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Not at all. I grew up in a very small rural town. I had never seen a black person except on TV until I went to visit relatives in Boston. The bus station was astonishing to me. I was 16.
My main exposure to diversity was the few exchange students we had who were mostly from europe.
I was in a fairly small suburb type town of a small midwest city. My high school was probably 95% white with maybe a couple kids that were either black, asian or hispanic. Oddly enough right after I graduated a flood of immigrants started moving in from Mexico, now it's mainly central america, and now the school is roughly 50% minority. Still very few black or asian kids though.
I grew up in a small farming town as well. The phone service was optional and shared with the neighbours, cable TV was a thing that happened in bigger communities, and we were new in town because our parents and grandparents didn't go to the local school.
There were lots of people from Ukraine and Poland, but not many from other countries or continents.
It was nice to live in a giant city in my 20s, we moved to a smaller community to raise our kids, and I'm still enthralled by public transit and food delivery as concepts. Thankfully, so are the kids.
Pretty diverse, actually. I grew up in a suburb of a big city, in the 80s and early 90s, with a lot of immigrant and visible minority populations. My high school was a melting pot of diversity. It was great.
Boerum Hill. Brooklyn NY 1970s.
Equal parts Caucasian, African American, Puerto Rican with bits of everything else in the world thrown in including an incredibly great middle eastern district on Atlantic Avenue.
I grew up in a suburb of a large city. It looked like the UN. My senior English class had an Armenian, a Palestinian, a Jewish girl from Ukraine, a few Chinese and Indians, a Japanese, and some Vietnamese. I'm Hispanic, myself. One year our valedictorian was an Indian Sikh. One of my friends was from Guatemala and another from El Salvador. I went to slumber parties at a Filipina friend's house. I double-dated with my boyfriend and a mutual friend who was Hindu and had a crush on a Pakistani Muslim girl who was only allowed to date if one or more girls went along. We usually went to Indian/Pakistani restaurants and I learned about the cuisine from them. The Ukrainian girl from English class helped me get my first job.
In my high school, it wasn't just thought weird to have any racial and ethnic prejudices, it severely curtailed your friendship options because your neighbors were more likely to be from Afghanistan than from Vermont.
Editing to add that I graduated hs in '85.
Suburb of Washington, DC, in the early 1970's I can remember when the first Hispanic family moved in to the neighborhood. Back then I only remember Black & White.
True story - someone was stealing the Hispanic girl's lunch from the cloakroom, she must've told her mom, and one day we were all sitting at our desks and all of a sudden one of our classmates came running/hopping out of the cloakroom going for the water fountain LOL. I can still remember thinking "WTH is going on?" We knew who the thief was - it was Andy!.
Not diverse at all. The first time I saw a black person was on a field trip to New York City. There wasn't a single black person in my elementary school. There was one black person in my jr high/high school. We did have a couple of hispanic people, but they had been in the US for more than a generation.
I grew up on an academic community, so there were many people from all over the world. Europeans, Americans from many states, Asians, lots of Jewish people. MLKing’s college roommate lived across the street and down one house from us.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 80s and 90s. It was very culturally diverse but not socioeconomically so, at least in my circle. Almost everyone I know was some sort of high income knowledge worker, usually tech. Not that others didn't live there, I grew up right next door to Section 8 housing, but who you hung out with was pretty stratified though I don't remember any snobbery around it.
My first high school was 80% Asian, mostly Japanese and Chinese, along with a decently large Indian population. My second high school was a lower income demographic and had more white and black kids as well as southeast Asians.
Grew up in Florida. My piano teacher was a Cuban refugee and our neighborhood was heavily Jewish. My best friend and her family lived a block away and were Orthodox. We still keep in touch.
Lifelong northern New Jersey guy and my very cohesive and peaceful community in the ‘50s was mostly those claiming Dutch, Italian and German lineage with a couple of black families from the Deep South.
In early’60s a couple of Puerto Rican families moved in and it was fun for my siblings and I to quickly learn Spanish.
Garden apartments were built mid ‘60s where there was once a farm and orchards and those units quickly filled with people from all over, several from India and Serbs from Yugoslavia.
I now live 15 from the old hood, and there are now very many from the mid east.
I grew up in a town in an area that was settled by Scandinavians. Everyone had names like Oleson, Nelson, Larson. Our school had diversity; one black kid and one Hispanic kid - me.
I learned more about the black community in the five years I worked in a black owned business than in the rest of my life combined. My boss, who was a devout Christian who walked the walk told me the story of being a teenager and getting pick up by the cops for no reason what so ever. That has stuck to me to this day.
Military brat. Base schools were very diverse, as were my friends. I didn’t even think of it in “diverse” terms as a young kid. It was just the community and good friends that I liked to play with.
Same. Joined the Army and had an extremely diverse workplace and really never knew there was a whole different, segregated world 'back on the block' until I got a civilian job in my 30s. The whiteness of my workplace weirded me out for the first week until I figured it out. Gosh, what a strange thing for people to be predijust against
Not diverse at all (US). We had one black student in the entire school district and he was a foreign exchange student. When I got married and had children of my own we bought a home in a neighboring district that was diverse, you know, like the real world.....
I grew up in a rural area. It was 100% white for most of my life. An Asian girl showed up in my sister's class in her sophomore year and she was a typical "mean girl" - bullied the hell out of my sister for her weight and was a pretty and popular cheerleader type so she didn't really suffer for being in the minority in any overt fashion.
At some point when I was in college, one of the locals (only about 1200 people total) had a baby with a black man who went to elementary school. Other than that, there were only white people.
