I have always thought that people of different ethnicities and cultures keep to themselves and usually only interact with people who look, eat and pray like them. I had seen this in my own neighborhood – the majority Dominican population and the white and black minority populations rarely mingled, and this continues to be the case. Our neighborhood salons, grocery stores and barber shops cater exclusively to Dominicans. As a result, the white, black and other Hispanics in my neighborhood travel elsewhere to do their own shopping and get their own haircuts. Everyone goes about their own business and there is virtually no cross-cultural interaction. In fact, if anything, there is still racial tension – for instance, before my father married my Latina mother, his white neighbor told him that he shouldn’t rent out extra space to Hispanics. To this day, our white neighbor refuses to talk to my mother. In the past, the racial tension was even more pronounced. There was a major crisis in Yonkers in the late 1980s when a federal court ordered that new housing projects be built in majority-white neighborhoods as part of a housing desegregation effort. This came as a shock to the white-majority population of my neighborhood (the neighborhood was majority-white when my father first bought our home and it continued to be until the early 1990s). The neighborhood’s residents were extremely resistant to proposals for new housing projects in the community and a city-wide crisis ensued (this is the subject of a great HBO mini-series Show Me a Hero, which I highly recommend). But the housing projects were built anyway, and the vast majority of middle-class whites moved out in the 1990s. A Dominican enclave has since developed in the neighborhood and now dominates it.
Hearing about what had happened in Yonkers in the 1980s and seeing what my neighbhood is like had made me somewhat cynical and close-minded to the idea that people of different ethnicities, incomes and cultures could really come together in a way that meaningfullyharbors cross-cultural interaction. But high school really changed my mindset. In the 1970s, Yonkers desegregated its schools and since then it has provided free busing for students to attend any school in the city as part of that desegregation effort. Most people attended their neighborhood school anyway, as was my case in elementary and middle school. But my city’s specialized high school attracted, and continues to attract, people from all over. I was astounded by the diversity of my high school – there was a healthy infusion of whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. This diversity was reflected in my high school friend group, which had: a Guyanese girl, an Italian, two Indians, a Mexican and an African-American. Daniel Shaw in “Melting Together in Ditmas Park” reminded me of what my friends and I looked like when we went out to grab coffee or have lunch – “When my friends and I walk down the street, we look like a UN summit meeting, no joke.” My high school friends have taught me an extraordinary amount about their own cultures and now my college friends are doing the same. While my experience in my friend groups may make for a rosy depiction of just how successful cross-cultural interactions can be, successes like these must be weighed against the reality that racism and discrimination exist. So ultimately, I have settled on a middle ground that I believe applies to most places and people in which diversity is present, which John Mollenkopf captures perfectly: “All these people may not love each other, but they tolerate each other.” Of course, there are cases of outright discrimination and marginalization and cases of nearly perfectly integrated groups, but on the whole, I think that people mostly do just keep to their own while tolerating others. And that’s just fine – people not going at each other’s necks is good enough for me.
