Nigeria) and is now whitening amidst early-medium stage gentrification. I was mortified after I moved in when I realised I basically lived in the white-people building in an otherwise black neighbourhood (it's a little less stark now).
I'm kind of interested in all the talk about Polish immigrants in the context of Brexit because while I certainly believe they're a major immigrant group here, I have never once knowingly interacted with a Polish person (okay, outside of at a Polish restaurant) except for a student who mostly grew up here. The few stereotypes I have about them are entirely positive -- industrious and vastly better at fixing things than native Brits -- so it's hard for me to imagine what the complaining is about.
Fixing things shittily might be a national tradition.
Anyway, that reminds me that basically nobody tells Polish jokes anymore. At least not in America.
78: Yes, they were huge back when I was in elementary school in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Nobody tells Irish jokes in England either (same jokes). In France they were traditionally Belgian jokes. I wonder if they still are.
But do they tell Polish jokes in England now or are they too upset that somebody came and did the plumbing work without fucking up the loo?
okay, outside of at a Polish restaurant
Inside of a Polish restaurant, the screen doors don't keep out the ocean water.
Polish people (or their grandchildren) were like the 3rd largest group in my town (after Irish and Germans). I'm still mad that none of them ever told me watch a perogie was.
My suburb is about 80% white and 15% Asian. I was recently talking to an older Jewish woman who told me that even fifty years ago, Jews weren't allowed in my suburb, and her family was one of the first who moved in. Today, the town is about half Jewish, so, between that and the Asians, progress!
Hawaii: pretty diverse then and now. One of the many things that's cool about that is the number of elderly interracial couples. It's not a new thing here.
In London I lived for a few years on the borders of gentrification (a couple of blocks from the Grenfell Tower, and that was very mixed). Since moving out, I've lived in two small towns with essentially no black people and, in North Essex, maybe three Muslim families out of 14,000 people (the daughter of one was a family friend). In the fens, there are maybe ten black people who attend the fundie church; a Polish deli and a Lithuanian one. Must be some South Asians because there are four or five curry houses and the same number of Chinese takeaways, some with improbably names -- the Alan fish bar is I hope operated by close relatives of the Huns but I have never been in to ask. Checking the stats suggests an 18/1 white/other mix in 2011.
Cambridge is very much more diverse. Lots and lots of Chinese.
It might just be a guy named "Alan".
No: there's about three obviously Chinese takeaways all with totally ill-fitting Anglo-Saxon names
Chinese people here usually take Anglo-Saxon names, sometimes ill-fitting.
"Alan Fish Bar" might be one of the great porn star names, but I refuse to believe this place belongs to an Alan -- any more than this one is a John.
Painting half of a building white and half of it pink. Classic Alan move.
Next you'll be saying all the places called "Kansas Fried Chicken" and "Michigan Fried Chicken" and "New Jersey Fried Chicken" weren't founded by immigrants from the US.
I think the single worst worst thing about leaving my job in May is how much whiter my world will be. (There are many, many great things about leaving my job.)
73: Thanks! I'll obtain a copy when I'm at the right type of library in the next week or two.
My life, diversity-wise, is like "Girls" before Lena Dunham got yelled at by the Internet.
We currently live in a district that has one of the highest shares of 1st & 2nd-gen immigrants (particularly, in our neighborhood, Turkish) -- but since we don't actually interact with our neighbors, it's kind of irrelevant. Last week was in fact our first real social interaction with a neighbor, after 3 years in this apartment -- the young (local-looking, German-speaking) family down the hall invited us over for the mother's birthday at the last minute (but we could only stay for 15 minutes, due to other plans & social anxiety).
Our social circle is mostly other professors from my wife's institute. On the one hand, that means it's an extremely international crowd; but on the other, American-SJW-hand, everyone's white and privileged.
I also interact with people through the local section of the social-democratic party, but it's only nominally a local org; it's actually more of a general left-wing pressure group within the party -- and the cliches about it being all privileged college-educated elites isn't all that wrong. Although to be fair, the share of 1st/2nd gen immigrants is decent, particularly among the leadership - maybe 20-30%.
Largely the same story at the high school where I've started assistant-teaching. And the school itself, through American eyes at least, looks extremely white -- but part of this is because south/eastern European diversity is largely invisible to my eyes -- in any case, the school does not do much outreach to the Turkish community.
I've also started a teaching degree program at the uni, but I don't actually talk to anyone there. (We were supposed to do some group assignments in one of my intro classes, but went into panicked paralysis-mode about it, and basically got myself kicked out of the group; I worked alone for the rest of the class, which I found much less stressful.)
I'd like to think that if we had kids, this would change, because we'd be interacting with other neighborhood parents; but maybe I'm much more subconsciously racist than I think. In any case: sad!
Teaching is great, I hear. Good luck at it.
90. Started by a late Roman auxiliary heavy cavalryman when he was demobbed. Try talking to the owner in Ossetian and see how you get on.