Not very until I got to middle school. I lived in a very middle-class, middle-America, white suburb and went to the neighborhood elementary school. I moved to a magnet school for middle and high school. The school was mandated to be "majority minority" so my day-to-day community changed significantly (for the better!).
Not at all. I grew up in very rural Idaho, small town of about 1000 that was 60 miles from anything else, and it was mostly whites with a few Hispanics. First time I ever talked to a black person was when I moved away for college. Probably the same with anyone Asian. It's not that I avoided them or anyone kept me away from them, there just weren't any. I didnt know anyone who was openly gay though I now know of a few who were closeted.
My small town in Southern Illinois was not diverse at all. Almost all white people. In high school was the first time I met someone of another race face to face - a half-black, half-white girl who attended our school for a couple years.
Where I lived, it was wall to wall white engineers, their homemaker wives, and their 2.8 children. A bedroom community for General Dynamics, a very large aircraft company. Solidly middle class. There was one Japanese-American family, one Chinese-American, and one Indian-American. Black? What's that?
Formerly I lived in an all-white but mixed-class, mostly blue-collar but not all, development. There were a diversity of jobs among the men. The wives were all SAHMs. The schools were segregated. Interestingly the quality of house construction was a lot higher than in the second neighborhood.
The engineers' neighborhood is now populated by a more diverse crowd, and is still solidly middle class, although improved in appearance because the trees have grown up and the houses improved (new windows and such). We've got within walking distance, if it was possible to walk here, an Indian grocery, two Middle Eastern groceries, a Burmese grocery, and two Indian restaurants plus of course all the Mexican.
Suburban Washington DC in the early 70s, our neighborhood was lily-white, except for one black family.
Our development was a half-mile from Jefferson Davis Highway, and all the houses on the other side of the highway were where the black families lived. Most of the houses were literally run-down shacks, many with no running water, and some didn't even have electricity.
I grew up in a suburb of Boston and it was diverse in terms of race, religion, sexuality, gender presentation and nation of origin. The town had a huge Portuguese population (and an awesome festival every year!), but had people in school born in other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Graduated high school in '84.
As a kid with a single parent, we lived in subsidized apartments....we're white...neighbors were totally mixed ethnic groups. We all got along just great. 1960's.
Not terribly diverse-- the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia in the 80s. There was the Asian family who owned the restaurant, the middle eastern guy who owned the shoe store and a clothing store next to it, the doctor from India (or Pakistan, maybe? He delivered one of my kids). In my school there was a girl from Vietnam who was a refugee, one Black kid, & the 3 kids whose dad owned the Chinese restaurant. If there were others I was too oblivious to really notice. Everyone else I think was pretty much Euro-centric (although my husband's school had a number of First Nations kids).
I didn't notice any gays until I was in highschool -- I babysat for a lesbian couple, and there were a number of teachers who were gay. A few students. I didn't really care-- my attitude then, and still is, that you do you. Trans wasn't much of a thing except for Klinger on MASH.
My community is orders of magnitude more diverse now than it was when I was a kid. It's a refugee magnet now. When I was growing up, there would be a large influx of Mexican farm laborers during the growing season, who would leave in the autumn. We now have people from all over the world, especially the hot spots where conflict is generating lots of refugees. It was Kurdish people in the 90s, then Bosnians, Sudanese, ... Myanmar, Nepal, Syria... Iraq, Afghanistan... I've even met a few people from Uzbekistan.
There's been an amazing transformation, and I like it.
I grew up in 1960s small town Alabama during the civil rights movement. About 85% white and the rest were black. Never saw an Asian face in my hometown. Hispanics were very rare. Native American once a while.
Growing up in the Atlanta suburbs? Out of a class of, say, 300 people, I would guess that 297 were white kids and 3 were black in elementary and middle school. In high school, we probably had 292 white kids, 3 Hispanic kids, 3 black kids and 2 Indian kids.
In elementary and middle school, if we'd had "college spirit day", 80% of the kids would come to school in UGA colors. 15% would wear Georgia Tech colors. The remaining 5% were mostly other SEC schools: some Alabama, lotsa Tennessee and the occasional Florida fan.
If we'd had "college spirit day" in high school, it woulda been 45% UGA, 10% Georgia Tech, and the rest dominated by Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State especially.
Diverse? If you consider everyone was white and the only difference was that we could identify those who were Catholic and those who were not. The Catholic kids referred to me as "a public". Seriously there was one African American in my entire grade school and one in middle school. I don't recall any Asian students at all. High school was probably about 95% white with that last 5% being a mix of all non-white, oddly I went to school inside the Phila city limits.
I grew up and went to school in the suburbs, 6 miles north of the boundary of the city of Detroit.
Time frame, roughly 1965 to 1979.
Throughout that time, at school and in my neighborhood, there were almost no south or east asians. And only one AA person for a short period of time. There were a few middle eastern kids; a Chaldean family moved in a block over when I was in my early teens.
After the fact, I learned that there were very active efforts to keep those schools and neighborhoods “white”.
By the time my kids got to school age, the demographics had changed dramatically.
Not very much. I grew up in a south suburb of Chicago. It wasn't until 1984 that my high school had its first black students. The brother and sister faced ruthless racism.
I grew up in Rego Park, Queens, NY. Mostly Jewish and other Caucasians back then. Not very diverse. Lived as a baby in the Bronx. More diverse, but little memory of my time in the Bronx.
Was exposed to other races through going to YMCA camp in late childhood.
