stratford e15-most cosmopolitan place in the history of humankind

scottdisco

rip this joint please
heh.

wow.

hmm.

oh Vietnam oh.

oh, Pearsall, you may be interested to know of a few things i learnt last night off the lass.

an ex-CEO of the organisation my girl works for - this is quite a long time ago i think, but still - a white woman, married an African-American man and in their predominately white neighbourhood on the South Side, they were the first mixed-race couple in that neighbourhood, apparently.

btw, her mate T is about to start courting with a white guy, so that's one "b/w couple" in our particular 'hood :)

my girl lived in Atlanta for a year going through school and although she acknowledges she was in a fairly/mainly white neighbourhood (and also a pretty nice one, i believe), she encountered/was aware of far more racism towards African-Americans in Atlanta than she is up here. but she admits she may have got a partial picture.
etc.
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
One thing with the South is that racial issues are out in the open - in newspapers, in people's discussions - in a way they aren't in the North (where the tendency, at least among whites, is to brush these issues under the carpet).

Anyways, I just found the article I was talking about before, about residential segregation in New York City. Worth a read, although unfortunately the graphics no longer seem to work.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
oh, OK, NYC is actually more segregated (re. our previous discussions) than the Chi!

thank you for posting that so much, it's very interesting.

i'm thinking the person who wrote the Lonely Planet Condensed guide to Chicago is more on-point re. these issues, since he mentions and basically apologises for the whole segregation thing early doors in the book. i've read the same book for New York and there's no such thing mentioned there, just praise for the city's diversity. anyway, irrelevant tittle-tattle. :)

i'll take your word on the whole north/south thing, but i hope you don't mind if i don't pass them through to the mrs. i'd be willing to wager that Chicago itself (which is the only place my girl referenced in relation to Atlanta) is a fairly ol' open-minded town, on all sorts of issues to do with race and class, and, er, lots of things blahblahblah.
now, large towns like Atlanta in relation to small-town Iowa or rural Wisconsin, maybe that's a different story...

i wonder what the cities in the USA that have the most miscegenation are, specifically kids with black and African-American, and white American parents. clearly - can we assume? - New York isn't on that list.
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
scottdisco said:
i'll take your word on the whole north/south thing, but i hope you don't mind if i don't pass them through to the mrs. i'd be willing to wager that Chicago itself (which is the only place my girl referenced in relation to Atlanta) is a fairly ol' open-minded town, on all sorts of issues to do with race and class, and, er, lots of things blahblahblah.

Oh, what I meant was not necessarily that the South is more open-minded than the North (and I guess I should really say when I say the North I can only really talk about the Northeast), merely that it is an issue that is out in the open more than around New York. Certainly when I've been down to Georgia to see my grandparents the main Atlanta paper seems to be more frank (both in editorial and in the letters) in its treatment of black/white issues than papers I've seen in the Northeast. Perhaps the greater variety of the population of the Northeast than the Deep South plays some role as well? Although the Hispanic population of Georgia and the Carolinas has grown at a staggering pace in the last fifteen years, it's still quite small compared to the black/white populations.

i wonder what the cities in the USA that have the most miscegenation are, specifically kids with black and African-American, and white American parents. clearly - can we assume? - New York isn't on that list.

I'd imagine military bases, actually, as the Armed Forces (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force) are the most racially integrated part of American society.
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
Actually, this topic reminds me of a book I read in the summer called A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. One of the places he talked about in the book was Oak Park, Illinois. I don't know if you are familiar with it?

Here's a quote:
Few towns in America spend much energy managing diversity. One that does is Oak Park, the enclave of integration adjoining the predominantly black slum of Chicago's West Side. For a quarter of a century, Oak Park has worked assiduously to maintain its racial mixture, to defuse internal tensions, and to guard against the segregation and decay that have festered next door. To cross Audtin Boulevard, Oak Park's border with Chicago, is to move between what America might have been and what America has become.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
Pearsall:
>Certainly when I've been down to Georgia to see my grandparents the main Atlanta paper seems to be more frank (both in editorial and in >the letters) in its treatment of black/white issues than papers I've seen in the Northeast

oh yes right, fair enough, sorry yeah.

yeah perhaps you are on to something with your surmisations about Georgia and the Carolinas, btw.

>I'd imagine military bases, actually, as the Armed Forces (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force) are the most racially integrated part of American >society.

really?
ah right.

i wonder though if we took my original query and applied it to just regular - as it were - cities in the USA, i wonder what would be atop any 'list'.

iirc Anchorage might be there.

>One of the places he talked about in the book was Oak Park, Illinois. I don't know if you are familiar with it?

yes indeed. and i genuinely didn't know that, but it sounds plausible, so thanks for sharing. Oak Park is essentially in Chicago, yeah, it's right next door (these clear-cut lines - i guess to do with taxes and zoning and whatnot - between zip codes and where the city ends and a 'suburb' begins in the USA seem a little more pronounced than things in the UK, but that's just me i think).

briefly (seems you like my travel guide hat ;) ):
Oak Park is eight miles left of the Loop as the crow flies, probably best way to get there is take the Green Line el. it's a nice affluent place, certainly quite different to some of the West Side further east.
but basically you might be interested to know its famed for two reasons, as it were.

firstly, this is where Frank Lloyd Wright "hit his stride": there's his house here, a lot of buildings he designed are here, he left a Chicago practice after a tiff and came to do business in Oak Park. he left it still quite a young man but the streets of Oak Park are like World Heritage or something i swear, just wondering through, marvelling at all these sublime Prairie Style etc. creations.
so yeah, that's nice.

the other really famous person associated with Oak Park is that it was Hemingway's birthplace.
he left early, i suppose, and i don't believe it was ever really a big thing with him (i could be wrong, having never read any Hemingway auto or biogs) so you could say, that - i guess, like that one horse town that Mark Twain scurried away from at a young age - on the subject of his hometown, Hemingway voted with his feet.

but yeah, that's Oak Park, in a nutshell.

never knew that about it.
interesting.
 
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