Blogging Social Difference: Week 9

For Thanksgiving, I went to my grandparents' house in Diamond Bar, CA, which is on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County. They moved to Diamond Bar in the late 1960s. My grandpa tells me how many fewer houses there were at the time. He talks about the hills and how empty they used to be, compared to now when they are covered in tract houses. Their neighborhood is full of suburban houses that you might picture from the 1960s or 70s - generally ranch style homes. I suppose that as the desire to live in the suburbs grew, so did the number of houses and their concentration in the area.



At dinner my grandma (who is fairly conservative and was raised on a farm) mentioned how "we" are the minority now. What she was referring to is the ratio of Asian Americans to white Americans in Diamond Bar. And it's true. The population of the city is now overwhlemingly Asain. According to city-data.com, the city is 52% Asian and only 21.3% white. That site also says that the average median household income is $88,598, which is pretty far above the average for the state of California. This tells us that when looking at the axes of difference we talked about in lecture, we really do have to separate race from class. Diamond Bar is a perfect case of this. Clearly, people are well-off here and it's majority population is considered a minority on a national level.

I think the fact that my grandma brought this up shows that she's from a different time. Growing up, she was in a place where whites were a majority and minority populations were usually synonymous with a lower class. It's probably a little strange for white people of her generation who grew up in the U.S. to see the racial dynamics of their communities shift, even though they (or they're parents or grandparents) likely immigrated to America, too.