I’m 33, white, and own a home in a predominantly black neighborhood. I didn’t really realize it for a few months, because it takes time to figure out who your neighbors are. We also live within a mile of a “bad” neighborhood, but then anyone who lives in the heart of the city is going to have that.
As for friends, they are mostly white, but my bestest friend of all is black, and so is her husband. Another good friend is Puerto Rican, but I didn’t know that until she told me.
And, having worked in all sorts of clubs with all sorts of people, I am comfortable around just about anyone. Drop me off at a dive bar and I’ll have talked to ten people by the time you come back in two hours. Leave me at a swanky wedding reception and I will ingratiate myself to the host and talk easily with the ex-governor (that was actually this weekend so it’s fresh in my mind).
Basically, I can adapt well to almost any situation and with any group of people. It is a good quality to have, and helps in everyday dealings.
I’ve seen your pictures. You would have to be brandishing a nail-studded baseball bat to keep it to only ten. Otherwise it would be “every Y chromosome in the place.”
Well, David Brooks isn’t the only one from New York City. So am I. Since New York City has every ethnicity under the sun, one would THINK I’d have had a hugely diverse group of acquaintances there.
But the truth is, since I went to Catholic schools, 90% of my friends were either Irish or Italian until I was about 18.
And I think that’s part of what Brooks is getting at- even if we’re in a sea of different peoples, we’re likely (not certain, just likely) to associate almost exclusively with people we think of as “our kind” (whatever that may be).
While I can’t claim that my group of friends is truly diverse, I live in an apartment complex that’s majority black. A lot of the other residents are Asian or Hispanic. I’m definitely in the minority as a non-Hispanic white. I also probably have a larger salary than nearly anyone else in the complex.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about the supposed quote about voting for Nixon:
> Kael is frequently quoted as having said, in the wake of Richard Nixon’s
> landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, that she “couldn’t believe
> Nixon had won,” since no one she knew had voted for him. The quote is
> sometimes cited by conservatives (such as Bernard Goldberg, in his book Bias),
> as an example of allegedly clueless New York liberal insularity. There are
> variations as to the exact wording, the speaker (it has variously been
> attributed to other liberal women, including Katherine Graham, Susan Sontag,
> and Joan Didion), and the timing (in addition to Nixon’s victory, it has been
> claimed to have been uttered after Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984.)
>
> There is in fact no record of Kael making such a remark. The story may have
> originated in a December 28, 1972 article on a lecture Kael gave at the Modern
> Language Association, in which the newspaper quoted her as saying, "I live in a
> rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they
> are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater
> I can feel them.
So Kael was not saying that since she didn’t know anyone who voted for Nixon, it couldn’t be true that he had won. She was saying that she knew perfectly well that her friends were not typical of the entire American population. She said that the fact that only one of her friends voted for Nixon proved that.
The only diversity in my white-laden circle of friends is my BEST friend – a Native American. However, I spend most of my waking life with my co-workers, who are Antiguan, Japanese, Korean, and Hispanic and Plillipino. I think it’s fair to say that they impact my life almost as much as do my friends, even though I don’t socialize with them at all.
Well, most of my friends are religious, some flavor of Christian, Anglo-derived, and straight, so I suppose as an agnostic Jewish lesbian of Mediterranean origins, I provide some diversity in our social network.