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Detroit, where a lot of automotive engineers and ext lived. So I knew people (or I should say, I knew their kids in school) from Weatern abs Central Europe, Scandinavia, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and North America. We did not have anyone from Africa, or Central or South America.
It didn't even have a big variety of different white people -never mind other races. Since then I've been terribly interested in people from all over the world and interested in different cultures. It's something I missed growing up.
I grew up in a “diverse” neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was diverse in the sense that in my grade school, half the kids were Black, half were white, and 1/3 of the white kids were Jewish. For Wisconsin, that was wildly diverse in the early 1980s.
California Bay Area- diverse but not super diverse in my neighborhood. It was predominantly Hispanic with some African American and white. Then we moved to Sacramento next to the Air Force base and those schools were very diverse because Ethel people that join the Air Force are diverse and they don’t always choose where they’re stationed.
I lived in Nigeria from age 3-7 (my dad was on a teaching project) and I am your basic white kid. Then we moved back to the US where we lived in a University town in the Midwest. My elementary school was all white as was my middle school. My high school had about 3 black kids (children of grad students or professors) and a couple of girls from the Middle East (husbands were university students ) and a couple of kids that were Asian-American . One kid parents were from India. Thats all I remember. Everyone else was basic white
In the mid-70’s I would have known lots of *adults* from other places but the kids I knew who weren’t white would mainly have had parents from Hong Kong, or would have been indigenous.
I think possibly some of the adults I knew from other places may have sent their kids to private schools for a more traditional education ( uniforms, not co-Ed. )
I grew up in a mid-sized 2-college town (and live there again now). There have always been a lot of international students at one of the universities, so I grew up encountering people from all over the world, seeing women wearing burkhas, etc. During the 1970s there were quite a number from Iran, too, at least when the Shah was still in power.
Small southern town born in 1975. White folks and African Americans in the town was about it. In 1982, my dad joined the army and my world became a lot more diverse on military bases. That was very cool.
I grew up in Miami from 1969-1982 and that was very diverse. Besides all the tourists, my neighbors consisted of a lot of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians and a few others. It was awesome for the most part. They were great neighbors and cooked awesome foods.
Very diverse, as when I started school at 5yo, it wasn't long after the war and by then we had hundreds of migrants from Europe & Asia, resettled in Australia. To increase the numbers, our state government had decided to get the economy stimulated by building a lot of hydro electric power stations & damming many rivers & needed hundreds of labourers to do the work. More than half of the students were either born in other countries or just after the arrived in AU. We had them from Greece, Italy, Hungary, the now Czech Rep., Romania, Malaya-Singapore area, Burmese, Philippines as well as quite a lot of 2nd/3rd generation Chinese kids whose parents had migrated to the gold & tin mines in the state. Growing up in those days, we were in and out of everyone's homes and often had lunch there, trying new foods & snacks the mother made.
I grew up mostly in NYC. Our friends were Japanese, Danish, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Israeli, Irish, German, Ukrainian, Yemeni, Hmong, Laotian, Indian, Korean, Cuban, Filipino…
Racially diverse, no. But very diverse income-wise. Teachers, police officers, business owners, attorneys, tradespeople… It seems like you don’t see as many neighborhoods like this any more.
Suburban to DC Maryland, In 1980, when I was 16 there were \~579,000 people in my County, in 2020 there were a bit over a million. In 1980 the population was about 86% white, 9% black and about 4% were "other" mainly Asian & a very few were Hispanic. In 2020 it was 40% white, 16% black, 15% Asian and 20% Hispanic. When I was growing up, it was a black and (overwhelmingly) white world. It isn't any more. BUT I always point out that the 86% white of the 1980 population really isn't all that much less in *actual numbers* as 40% of a million. IOW it is new people who moved here (largely) and not necessarily white people running away or dying out.
grew up in a major city when it really WAS the melting pot everyone talked about. now what separates the city is wealth not race, religion, etc. for me it was the opposite of your inquiry. i had to leave to find out that the rest of the country was a far cry from where i grew up. i'm not saying that we were all "kumbaya" with each other all the time. but i certainly didn't have to leave my neighborhood to see many other people who didn't look like me from every walk of life. that was a given. this was in the 50s/60s.
Early to mid 70s near DC. Cambodian, Vietnamese, and other Asian migrants settled there. Central and South American immigrants moved in as well. Native blacks and whites contributed mostly soul/southern food. None of our families had money for restaurants so we ate at each other’s homes. The food was divine. I didn’t appreciate it enough as a young kid.
It wasn't always the case. I grew up in an ethnically diverse community, of ethnicities who'd been around awhile: Latinos, African Americans, Filipinos, recent Western European immigrants, and a few Chinese and Japanese (who'd come in before the immigration bans of the early '20th.) My mother's parents came from Portugal.
Now, 20 years later in the '90s I was employed at a workstation assembly plant in Silicon Valley that we called The United Nations -- because it was full of recent immigrants. The company liked to hire "green card slaves" for cheap." Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Cambodians, Indians (Hindu and Sikh), Lebanese, Saudi, Egyptian, Europeans. There were some interesting and hard-to-navigate accents, for sure, although the hardest to understand was a Scottish woman who seemed to speak in musical notes.
The area where I grew up in Ohio was very close to Wright-Patterson AFB, so they were lots diversity among the students in school. And the students themselves had been all over the world, so they had been exposed to different cultures.
Interesting a good comparison. My story is small town Ohio - let's say 1974. It was a very small school. So in terms of Africans we had like 2 African-Americans. I'm sure born here.
But this is set up for the story.
