How diverse is your area?

Just curious, given the racial component of the national "debate" right now.

I feel blessed to live in a very diverse, yet mostly harmonious, area. I like that my kids will grow up side by side with kids from a vast assortment of backgrounds and ethnicities. It's my hope that racism will be a foreign concept to them. The elementary school they'll go to is 26 percent white, and the high school is 32 percent white.

A quick scan of actual demographics show where I live is 55 percent white, and about 40 percent black/Asian/Hispanic. There are 14 houses on my street - six white, five Hispanic, two black, and one Indian.

 

Most diverse region in the country, baby!

My county is less than 50 percent white. About a third of the population is Asian (Chinese and Vietnamese for the most part). Only 3 percent black. Hispanic ethnicity up around 30 percent (including white Hispanic and non-white Hispanic obviously).

Politically, too, contrary to popular belief (and election results) there's a conservative presence, if it's perhaps silent. Lots of people with lots of money. Also the Google engineer is a pretty good proxy for that group. It isn't the political monolith it's made out to be (and which San Francisco an hour away definitely is).

My immediate home area matches those stats fairly accurately. One thing we lose points on is that by now, everybody's rich, either because of how much their home has increased in value or because it was so expensive they had to be rich to buy it in the first place. My neighborhood is far far removed from, for instance, the ACA/Medicaid debate.

 

I mean that more in comparison to my wife and I. I grew up in one of the most segregated cities in the country, and she grew up in a small town of about 2,000 honkies.

They'll grow up thinking this is all normal and wonder why there are people who make a big deal out of it.

 

Currently, 95.9% white

But I grew up in Long Beach, a melting pot.

 

I live in one of the whitest, most non-diverse areas of the United States.

Seriously.

 

It's been a long time but half of the children in my son's kindergarten class were either first-generation US citizens, or born in other countries. Not a high African-American population in Microville, but lots of Asian-Americans, India/Pakistan, Hispanic.

 

This area is considerably diverse in sum, but very divided geographically by the Susquehanna River.

The black and Hispanic families gravitate into the city and surrounding suburbs on the east shore. The suburban white families congregate on the west shore. And it's a common theme that one side doesn't cross the bridge to the other unless work gives them no other alternative.

 

Heinz 57 where I live. You name it, we have it. County is "majority" Hispanic now, with a rapidly-growing Asian population.

 

My suburban town is 25 percent Asian, attracted by the school system. A sprinkling of African Americans and Hispanic Americans, maybe not statistically significant.

 

My wife and I were just discussing how white our small neighborhood is. (Our kids' eventual high school is 60 percent white.) But we could name just two black families in our neighborhood. Then, a few days later, she gets this email from our neighborhood association president (she's on the board):

 

We have a Chinese restaurant.

When I think of non-diverse places, I think of Montana. Might be the whitest place I've seen.