White Men Can't Hide

The government recently reported that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians outnumber non-Hispanic whites in one out of ten counties and parishes (in deference to Louisiana) in the United States. Sure enough, I've been hearing of white people in my home county of Essex in New Jersey (having long since become one of those minority-majority counties) vowing to move to where there are fewer and hopefully no minority groups. Hello, my fellow Caucasians, wake up and smell the demographics - you are going to become a minority group!

White people talk about traditional values a lot, but one thing I've always believed is that two traditional values are respecting where you live - unless your heart is elsewhere, so move somewhere else but respect wherever you choose to put roots down - and loving your neighbor. Isn't this white flight thing getting silly? First we left whole cities, then whole counties, now whole major metropolitan areas and possibly whole states? What good is avoiding brown people when you end up avoiding a whole lot of everything else? The New York, Boston, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas in the Northeast are some of the most socioculturally sophisticated areas in the country, Ditto San Francisco, Chicago, and other increasingly multiracial cities I could mention. And white people, in their haste to get away from so-called minorities, would actually prefer to live in uncivilized places like Boise, Wichita, or Bismarck, North Dakota and shut themselves off from decent restaurants, theater, and a good foreign film house just to avoid contact with people named Quashana, Carlos, or Lei-Ching? What's wrong with my European-American brethren?

Oh yeah, it's worth repeating that I, white and male as I am (I listen to Rush - the band, not the Limbaugh), have four ladyfriends to speak of. One is Asian, another is black, another is Puerto Rican, and the fourth - my Britgirl pal Therisa - is an immigrant! (Yes, she's white, but these days just being an immigrant in this country, even if you're from the mother country of Great Britain, is enough to make you seem dangerous in the eyes of us pale-faced native-born.) And since I brought up Rush, let me quote their 1981 song "Witch Hunt:"

"Quick to judge, slow to understand, ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand."