I’m 41, white, and grew up in what passes for a “city” in Western Kansas. I don’t know the exact percentages, but mostly white, quite a few Mexicans, and a few African-American. Pretty much the same at the schools I went to (I attended all grades through HS in the same place)
My family’s Eposcopalian church was whiter-than-white.
I’m 30, white, grew up in Union County in NJ.
My neighborhood was entirely white, baring one hispanic family across the street that my father felt was going to “ruin” the neighborhood. My elementary school, which pulled from multiple areas in our town, was about 50% white, 40% black, 10% hispanic. Faculty almost entirely white (I think there was one black teacher) For junior high I went to private Catholic school that was 100% white, almost entirely of Irish or Italian decent. Faculty as well. Public High School was 50% Black, 25% Hispanic, 25% White. There were a handful of Asians, I think mostly Filipino. Faculty 85% White, 15% Black.
My church was 100% White, mostly of Scandinavian or German decent.
41, male. Grew up in Columbia, South Carolina.
My neighborhood and church (which I attended semi-regularly through my childhood) were both completely white. I’m trying to think of where the closest black family lived to my house and coming up blank. Nowhere in what I would call my “neighborhood,” though.
My schools, however, by virtue of being public schools in the full stride of the bussing era, were very much desegrated. My high school, which was two blocks from my house, was 93% black.
Rural sticks, SC:
Neighborhood:…100% White
Church:…100% White
School (Grades 1-4)…80% White
School (Grades 5-12)…30% White
There were a couple of Hispanics of some sort who passed thru over the years, but I didn’t know them personally, and one classmate who had been born in Cuba, or so she said.
I also think, looking back, there was one Jewish family who lasted one year.
I’m 32, Japanese-American, and I grew up in Honolulu.
Neighborhood: I split my time between my schools’ neighborhoods and my home neighborhood. One was a predominantly Asian neighborhood, skewing toward the elderly. There were some Filipino and Portuguese families, but it was mostly Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The other neighborhood was younger, mostly new homeowners with young families. They were also mostly Asian, but there were some Caucasians as well.
Schools: I’d say it was 60 percent Asian, and the rest were Filipinos, Portuguese, Thai/Laotians, Hawaiians, Samoans, Tongans, and Caucasians. There aren’t many black people in Hawaii; they tend to be military families, so their kids attend schools near bases. There weren’t many full Caucasians either (half-Caucasians are more common). If you said “the blond kid” or “the black kid”, everyone knew who you meant.
Until the start of my Senior year in high school, I lived overseas, and with the exception of five years in Australia, I was in the minority as a white kid. My high school that I graduated from in suburban Washington D.C. The closest school to us was T.C. Williams, for those of you who have seen Remember the Titans. In fact, my school is featured in the film as being the nasty opponents in one of the games. This was about ten years after the incidents in the film took place. Looking at my yearbook, the school was about 25-30% black with a sprinkling of Asians. No hispanics whatsoever as I can remember. I don’t remember a single racial incident at school or out of school. I played sports so I had a lot of black friends.
My street was integrated, although more black families lived on one end of it and more whites on my end. It was about six blocks long. My next door neighbors were a black middle-class family. The father was a referee in the NBA. Church was less intetgrated. More white, less black, more Asian than my school.
I went to the University of Wisconsin and it was the whitest place I had ever seen. Growing up in diverse situations, it freaked me out to be surrounded by so much similarity. I can only imagine what it must have been like for a black person there. We had one black player on the baseball team, but he was light-skinned, spoke with a midwestern accent, and had gone to private school with mostly white kids throughout his education. He had a lot of friends and was socially much more aligned with the white majority than the black minority.
I grew up in Salt Lake City, UT.
Public elementary school - 600 students, zero African-Americans, three or four Asian kids.
Public middle school - 1,500 students, 3 African-Americans (all from the same family, as I remember), and handful of Asians, and 1,487 white kids.
I moved to an Army base overseas in high school. The high school was 40% white, 40% African-American, and 20% Latino.
Church was always 100% white.
I’m a 60 year old white male. I grew up here in Anderson, Indiana, a middle-size industrial town.
My neighborhood was all white. The sharp dividing line where the black people lived was the street my K-to-6 school was on.
That K-6 school was about one third black. I didn’t know to think whether somebody was Asian or Hispanic. Mom briefed us, it was rude to call anyone nigger, the proper form was colored, or, more formally, negro. A friend of mine called a girl black in the fifth grade, and she was on the edge of smacking him. I got along well with the black kids in my classes.
The 7-9 school was less black, and the 10-12 high school was 10% black.
Our Presbyterian church was completely white, and mostly upper middle class. I later asked my mom if any black people ever came to our church. She was in the choir, so she’d know. She said once a black family came in. They sat near the back, and they left just before the service ended, probably to avoid awkward conversations.
From birth to age ten I lived in a MA city. Half my classmates were also white, and the other half were Puerto Rican or black. The neighborhoods I lived in there had more white people than my classrooms did, but I never attended church often enough to have an opinion on that.
Then we moved to NH, and as others have said…I was shocked the first day of 5th grade because everyone was white. As time went on maybe 1% of my classmates were Asian or black.
Grew up in a small Netherlands town.
Ages 6 to 12 I went to a really small school in the Netherlands (about 60 kids together; 30 kids in classes 1 -3 and 30 in classes 4 -6) the only really differently coloured kids I recall were a pair of (adopted) Indonesian twins.
