<< BackEditor's Note
Welcome to the Neighborhood
I had an epiphany one recent day, one of those moments whose jolt is as uncomfortable as it is enlightening. I was exhausted from a long day grappling with the topic of this issue’s cover story, about the racial segregation of Twin Cities public schools. This was followed by a slow commute home, thanks to ongoing snowfall, and then a delay at the grocery store where I intended to make a quick stop.
Most of my neighbors seemed to have had the same plan. I got into a long checkout line and rested my forearms on the cart handle, zoning out to the beeps of barcodes being scanned. After a few minutes I was brought back to the present when I sensed that someone was watching me. I looked up at a little boy, about 4 or 5 years old, perched in the child’s seat a couple carts ahead of me, his legs dangling through the holes cut out beneath the handle.
He sat there watching me and I gazed back, his parents unloading items from their cart onto the conveyor belt and oblivious to our staring contest. The boy had black hair and deep brown eyes and skin much darker than mine. I didn’t have to look around the store to know that maybe half the people in it were nonwhite. My husband and I live in a Twin Cities neighborhood whose population hovers at around 50 percent white and 50 percent Latino, African American, Asian American, and Native American. I thought about how much I like our neighborhood, largely because of its diversity. I smiled at the little guy, so quiet and observant.
The boy’s parents conversed over the cart in a language foreign to me and passed cash and coupons between them. I wondered how many languages this boy might grow up speaking and thought about how fortunate he’d be to add one or two more, in addition to English, when he went to school. Or maybe he was already in kindergarten, I thought, and immediately wondered whether his school was integrated, preoccupied as I was with the matter.
I smiled again at the boy, trying to convey, I suppose, that I was a nice white lady, someone who wants to live in this area, who values diversity and welcomes it—and him and his family—in my neighborhood.
He stared back, clearly not comprehending that he required a welcome to the neighborhood from a nice white lady. The lights in the store appeared to flicker when I felt the zap of illumination. The boy’s expression seemed to say that, contrary to my view, this is his neighborhood and his store and, what’s more, that he’s ahead of me in line. Then one of his parents tugged on the front of the cart and wheeled him from my view.
Arriving home at last, I felt disoriented, like I’d emerged from the sleeping car after a transcontinental rail trip only to discover that I’d accidentally boarded the eastbound, not the westbound, train the day before. What had happened back at the store? I replayed what had run through my mind during that silent exchange with the little boy.
I did value diversity, right? Yes, I knew I did.
I like living in this racially diverse area, don’t I? Yes, very much.
Had I really seen this as my neighborhood? And did I truly think that nice white people were the welcoming committee?
Apparently so.
I don’t know where that view came from exactly, but at least now I know that it had been lurking there. And, like the issue of what to do about segregated schools, it helps to talk about it.
Shelly Fling may be reached at fling003@umn.edu.