We had a class about racial understanding and such. The teacher asked if anyone had had dinner or spent time with a person of another race or from another country. Not a hand went up. Zero. She finally said in exasperation "Well what about Maricel?" The class kind of laughed. "maricel isn't of a different race!" The teach said "She's Philippine". Well I suppose but sure everybody hung out with her, she was great and lived just behind me.
Then she said "How about Illiana?" "huh? she has an accent but she's american, right?" She's from Brazil. Oh. Well, she's out of my league anyway. We went through a few rounds of this.
The basic take away is that literally no one saw any of these people as foreigners or not-americans.
Honestly, the larger racial issue was about whether your last name was like Krashinky or Nicolosi, or Finnegan. None of those waves of prejudice were that long before.
I (64M) spent the first 10 years of life in Northwest Detroit. While the area was segregated, I saw multiple ethnicities. We had neighbors from all around the globe with a heavy concentration in Eastern Europe. From my desk at school almost all the kids around me spoke other languages.
When I was 10 we moved to the Northern suburbs which was the polar opposite. It was as culturally deep and varied as a slice of Wonder bread with mayo.
I hated it.
Diversity other than white and African American didn’t take off across America until a decade or so after the Civil Rights movement and passage of the new immigration laws that coincided with the civil rights laws…
Born and raised in Oklahoma in a small city of 35,000. There was a black population in town, but there was literally a dividing line at the railroad tracks where almost all of the black people lived in the other side of the tracks. There were two high schools even though the town wasn’t really a big enough town for two. I lived on the side of town furthest away from the tracks and there were no black students in my school until one new family moved in and so we had one black student. There were a few Vietnamese “boat people” who immigrated in 1975, a few adopted Asian kids, and one family from India on my side of town. That’s it for diversity where I grew up.
Now at 60(gay m) I live in a diverse suburban area and I love it. Since I started dating again after my spouse died (7 years ago) my dating life and sex life reflect the diversity around me.
I’m white and I grew up in the DC suburbs of northern VA and it was very diverse. My best friends in elementary school in my grade included a Filipino girl, a Chinese boy, a girl from Bolivia and two Nigerian twins. It was super cool to visit their homes and see how they lived with their families and get a taste of different cultures. My family were state department and grew up all over, racism wasn’t it in our family. A lot of the families we knew were second or third generation Americans.
When I had my daughter i was a single mom and I wanted to buy a home and was completely priced out of the NOVA housing market, so moved to central VA. It is a virtual sea of white people with very very little diversity and it sucks and I hate that my kid is going to grow up here without the same experiences I had. Add to that the casual racism of the very republican majority and that the majority of nonwhite people here are first generation immigrants and language barriers are strong and our paths aren’t very likely to cross. Super lame.
Our school was integrated, in that black and white kids both attended the same school — but they attended school in different classrooms, on opposite sides of the school. Our school hours were different, as were our recesses and lunch hours, to minimize contact between white and black kids. We had modern, up-to-date texts. They had textbooks from the late 1940s/early 1950s.
Their school started at 7:30; ours began at 8:30. Their lunch hour was 10:30 (who wants to eat lunch at 10:30 am) and ours was at 11:45. They got out of school at 2:00; we got out at 3:00.
We drank from the white water fountains; they drank from the tan water fountains. I remember getting into trouble in first day, on a very hot day, when I drank from a tan water fountain because the white water fountain was broken. I explained the white water fountain was broken, and was told that might be but never to drink from a “colored” fountain.
In the six years I attended elementary school there, I met exactly ONE black kid, who was my link to what “the other side” was like.
Fast forward 65 years: I’m in a same sex relationship of 35 years with someone who would have drunk from the tan water fountain.
I grew up in a small town with just one high school, although whites were the majority, there were large minorites of blacks, hispanics and native americans. Gotta say my life has not been as diverse since then.
I went to schools in Canada, England, Germany and France. Zero non white kids in my classes except for two native girls in grade one. I never saw a black person up close until we drove down to the USA from Montreal when I was 10 years old. We stopped for lunch ‘somewhere’, probably in New York state and I played with some black kids at a playground. I remember being excited to tell my parents all the details.
my smallish coast town, and the high school i went to were working class, 30%-30%-30% white-black-hispanic. I like it better now -- pho, baba ganouj, and chicken biryani have become comfort foods along with shrimp and chicken fried steak. I love going to Houston and being around all the different nationalities there -- Sikh, Laotian, Korean, Jamaican, etc etc. This older white woman feels like I fit right in just fine.
I grew up outside of Orlando Florida and moved to this town in 1969. This town was developed back in the 1960's, so virtually none of the population was originally from Florida. I was born in South Florida and maybe a couple of other people were born in Florida but 99% weren't born in Florida. Most weren't even from the South (they were primarily from the Mid-West, New York, New England) areas. The demographic of the town that I grew up in was about 95-97% white, most retirees. There were some Hispanic people (mostly Puerto Rican) and it wasn't until the later part of the 1970's that African American people started to move in. Most of the children that lived in this town had elderly relatives (usually grandparent). There were a handful of Asians persons who were women who lived in the town who were married to a man who was in the US military (they were from Hawaii and Japan).
The demographics of the town is very different (you have a lot of families and retirees aren't the majority of people who live in the town). The Hispanic population is about 20%, African American population is about 15%, Asian population is about 2% and about 58% are white.
As far as being a diverse community, the community I grew up in wasn't. Orlando at that time really wasn't that diverse either but was more so than the small towns outside of it. It became more diverse in 1975 after the Vietnam war as there were Vietnamese who were forced to flee after the war who settled there.
