The Fruits of Demographic Change

“I don't believe in integration to achieve miscegenation” is a line from a Kid Creole song that appeals to me because I was born in New Orleans, where race was chaste and was inescapable unless one chose to pay the very high price to pass. Ignoring the diversity in your own family. Then, where one fit in society had everything to do with how one appeared; the whiter, the better. When we moved to Los Angeles, we went from being “Creole,” more than light enough to pass, to being contextually black, though we fit well into what Los Angeles was becoming even then, a broad palette of skin colors and appearances. In college I was as shocked to find that that beautiful blonde girl was Mexican American as someone was shocked to discover that I was black or that I didn't speak Spanish. Race like religion had los some of it coercive influence; though we didn't necessarily get along, the potential was there

Geography · Sociology · Demography · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies