From the neighborhoods I know of, those that are not dominated by a couple of ethnicities only exist in Manhattan. I never even heard of the neighborhood of Ditmas Park. An idea that struck me as interesting from the thoughts of the diverse people living in that neighborhood was that of an old lady who said that you can’t learn to be in a democracy if you live in a one-ethnicity neighborhood. And I think that makes sense, because how can one learn to listen to and respect opinions of different people if he is always surrounded by others whose way of living and thinking is just like his own. I never really looked at democracy from this point of view: that it’s not just about everyone having a vote, but it is also about learning to respect the opinions of others who cast those votes, even if they’re different from yours.
The neighborhood itself is still a bit obscure to me since I went to a high school that is mentioned in this book, Midwood High School, and I’m still not aware of a neighborhood near there that is called Ditmas Park. The neighborhood that does sound like the one being described is now called Midwood.

This neighborhood is described as “diversity by accident” because it is surrounded by neighborhoods that are dominated by specific ethnic groups and it is assumed that those people moved into this neighborhood simply as an extension of the surrounding ones. Even if that is true, I still think that this neighborhood shows true diversity because people wouldn’t want to live there unless they appreciated living on blocks that are a mix of very different people, as opposed to even having a neighborhood that seems diverse, but in reality each block is dominated by one group.

The one type of diversity described here that seems unwelcome is the mix of economically polar households. One man was describing how he and his family members were robbed in this neighborhood due to, according to him, an “unpleasant consequences in the mix of rich and poor”. This made me realize the differences between the two diversities that I haven’t compared this way before: while cultural diversity is about sharing ideas and a friendly exchange of cultural aspects, the economic diversity seems to cause anger in those who have less. I think that is primarily because when it comes to culture, people don’t often feel like their culture is inferior to another, so they don’t have a problem exchanging aspects of their culture with others. The problem with economic differences is that people who are poor might feel anger or jealousy toward those who are rich, and friendly mixing would be difficult if those feelings are there. The environment created by such interactions is much more hostile than the friendly environment of cultural exchange that is described by people in the Ditmas Park neighborhood. And this economic evil is later described in this book as bringing about the tensions between ethnicities that would not have existed otherwise.