Vanilla Cities, Chocolate Suburbs

Clarence Page

So you think we Americans know ourselves? New census numbers reveal that a lot of our 20th century racial and ethnic assumptions are overdue for an overhaul.

For example, the South is rising again -- in terms of mixed-race marriages, one of the most dramatic yardsticks of racial change.

North Carolina's mixed-race population doubled since the 2000 census, according to the New York Times. Georgia's grew by more than 80 percent and by almost that much in Kentucky and Tennessee. Even Mississippi, infamous in the 1960s for terror killings of civil rights workers, saw a 70 percent increase in mixed-race marriages, matching Indiana, Iowa and South Dakota.

African Americans also have become less Northern and more suburban, the census reports. The percentage of the nation's black population that lives in the South is higher than it has been in 50 years -- and higher than ever in suburbs.

Particularly dramatic to many members of my generation is Washington, D.C., whose black population was about 70 percent in 1975, when the funk band Parliament's "Chocolate City" became a hit. Its black population has since fallen to 50 percent and continues to drop as more blacks move out to colorize what used to be, in the song's lyrics, "vanilla suburbs."

News media tend to treat these new census findings as if they were a big surprise. In fact, they continue trends that began to appear in the early 1980s, largely as a consequence of seismic changes in antidiscrimination laws, immigration policy and the nation's industrial economy two decades earlier.

Black flight soon followed white flight to suburbs and economic opportunities to the Sun Belt. Economically hard-hit Detroit may be the worst victim of such changes. The Motor City lost a fourth of its population in the past decade alone.

The biggest surprise may be in how much the Hispanic population has grown faster than expected, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis. If the Hispanic population had not grown in Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island since 2000, Pew says, those states' overall population would not have grown at all.

And non-Hispanic whites have fallen to less than half of the child population in 10 states, says Pew: Mississippi, Georgia, Maryland, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, California, New Mexico and Hawaii.

Reactions to those demographic changes predictably fall largely along generational lines. We older folks are more prone to diversity anxiety, seeing problems while our children and grandchildren, who will be living in the emerging future, tend to see opportunities.

The hyperventilating I hear from some of today's alarmists remind me of the immigrant anxiety in past generations of Americans, including young Benjamin Franklin, who sounded editorial alarms against immigrants from Germany. He thought they would never make good Americans of themselves. But they did.

Today, the rise of new Obama-generation Republicans like Cuban-American Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, fellow Hispanic New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, and Indian American governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina symbolize how well Americas's melting pot of assimilation is still working.

What keeps it working is families, schools and communities that maintain healthy achievement-oriented values from one generation to the next. Our challenge today is to help make those values work for everybody. That includes our least-fortunate underachieving households who have been left behind while their more fortunate neighbors have moved away.

In that pursuit, we need to pay more serious attention to two tough and touchy issues: national immigration reform and long-term poverty, including the one-fourth of black Americans left behind by the exodus of the new black middle class.

Most of us Americans would rather change the subject than bring either issue up in mixed company. But that only leaves race, poverty and immigration to be exploited by alarmists and opportunists. We owe our kids something better than that.

Bill Cosby in 2004 put his enormous star power to good use, in my view, by calling attention to the role that poor people need to play in taking charge of their own social and economic destinies. But they can't do it alone.

Cosby's launched a city-to-city crusade to recharge achievement-oriented values -- beginning with hard work, strong families and delayed gratification. His effort received a lot less attention than his initial tough-love sermon did. But those are values that make the melting pot work.

Available at Amazon.com:

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The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

Courage Grows Strong at the Wound

The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy

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Vanilla Cities, Chocolate Suburbs