Grew up in San Diego and went to elementary school in a very navy neighborhood, so it seems to me that it ws a pretty diverse ethnic mix - I remember having friends of all hues, and hated being blonde because most of my friends had long dark hair. Early church was a cool sort of place with a very active hippie-type youth group that was pretty well mixed, but then my parents started going more to much more fundie (and much less fun) white church.
Moved up the coast to a more agricultural area for high school where it was about 40% white, 40% hispanic, and 20% everything else. Church was heavily white as most of the hispanic population was Catholic and my parents were still in the sedate, grape-juice style of church.
The neighborhood I lived in in the 80’s was pretty much all (white) Italian/Catholic, other than our family (also white, but non-Italian and protestant).
Public school had to have been about 99.99% white, but not nearly as completely Catholic. I’d say probably 2 thirds catholic, close to a third protestant, with a smidgen of other/no religion. Not everyone was practicing, mind you, just, it’s what if you asked them what religion they are what they’d respond. About the darkest anyone got in there were the darker Italians, who probably could’ve passed for Hispanic, if any of us even knew what Hispanic meant at the time.
Private school, still almost all white, but on occasion a few black kids would enroll for a few years. Oh, and one teacher had adopted several Korean orphans, so they attended. Almost all protestant (as the school was supported by protestant churches) but also a few other/nones who just wanted to get their kids out of the public schools. I think there may have even been an occasional Catholic. Also, because kids were coming from all over the area, not just a few nearby neighborhoods, there was no predominant ethnicity like the Italians in the public school.
Church was, again, pretty much all white, but no specific background dominated that I’m aware of.
I was 15 when I first saw a real life non-white person. And he wound up leaving town.
It doesn’t help that my hometown had lynchings as early as 100 years ago. And the thing is, I didn’t even know about that until I casually mentioned my hometown to a guy who freaked out.
ETA: Oh. I’m 25 in March. And, as you would probably guess, white (mostly Scottish decent with some Native American, to be precise.)
Age 66. Grew up in a rural part of S. California. We had about 1/3 Hispanic and 2/3 white students. When I went to high school, there was about the same ratio of hispanic to white, with a very few Asians, but no black students.
College was mostly white, with a few hispanics and a few asians.
My time in the Air Force exposed me to many black people; they were the largest group after white people.
Then I moved to N. California (rural), where there was a predominant white population, with no blacks, no asians, a few hispanics, and about 10% American Native. Over the 30 years I was there, all of the minorities increased except American Native. Thhis is where I spent 30 years teaching in a high school.
Now I live in an upper middle class neighborhood in the Southwest. Mostly white, with a sprinkling of just about every minority.
There were black kids in the schools in our conference, does that count?
I grew up in a small town a bit south of the suburbs of Chicago. While I was in grade school there was a black family that lived there for about a year or so. The father worked for the railroad, as I understand it. The kids went to school in town, and two of the boys were in Cub Scouts with my brother. (Apparently my father had to go to bat for them for the kids to be allowed to join.) They played in our backyard some, but so did everybody else. I was a pretty oblivious kid and I really don’t remember all that, except for some vague memories of them being around.
That would be the sum total of my experience with anyone not white until I went to college.
We had a fair number of new kids in high school, since we caught a certain amount of the ‘white flight’ from the suburbs.
Another military brat here; the racial composition really depended on where we were stationed. When we lived and went to school on base (which was most of the time), it was always very diverse - I’d say probably 30-40% African American, large number of Hispanics (mostly Puerto Ricans), and a fair number of Asians (mostly Korean, Japanese, or Philippino wives and their children). There were also typically a good number of assorted Germans, Italians, etc. The great majority of people were Christian of some denomination or other.
As racially diverse as base life can be, it can be strangely homogeneous in other ways. Everyone’s parents more or less work for the same employer; there’s a much narrower range of social class that in the civilian world; people are healthier; there are almost no old people; almost no handicapped people; no really poor people; no (openly) gay people. It was a bit of a culture shock to have to leave base and go to college.
I’m 29 and lived mostly on bases in the East Coast (US) and Europe.
Born 1960, spent my first 10 years in a small town where everyone was of Anglo-Saxon descent (apart from one token kid who was half-Japanese).
