The future is now

At the time of graduation, my high school was 69% Latino, about 11 - 12% African American, and about 4% Asian/Pacific Islander (though that number seems low in memory).. My freshman year in college, more than one person told me I was the first black person they knew beyond a "seeing them around school, maybe saying hi" level. That shocked me.. As time went on and I progressed through my twenties, I grew more and more suspicious that my experience and viewpoint was considerably different than "the average American," particularly when it came to the value of diversity and the utility in seeing other cultures as paradigms for, at the very least, reflection on our beliefs and assumptions (various signs of conservative retrenchment/backlash over those 12-15 years, several of which originated in my own home state, helped that suspicion).

So it makes me happy to hear that more of the country is becoming more diverse to the point where there are no longer racial majorities in a large number of US counties. It makes me feel that it will be easier to find a place to raise my kids where they will feel less out of place. I had my own racial identity issues growing up, and I know they will too, but I think growing up in a diverse community helped me, then and in hindsight, to shed light onto my place in society, and I expect that it will for my children as well. But there are things that still worry me, greatly. First, it's just very sad that in too many parts of the country, seeing the coming "browning" of cities and counties (and I'm talking about L.A. in particular), avenues for opportunity (i.e. jobs, but in particular, schools) have been allowed to rot leaving us now with the situation where: ok, we don't have a majority -- but now all of the minorities live in sub-standard housing and attend barely-functional schools. That is a failure on everyone's part. But further, if more minorities means more minority representation in government, can we do better than what we're doing now? Villaraigosa seems to be on his way to being a good mayor, but the disaster of minority-led government in South Gate is still a recent memory. Compton is a study in what happens when everyone consistently does the wrong thing and never gets called on it for a decade. And, though lauded as shining stars when elected, the black mayors of Detroit and Philadelphia are derided as signs of corruption and excess are revealed.

With respect to Street, I don't want to be too easy or harsh. Sure, being part of the democratic establishment in Philadelphia I don't doubt suspicions of corruption, and I can only wonder where we would be if they didn't find a bug in his office. And though some of his initiatives are suspect (controversially designating areas as "blighted" so that they may be razed) while it can be argued he has neglected maximizing the city's benefit from a downtown rennaisance, maybe he did what he could to try to reverse decline in areas where the minority is the majority, and that's not sexy work. Forty years since the civil rights movement, somehow our communities are in bad or worse shape than in the past: maybe he did what he could to do right by all of Philadelphia rather than make my "center city experience" more sterile.

But I digress. The aura of corruption doesn't help the image of minority leadership in the city, state, or country. Further, if headlines over the past few months reveal a trend, racially-motivated minority-on-minority crime seems to be on the rise in L.A. As one of the first absent-majority cities, this is troubling, and not a good sign for the future. Hopefully L.A.'s unique situation with gangs is as much of a factor in this type of violence as racism (as it seems to be). Why hopefully? Because that means it will be particular to L.A. and not indicative of what inevitably happens in multi-racial/ethnic, absent-majority large cities and counties. But L.A. is also the site of awful schools relegated to minority districts, bad policing with respect to minority communities (either hostility, as in excessive violence and racism, or indifference as in leaving the ghetto to burn in 1992).

I guess I just feel we need to do better. It seems that as minorities, "America" has never wanted to accept us (except when we're serving or entertaining them), and has neglected some important failures in the system that have left some of our communities in horrible shape for (at least) a half of a century. But now that, in more places, everyone will technically be a minority, we are, statistically, technically, no longer able to excuse ourselves as marginalized (I'm not saying that we are no longer marginalize-able.. divide and conquer is still alive and kicking).. It might take a generation to get over the letdown of boomers and their predecesors being unwilling to maintain the "good society" for people who don't look like them (I'm not just talking about whites -- Compton is a nightmare example of this attitude combined with rampant corruption). Hopefully we will do better, because in 45 years it will be statistically incorrect to equate "white" with "American" -- we need to be ready as much as they do.

P.S. -- I notice that so often here I have used the word "minority" to stand in where I might have meant "people of color".. Hopefully grad school will excise such sloppiness from my writing, and better, my thinking..