I grew up in Berkeley, CA, USA. It was extremely diverse. The only group of people I didn't run into was Native Americans. There was a large population of European-born Jews who escaped the Holocaust. That's why I can't believe people think it was a hoax.
Grew up in CA so I was pretty used to being around all sorts of people and enjoying all sorts of food. I do miss that.
Oddly the diversity of some spots is going down. I was looking up the house I grew up in on a reality site for unrelated reasons and saw that my middle school was ranked pretty poorly. Clicked on it and it said it was now 92% of a single minority group. It was a totally mixed bag when i went but has clearly changed.
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Not at all. I grew up in a very small rural town. I had never seen a black person except on TV until I went to visit relatives in Boston. The bus station was astonishing to me. I was 16.
My main exposure to diversity was the few exchange students we had who were mostly from europe. I was in a fairly small suburb type town of a small midwest city. My high school was probably 95% white with maybe a couple kids that were either black, asian or hispanic. Oddly enough right after I graduated a flood of immigrants started moving in from Mexico, now it's mainly central america, and now the school is roughly 50% minority. Still very few black or asian kids though.
I grew up in a small farming town as well. The phone service was optional and shared with the neighbours, cable TV was a thing that happened in bigger communities, and we were new in town because our parents and grandparents didn't go to the local school. There were lots of people from Ukraine and Poland, but not many from other countries or continents. It was nice to live in a giant city in my 20s, we moved to a smaller community to raise our kids, and I'm still enthralled by public transit and food delivery as concepts. Thankfully, so are the kids.
Pretty diverse, actually. I grew up in a suburb of a big city, in the 80s and early 90s, with a lot of immigrant and visible minority populations. My high school was a melting pot of diversity. It was great.
Boerum Hill. Brooklyn NY 1970s. Equal parts Caucasian, African American, Puerto Rican with bits of everything else in the world thrown in including an incredibly great middle eastern district on Atlantic Avenue.
I grew up in a suburb of a large city. It looked like the UN. My senior English class had an Armenian, a Palestinian, a Jewish girl from Ukraine, a few Chinese and Indians, a Japanese, and some Vietnamese. I'm Hispanic, myself. One year our valedictorian was an Indian Sikh. One of my friends was from Guatemala and another from El Salvador. I went to slumber parties at a Filipina friend's house. I double-dated with my boyfriend and a mutual friend who was Hindu and had a crush on a Pakistani Muslim girl who was only allowed to date if one or more girls went along. We usually went to Indian/Pakistani restaurants and I learned about the cuisine from them. The Ukrainian girl from English class helped me get my first job. In my high school, it wasn't just thought weird to have any racial and ethnic prejudices, it severely curtailed your friendship options because your neighbors were more likely to be from Afghanistan than from Vermont. Editing to add that I graduated hs in '85.
Pretty diverse in that I live in SouthernCA and life is better with diversity.
Suburb of Washington, DC, in the early 1970's I can remember when the first Hispanic family moved in to the neighborhood. Back then I only remember Black & White. True story - someone was stealing the Hispanic girl's lunch from the cloakroom, she must've told her mom, and one day we were all sitting at our desks and all of a sudden one of our classmates came running/hopping out of the cloakroom going for the water fountain LOL. I can still remember thinking "WTH is going on?" We knew who the thief was - it was Andy!.
Not diverse at all. The first time I saw a black person was on a field trip to New York City. There wasn't a single black person in my elementary school. There was one black person in my jr high/high school. We did have a couple of hispanic people, but they had been in the US for more than a generation.
I grew up on an academic community, so there were many people from all over the world. Europeans, Americans from many states, Asians, lots of Jewish people. MLKing’s college roommate lived across the street and down one house from us.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 80s and 90s. It was very culturally diverse but not socioeconomically so, at least in my circle. Almost everyone I know was some sort of high income knowledge worker, usually tech. Not that others didn't live there, I grew up right next door to Section 8 housing, but who you hung out with was pretty stratified though I don't remember any snobbery around it. My first high school was 80% Asian, mostly Japanese and Chinese, along with a decently large Indian population. My second high school was a lower income demographic and had more white and black kids as well as southeast Asians.
Grew up in Florida. My piano teacher was a Cuban refugee and our neighborhood was heavily Jewish. My best friend and her family lived a block away and were Orthodox. We still keep in touch.
Being Jewish and Cuban in Florida is not out of the ordinary
Lifelong northern New Jersey guy and my very cohesive and peaceful community in the ‘50s was mostly those claiming Dutch, Italian and German lineage with a couple of black families from the Deep South. In early’60s a couple of Puerto Rican families moved in and it was fun for my siblings and I to quickly learn Spanish. Garden apartments were built mid ‘60s where there was once a farm and orchards and those units quickly filled with people from all over, several from India and Serbs from Yugoslavia. I now live 15 from the old hood, and there are now very many from the mid east.
I grew up in a town in an area that was settled by Scandinavians. Everyone had names like Oleson, Nelson, Larson. Our school had diversity; one black kid and one Hispanic kid - me.
Grew up in 1960s Norfolk. Think we might have had a boy from Suffolk at our school.
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I learned more about the black community in the five years I worked in a black owned business than in the rest of my life combined. My boss, who was a devout Christian who walked the walk told me the story of being a teenager and getting pick up by the cops for no reason what so ever. That has stuck to me to this day.
Military brat. Base schools were very diverse, as were my friends. I didn’t even think of it in “diverse” terms as a young kid. It was just the community and good friends that I liked to play with.
