In spite of some of my recent complaints about some of our neighbors, and the fact that there is a grand total of one (1) tree on our entire block, I have to say that on the diversity front, our neighborhood is pretty awesome. In the space of our one, mono-treed block, we've got a Haitian family, an Indian family, several Italian families, an Irishman (the hero who rescued our girls through their bedroom window), and numerous native-born Americans of various backgrounds and ethnicities. It's like the freakin' United Nations.
I grew up in a suburb in southwestern Connecticut where the only sizable minority represented was Jews -- and even they lived primarily in very specific areas of town when I was very young. I think there were maybe twenty total non-white kids in my graduating high school class of over 400 people. My family went to church in the city of Bridgeport, right next door, which has a very racially / ethnically diverse population, but our church was like this big, white island in the middle of the city. Many of the older congregants made no secret of the fact that they blamed Bridgeport's economic and aesthetic decline on the arrival of "the blacks and Puerto Ricans."
While I consider myself a pretty open-minded and enlightened person where issues of race and ethnicity are concerned, I do feel like it has been (and continues to be) a journey. When you grow up in a very homogenous place, around people with attitudes like those of the aforementioned church ladies (and gentlemen), you need to work hard to resist and overcome certain prejudices and assumptions. I know that I have fewer of these than my parents do, and they have fewer than their parents. My girls will probably have fewer than me. (In fact, I can just see them, years from now, rolling their eyes at me behind my back for being such a cretin when I tell them what a big deal it was when an African-American man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama was elected president.)
Anyway, the occasion of this post -- the reason I've been thinking about this lately -- is that the girls have a new pal here in neighborhood: Supreet, the six-year-old girl across the street. Her family is Indian, and her parents and both sets of grandparents all live in the house. She's the perfect age for a playmate -- older enough than the girls that I suspect they find her pretty exciting and glamorous, but young enough that she's still interested in doing many of the same things they are. They've got this little ritual now where they go over to Supreet's and she brings them each a cup, which they fill up from the spigot or garden hose and dump on themselves / each other / the potted flowers and pepper plants in the driveway. A couple of times, Supreet has come over here and hung in our backyard; she loves the playhouse and the wading pool. And saying "we had a play date!" Also, bonus: I now know how to say "hello" in Punjabi, courtesy of Supreet's grandmother, who speaks nothing but. I tried to teach Elsa and Clio, but they just looked at me like I was crazy, as did Supreet. I must not have been pronouncing it right.
All this rose-colored, kumbaya, We are the World musing aside, I'd of course be equally pleased if the girls had a new White/Euro pal across the street. I like the idea of neighborly interaction in general; it's one of the things I like most about summer -- how everyone emerges from their dens for awhile. But there's something particularly cool about the cross-cultural aspect of this new friendship. And the larger fact that the girls are growing up in a neighborhood where not all the families are exactly like ours. Whether or not it will have an impact on their lives and how they view the world remains to be seen, of course. But whatever the case, I think it's a good thing.
