This is a very interesting, enlightening and sobering article, Charlie. Thank you for writing it. It isn't easy to take a cold, hard look at our country this way but it is so important in healing divides. I have learned that even on the most divisive issues if people can simply sit down and LISTEN to each other, we find common ground and community.
I spent virtually none of my childhood thinking about race and my world consisted of 95+% of white upper middle class, none of whom did either. History class described racial events of the country's past, and so what little time I did talk about the subject taught me it was a historical event, in the past.
This changed a lot when I moved to southeast Michigan out of college, and I actually had a choice of where I would live. Knowing nothing about the area, but also having never in my life thought about maps such as the ones you showed (including, unsurprisingly, one of Metro Detroit), I found an apartment complex right in Dearborn - south of 8 mile, adjacent to Detroit - less than a mile from my office, and settled down. As I got to know my co-workers, I learned that virtually none of my (mostly white, married-with-kids, white-collared) colleagues lived close to our office, but still was a bit naive as to why that was.
Once I moved to the suburban DMV - I started to notice more that people "like me" moved further out even from the suburbs to the exurbs. It wasn't until my son was starting kindergarten when it finally came full circle and our few white neighbors with kids made the move from the more concentrated suburbs to exurban life, all within a couple years from when their kids started school. Having lived in metro Detroit and DMV - two of the most racially diverse yet separate metropolitan areas in (at least) the northern US) - my wife and I are now amply aware of the mostly unspoken but widely understood racial separation and where those lines are drawn. We have personally chosen to play down their significance and have made choices to live around and send our children to schools with mostly people who don't look like us. But the undercurrent is pervasive and as you've pointed out, the local political lines are largely the same as the racial ones.
It would be blasphemous to call any of us "racists", but the extremities of racism have shifted so much over the course of time, I sometimes wonder if this is just today's incarnation of the word.
This is a very interesting, enlightening and sobering article, Charlie. Thank you for writing it. It isn't easy to take a cold, hard look at our country this way but it is so important in healing divides. I have learned that even on the most divisive issues if people can simply sit down and LISTEN to each other, we find common ground and community.
I spent virtually none of my childhood thinking about race and my world consisted of 95+% of white upper middle class, none of whom did either. History class described racial events of the country's past, and so what little time I did talk about the subject taught me it was a historical event, in the past.
This changed a lot when I moved to southeast Michigan out of college, and I actually had a choice of where I would live. Knowing nothing about the area, but also having never in my life thought about maps such as the ones you showed (including, unsurprisingly, one of Metro Detroit), I found an apartment complex right in Dearborn - south of 8 mile, adjacent to Detroit - less than a mile from my office, and settled down. As I got to know my co-workers, I learned that virtually none of my (mostly white, married-with-kids, white-collared) colleagues lived close to our office, but still was a bit naive as to why that was.
Once I moved to the suburban DMV - I started to notice more that people "like me" moved further out even from the suburbs to the exurbs. It wasn't until my son was starting kindergarten when it finally came full circle and our few white neighbors with kids made the move from the more concentrated suburbs to exurban life, all within a couple years from when their kids started school. Having lived in metro Detroit and DMV - two of the most racially diverse yet separate metropolitan areas in (at least) the northern US) - my wife and I are now amply aware of the mostly unspoken but widely understood racial separation and where those lines are drawn. We have personally chosen to play down their significance and have made choices to live around and send our children to schools with mostly people who don't look like us. But the undercurrent is pervasive and as you've pointed out, the local political lines are largely the same as the racial ones.
It would be blasphemous to call any of us "racists", but the extremities of racism have shifted so much over the course of time, I sometimes wonder if this is just today's incarnation of the word.