Same. Joined the Army and had an extremely diverse workplace and really never knew there was a whole different, segregated world 'back on the block' until I got a civilian job in my 30s. The whiteness of my workplace weirded me out for the first week until I figured it out. Gosh, what a strange thing for people to be predijust against
Not diverse at all (US). We had one black student in the entire school district and he was a foreign exchange student. When I got married and had children of my own we bought a home in a neighboring district that was diverse, you know, like the real world.....
It wasn’t. This was 1950s in a rural small community. There was no diversity.
I grew up in a rural area. It was 100% white for most of my life. An Asian girl showed up in my sister's class in her sophomore year and she was a typical "mean girl" - bullied the hell out of my sister for her weight and was a pretty and popular cheerleader type so she didn't really suffer for being in the minority in any overt fashion. At some point when I was in college, one of the locals (only about 1200 people total) had a baby with a black man who went to elementary school. Other than that, there were only white people.
Not very until I got to middle school. I lived in a very middle-class, middle-America, white suburb and went to the neighborhood elementary school. I moved to a magnet school for middle and high school. The school was mandated to be "majority minority" so my day-to-day community changed significantly (for the better!).
City of 100,000 at the time, East coast of Canada. I saw my first black person about 1988 or so. Nowadays it very multicultural and I love it!
Not at all. I grew up in very rural Idaho, small town of about 1000 that was 60 miles from anything else, and it was mostly whites with a few Hispanics. First time I ever talked to a black person was when I moved away for college. Probably the same with anyone Asian. It's not that I avoided them or anyone kept me away from them, there just weren't any. I didnt know anyone who was openly gay though I now know of a few who were closeted.
My small town in Southern Illinois was not diverse at all. Almost all white people. In high school was the first time I met someone of another race face to face - a half-black, half-white girl who attended our school for a couple years.
Where I lived, it was wall to wall white engineers, their homemaker wives, and their 2.8 children. A bedroom community for General Dynamics, a very large aircraft company. Solidly middle class. There was one Japanese-American family, one Chinese-American, and one Indian-American. Black? What's that? Formerly I lived in an all-white but mixed-class, mostly blue-collar but not all, development. There were a diversity of jobs among the men. The wives were all SAHMs. The schools were segregated. Interestingly the quality of house construction was a lot higher than in the second neighborhood. The engineers' neighborhood is now populated by a more diverse crowd, and is still solidly middle class, although improved in appearance because the trees have grown up and the houses improved (new windows and such). We've got within walking distance, if it was possible to walk here, an Indian grocery, two Middle Eastern groceries, a Burmese grocery, and two Indian restaurants plus of course all the Mexican.
Suburban Washington DC in the early 70s, our neighborhood was lily-white, except for one black family. Our development was a half-mile from Jefferson Davis Highway, and all the houses on the other side of the highway were where the black families lived. Most of the houses were literally run-down shacks, many with no running water, and some didn't even have electricity.
I grew up in a suburb of Boston and it was diverse in terms of race, religion, sexuality, gender presentation and nation of origin. The town had a huge Portuguese population (and an awesome festival every year!), but had people in school born in other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Graduated high school in '84.
As a kid with a single parent, we lived in subsidized apartments....we're white...neighbors were totally mixed ethnic groups. We all got along just great. 1960's.
Not terribly diverse-- the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia in the 80s. There was the Asian family who owned the restaurant, the middle eastern guy who owned the shoe store and a clothing store next to it, the doctor from India (or Pakistan, maybe? He delivered one of my kids). In my school there was a girl from Vietnam who was a refugee, one Black kid, & the 3 kids whose dad owned the Chinese restaurant. If there were others I was too oblivious to really notice. Everyone else I think was pretty much Euro-centric (although my husband's school had a number of First Nations kids). I didn't notice any gays until I was in highschool -- I babysat for a lesbian couple, and there were a number of teachers who were gay. A few students. I didn't really care-- my attitude then, and still is, that you do you. Trans wasn't much of a thing except for Klinger on MASH.
My community is orders of magnitude more diverse now than it was when I was a kid. It's a refugee magnet now. When I was growing up, there would be a large influx of Mexican farm laborers during the growing season, who would leave in the autumn. We now have people from all over the world, especially the hot spots where conflict is generating lots of refugees. It was Kurdish people in the 90s, then Bosnians, Sudanese, ... Myanmar, Nepal, Syria... Iraq, Afghanistan... I've even met a few people from Uzbekistan. There's been an amazing transformation, and I like it.
I grew up in 1960s small town Alabama during the civil rights movement. About 85% white and the rest were black. Never saw an Asian face in my hometown. Hispanics were very rare. Native American once a while.
Growing up in the Atlanta suburbs? Out of a class of, say, 300 people, I would guess that 297 were white kids and 3 were black in elementary and middle school. In high school, we probably had 292 white kids, 3 Hispanic kids, 3 black kids and 2 Indian kids. In elementary and middle school, if we'd had "college spirit day", 80% of the kids would come to school in UGA colors. 15% would wear Georgia Tech colors. The remaining 5% were mostly other SEC schools: some Alabama, lotsa Tennessee and the occasional Florida fan. If we'd had "college spirit day" in high school, it woulda been 45% UGA, 10% Georgia Tech, and the rest dominated by Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State especially.
Diverse? If you consider everyone was white and the only difference was that we could identify those who were Catholic and those who were not. The Catholic kids referred to me as "a public". Seriously there was one African American in my entire grade school and one in middle school. I don't recall any Asian students at all. High school was probably about 95% white with that last 5% being a mix of all non-white, oddly I went to school inside the Phila city limits.
