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 southeastern
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 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."
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