After that (age 12 - 17) I went to a more affluent school. Don’t really recall any non-white pupils there, though I suppose that were a few - that was a school with about 1200 pupils. I had one australian girl in my first year class, though.
After I got expelled from that school I went to a more mixed education to finish high school. Quite a lot of pupils of first and second generation Morocan and Turkish descent there.
Never went to any church, and pretty much all my neighbourhood up to that age were “white”.
It was about equally Hispanic/White with a significant minority of Native Americans. There was only a smattering of anyone else.
I am white, 32, male and grew up in New Mexico.
ETA: I was born 1974
Hey what school did you go to Skald? I went to Treadwell. It was the eighties in the Highland Heights area (I just turned forty in December). There weren’t many black people in my immediate neighborhood but they were very close in the projects near Jackson Avenue. The street I lived on is now frightening. My house has burned down after being vacant like about half the other houses, and if you slow down people run out trying to sell you drugs.
In our church? No minorities of any sort. It was a fairly liberal United Methodist church and I’m sure there are probably at least a few minorities there now, but I haven’t been in thirty years.
The school was about 60% white at the time. My first best friend was a black girl but later on there wasn’t much “mixing” of the races. You know the term “nigger lover”. Yeah, it was like that. You kept to your own “kind” unless you wanted that label. I hated it, but I was such a little shadow in school I just tried to do my work and not be noticed. There are almost no white students at Treadwell now, but I think it’s even with Hispanic and black students. My little girl’s school is probably 50% Hispanic now. I don’t know how the race mix is with teachers now but it was evenly divided back then. I remember Asians from middle school on, Laotians I believe. Many moved to the neighborhood around Treadwell. I honestly don’t recall any Hispanic students. We had one exchange student from Germany and we thought that was the most exotic thing ever.
I was born in 1966 and lived in a small town in upstate New York until I was 12. My school and probably my town as well were 100% white. After we moved to a suburb of Atlanta in 1978, my school was all white, but there were a few black teachers, all women. Senior year we got a black football coach, and all the girls thought he was cute, and it was kind of a taboo thrill. I never really got to know anyone non-white until I started working.
My daughters, on the other hand, (23 and 21) always went to ethnically mixed schools, and none of the kids seem to be too concerned about race. They just hang out with/date whomever they like.
40 and white.
I grew up in a smallish city in Pennsylvania, in what was still very much a German-American, working-to-middle class neighborhood. On our block I believe there was one Hispanic family, and I remember that one couple consisted of a man who had grown up in the neighborhood, his Japanese wife, and their son. Heck, our next door neighbors were Greek-American, and some people thought they stood out :eek: (Well, I guess they sometimes did, but culturally, not physically. For example, our stinkiest meals involved sauerkraut, theirs involved squid and large amounts of garlic :D) I clearly remember the first Black family moving into the neighborhood.
I spent some years at parochial school and some at public school (long story). The Catholic school was similarly very white, with some Hispanic families. The public school was a bit more mixed, but I would guess perhaps 5% of the students were Hispanic, Black or Asian. Every teacher I remember was white. I then attended a Catholic high school that drew students from all over the county. Out of a student body of 800, fewer than ten students were Black, maybe a couple dozen were Asian, and perhaps fifty were Hispanic.
We’re the same age, though I think we’ve already established that; certainly I knew before this thread opened.
Anyway, I oversimplified on the high school. It was Whitehaven for the sophomore year CBHS thereafter.
The situation was similar, if reversed, in my neck of the woods. More than a few people commented when I was at Whitehaven that I had dated all the white girls in the class, and this was not meant as a compliment or praise.
I grew up in an Ohio farm town of about 3000 people, +/-. We thought third generations Italians were exotic.
We had IIRC 4 Mexican families, one Korean family, one mixed Caucasian/Asian couple and two mulatto kids. Highly diverse, as you can see. A generous estimate would be 30 people in the town that weren’t white/Caucasian on their census forms.
I’m 43.
My dad was in the Air Force, then the State Department, so we were moving to other states or other countries all the time. Racial and ethnic composition depended on where I lived. The city where I was born, Shreveport, La. was in the Guinness Book of World records as the “most segregated city in the US” when I was growing up. There was a white part of town, and a black part of town, and the black part of town (still commonly called “N-----town” even when I was a young adult) had dirt roads.
I also lived in New Mexico (lots of Hispanics), England (lots of Brits), North Dakota (very, very white, execpt for the Native populations), and West Africa, which was heavily black, but the school I graduated from there was an American School with an extremely diverse international population.
Age 32, white female.
ages 0-9: lived in a section of Silver Spring MD (near the area that is now called Langley Park). My neighborhood was predominantly black & Latino, and a number of Asian kids at school. Our area had a significant number of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees because of these countries’ political oppression in the 70s & 80s.
ages 9-18: moved to a different area of Silver Spring, with significantly more white families (many Jewish–my high school friends threw Chrismakah parties). I think the demographics for my high school were 30% black, 30% white, 15% Asian and 15% Hispanic. We had something like 70+ languages represented at the school and people from all over the world.
38,white.
Neighborhood was majority black by the time I was a teenager, but some 20 years earlier it was all-white. The schools I went to were the most racially diverse in the Toledo area (which is to say 50/50 white/black). I teach in the same area, which is now maybe 30% white, 35% black, 20% Hispanic, and 15% Middle-Eastern.
Church was all-white,but with a significant gay/lesbian presence.