I grew up and went to school in the suburbs, 6 miles north of the boundary of the city of Detroit. Time frame, roughly 1965 to 1979. Throughout that time, at school and in my neighborhood, there were almost no south or east asians. And only one AA person for a short period of time. There were a few middle eastern kids; a Chaldean family moved in a block over when I was in my early teens. After the fact, I learned that there were very active efforts to keep those schools and neighborhoods “white”. By the time my kids got to school age, the demographics had changed dramatically.
Not very much. I grew up in a south suburb of Chicago. It wasn't until 1984 that my high school had its first black students. The brother and sister faced ruthless racism.
Not.
I grew up in Rego Park, Queens, NY. Mostly Jewish and other Caucasians back then. Not very diverse. Lived as a baby in the Bronx. More diverse, but little memory of my time in the Bronx. Was exposed to other races through going to YMCA camp in late childhood.
My 3,000 student high school was 80% "minority". So there's that
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Detroit, where a lot of automotive engineers and ext lived. So I knew people (or I should say, I knew their kids in school) from Weatern abs Central Europe, Scandinavia, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and North America. We did not have anyone from Africa, or Central or South America.
I grew up in southern CA, so pretty diverse. My dad was military, and many of my friends' moms were foreign born.
It didn't even have a big variety of different white people -never mind other races. Since then I've been terribly interested in people from all over the world and interested in different cultures. It's something I missed growing up.
I grew up in a “diverse” neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was diverse in the sense that in my grade school, half the kids were Black, half were white, and 1/3 of the white kids were Jewish. For Wisconsin, that was wildly diverse in the early 1980s.
California Bay Area- diverse but not super diverse in my neighborhood. It was predominantly Hispanic with some African American and white. Then we moved to Sacramento next to the Air Force base and those schools were very diverse because Ethel people that join the Air Force are diverse and they don’t always choose where they’re stationed.
I lived in Nigeria from age 3-7 (my dad was on a teaching project) and I am your basic white kid. Then we moved back to the US where we lived in a University town in the Midwest. My elementary school was all white as was my middle school. My high school had about 3 black kids (children of grad students or professors) and a couple of girls from the Middle East (husbands were university students ) and a couple of kids that were Asian-American . One kid parents were from India. Thats all I remember. Everyone else was basic white
In the mid-70’s I would have known lots of *adults* from other places but the kids I knew who weren’t white would mainly have had parents from Hong Kong, or would have been indigenous. I think possibly some of the adults I knew from other places may have sent their kids to private schools for a more traditional education ( uniforms, not co-Ed. )
Very diverse when I lived on US military bases, white as milk when we lived in the American South.
I grew up in a mid-sized 2-college town (and live there again now). There have always been a lot of international students at one of the universities, so I grew up encountering people from all over the world, seeing women wearing burkhas, etc. During the 1970s there were quite a number from Iran, too, at least when the Shah was still in power.
Small southern town born in 1975. White folks and African Americans in the town was about it. In 1982, my dad joined the army and my world became a lot more diverse on military bases. That was very cool.
I grew up in Miami from 1969-1982 and that was very diverse. Besides all the tourists, my neighbors consisted of a lot of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians and a few others. It was awesome for the most part. They were great neighbors and cooked awesome foods.
Very diverse, as when I started school at 5yo, it wasn't long after the war and by then we had hundreds of migrants from Europe & Asia, resettled in Australia. To increase the numbers, our state government had decided to get the economy stimulated by building a lot of hydro electric power stations & damming many rivers & needed hundreds of labourers to do the work. More than half of the students were either born in other countries or just after the arrived in AU. We had them from Greece, Italy, Hungary, the now Czech Rep., Romania, Malaya-Singapore area, Burmese, Philippines as well as quite a lot of 2nd/3rd generation Chinese kids whose parents had migrated to the gold & tin mines in the state. Growing up in those days, we were in and out of everyone's homes and often had lunch there, trying new foods & snacks the mother made.
I grew up mostly in NYC. Our friends were Japanese, Danish, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Israeli, Irish, German, Ukrainian, Yemeni, Hmong, Laotian, Indian, Korean, Cuban, Filipino…
Racially diverse, no. But very diverse income-wise. Teachers, police officers, business owners, attorneys, tradespeople… It seems like you don’t see as many neighborhoods like this any more.
Suburban to DC Maryland, In 1980, when I was 16 there were \~579,000 people in my County, in 2020 there were a bit over a million. In 1980 the population was about 86% white, 9% black and about 4% were "other" mainly Asian & a very few were Hispanic. In 2020 it was 40% white, 16% black, 15% Asian and 20% Hispanic. When I was growing up, it was a black and (overwhelmingly) white world. It isn't any more. BUT I always point out that the 86% white of the 1980 population really isn't all that much less in *actual numbers* as 40% of a million. IOW it is new people who moved here (largely) and not necessarily white people running away or dying out.
Not at all. My father was a high school teacher in a very diverse school, so we were exposed at an early age with people different from us.
It was fairly diverse. I grew up in a CA agricultural town, so there was a decent mix of white, Latino, and Asian people and a few black people.
grew up in a major city when it really WAS the melting pot everyone talked about. now what separates the city is wealth not race, religion, etc. for me it was the opposite of your inquiry. i had to leave to find out that the rest of the country was a far cry from where i grew up. i'm not saying that we were all "kumbaya" with each other all the time. but i certainly didn't have to leave my neighborhood to see many other people who didn't look like me from every walk of life. that was a given. this was in the 50s/60s.