On moving to a large Australian city environment, AND in a lower-socioeconomic area, 93% of my school community was from a Non English Speaking Background…and they comprised 26 different nationalities. (I know this because I had to do a demographic study back then in order for our school to qualify for extra government assistance!!) Most were of Greek origin (a result of post-war migration policies) but we had kids from all points of the compass. I left school just as the new-wave of SE Asian migration was happening unfortunately, but it was still a rich and wonderful environment to grow up in.
Ask me for my* pastitso* recipe heh. Wogs make THE best food of all, and I consider myself a Nominal Wog now.
I am 50 and a woman. I grew up between California and Washington State from kindergarten until 5th grade. I remember my elementary school population as being primarily white with a small percentage of black and Hispanic students. I moved to Alaska in 1970 and throughout 6th grade to graduation, the percentage of black and Hispanic students in the schools I attended was still pretty small, less than 10% (just off the top of my head and from the 2000 Anchorage indicators census, the number of black people in Anchorage was about 27,000 out of 250k overall). The other ethnic group at my Jr. and High School was that of Alaskan native. But that was also low, probably between 10 and 20 percent.
I lived in an area of town (still do in fact) called “lower hillside”. Hillside is where all the rich folks live. But lower hillside has every range of income from a small trailer trash area (I used to own a trailer there) with mobile homes on private lots to some fairly nice upper middle class homes to condos.
The number of black students in my High School was small enough that I can still remember, that without exception, every black student in my High School was in some way a “star”. Ether a jock, cheerleader, an egghead, or a well-loved class clown (Thomas you KNOW who you are :D)
Whoops, I always forget something, I’m a white mutt with English/Scandanavian/Scottish/Drop O’American Indian (I think someone had some fun out behind the corncrib in New England back in the day :D).
Grew up on the east side of Salt Lake City, but below 13th East, the border where any ethnic mixing ended in 99% whites.
The neighborhood was almost completely white, except there were a few Tongans in our church (Mormon, of course) for a while. Our next-door neighbor wasn’t Mormon, but most of the block was.
The only non-whites I remember in elementry school were an Native Indian girl in 5th grade and a Korean boy in 6th grade.
There were some Chicanos (as they were known) in junior high, one black girl that I remember, and a few more Tongans, but still 90% white. There was one Jewish girl that I knew.
Fewer minorities in high school, as most of the minorities in my junior high when to a different high school, but the black girl was still there.
51 & white. Grew up in suburban SoCal in a middle-class-plus neighborhood. 100% white neighborhood. I recall seeing my first black person live in the flesh at about age 5. He was a handyman and I thought he’d gotten really dirty working on something messy.
My elementary school in the mid-late 60s was 100% white faculty & other employees. As to the students it was all white except … There were probably a few Jews, but they were indistringuishable from non-Jews. There was one full-blooded Mexican family who lived down the street; they had a son my age & we were pals. He stood out hugely because he was so dark compared to the other lilly-whites. And he was the only one in a school of ~500 kids. We did have a few Japanese who were then a distinct & rather insular ethnic group, probably 5 or 6 families & 6-8 kids total.
My middle school had a larger catchment area which extended a little farther down the economic ladder, and as it was now the early 70s the influx of Hispanics had gotten under way. We had ~900 students in 3 grades. Probably 50 Hispanic students, and 1 or 2 Hispanic teachers. The word Chicano was just coming into use as a favorable term. The Japanese were getting assimilated, but there were now a few more other Asians, like 2 families of Vietnamese and a couple from Hong Kong. But of 900 students, 800+ were whitebread white.
My high school’s catchment area straddled the tracks so to speak, so we had 2400 students split about 50/50 from the working class side vs the management/professional class side of town.
The students were ~20% Hispanic, 10% Asian of some sort (Oriental is the word we’d have used then), and the rest white. I knew all 8 of the Jewish kids. My sophomore year the first two black kids (siblings) showed up when their family moved into the area.
I grew up in rural northern New England - one of the least diverse areas in the country. In our entire school system there was one black student and no hispanics or asians. (Dave, the black student, was ironically part of the redneck crowd.)
The only non-white people I ever saw growing up were the students at a nearby university, the airmen and their families at a nearby military base, and the Iroquois who lived in the area.
1-3 grades. Washington DC Suburbs. Don’t remember any minorities. Public School
4-8 grades. Rural Rural Vermont, No minorities. Public school “WASPy”
High School: Upstate New York college town. maybe 1% black, no asians. Public School. Mostly Roman Catholic Italians.