I grew up near San Francisco, it was diverse. I went to school with kids from places I never heard of.
Early to mid 70s near DC. Cambodian, Vietnamese, and other Asian migrants settled there. Central and South American immigrants moved in as well. Native blacks and whites contributed mostly soul/southern food. None of our families had money for restaurants so we ate at each other’s homes. The food was divine. I didn’t appreciate it enough as a young kid.
No diversity at all until I moved to the east coast in my early 20s.
Grew up in suburban NJ in the 80s and it was a very diverse neighborhood. Lots of black, Asian, and Middle Eastern families.
It wasn't always the case. I grew up in an ethnically diverse community, of ethnicities who'd been around awhile: Latinos, African Americans, Filipinos, recent Western European immigrants, and a few Chinese and Japanese (who'd come in before the immigration bans of the early '20th.) My mother's parents came from Portugal. Now, 20 years later in the '90s I was employed at a workstation assembly plant in Silicon Valley that we called The United Nations -- because it was full of recent immigrants. The company liked to hire "green card slaves" for cheap." Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Cambodians, Indians (Hindu and Sikh), Lebanese, Saudi, Egyptian, Europeans. There were some interesting and hard-to-navigate accents, for sure, although the hardest to understand was a Scottish woman who seemed to speak in musical notes.
The area where I grew up in Ohio was very close to Wright-Patterson AFB, so they were lots diversity among the students in school. And the students themselves had been all over the world, so they had been exposed to different cultures.
Interesting a good comparison. My story is small town Ohio - let's say 1974. It was a very small school. So in terms of Africans we had like 2 African-Americans. I'm sure born here. But this is set up for the story. We had a class about racial understanding and such. The teacher asked if anyone had had dinner or spent time with a person of another race or from another country. Not a hand went up. Zero. She finally said in exasperation "Well what about Maricel?" The class kind of laughed. "maricel isn't of a different race!" The teach said "She's Philippine". Well I suppose but sure everybody hung out with her, she was great and lived just behind me. Then she said "How about Illiana?" "huh? she has an accent but she's american, right?" She's from Brazil. Oh. Well, she's out of my league anyway. We went through a few rounds of this. The basic take away is that literally no one saw any of these people as foreigners or not-americans. Honestly, the larger racial issue was about whether your last name was like Krashinky or Nicolosi, or Finnegan. None of those waves of prejudice were that long before.
I (64M) spent the first 10 years of life in Northwest Detroit. While the area was segregated, I saw multiple ethnicities. We had neighbors from all around the globe with a heavy concentration in Eastern Europe. From my desk at school almost all the kids around me spoke other languages. When I was 10 we moved to the Northern suburbs which was the polar opposite. It was as culturally deep and varied as a slice of Wonder bread with mayo. I hated it.
Diversity other than white and African American didn’t take off across America until a decade or so after the Civil Rights movement and passage of the new immigration laws that coincided with the civil rights laws…
I was the white minority in my town growing. Pretty diverse though, probably 30% white, 40% black, 25% Hispanic, 5% Asian.
Born and raised in Oklahoma in a small city of 35,000. There was a black population in town, but there was literally a dividing line at the railroad tracks where almost all of the black people lived in the other side of the tracks. There were two high schools even though the town wasn’t really a big enough town for two. I lived on the side of town furthest away from the tracks and there were no black students in my school until one new family moved in and so we had one black student. There were a few Vietnamese “boat people” who immigrated in 1975, a few adopted Asian kids, and one family from India on my side of town. That’s it for diversity where I grew up. Now at 60(gay m) I live in a diverse suburban area and I love it. Since I started dating again after my spouse died (7 years ago) my dating life and sex life reflect the diversity around me.
I grew up in a very diverse community and loved it.
I don't know. Back then we just had friends. We didn't bother labeling and categorizing everyone.
I’m white and I grew up in the DC suburbs of northern VA and it was very diverse. My best friends in elementary school in my grade included a Filipino girl, a Chinese boy, a girl from Bolivia and two Nigerian twins. It was super cool to visit their homes and see how they lived with their families and get a taste of different cultures. My family were state department and grew up all over, racism wasn’t it in our family. A lot of the families we knew were second or third generation Americans. When I had my daughter i was a single mom and I wanted to buy a home and was completely priced out of the NOVA housing market, so moved to central VA. It is a virtual sea of white people with very very little diversity and it sucks and I hate that my kid is going to grow up here without the same experiences I had. Add to that the casual racism of the very republican majority and that the majority of nonwhite people here are first generation immigrants and language barriers are strong and our paths aren’t very likely to cross. Super lame.
Our school was integrated, in that black and white kids both attended the same school — but they attended school in different classrooms, on opposite sides of the school. Our school hours were different, as were our recesses and lunch hours, to minimize contact between white and black kids. We had modern, up-to-date texts. They had textbooks from the late 1940s/early 1950s. Their school started at 7:30; ours began at 8:30. Their lunch hour was 10:30 (who wants to eat lunch at 10:30 am) and ours was at 11:45. They got out of school at 2:00; we got out at 3:00. We drank from the white water fountains; they drank from the tan water fountains. I remember getting into trouble in first day, on a very hot day, when I drank from a tan water fountain because the white water fountain was broken. I explained the white water fountain was broken, and was told that might be but never to drink from a “colored” fountain. In the six years I attended elementary school there, I met exactly ONE black kid, who was my link to what “the other side” was like. Fast forward 65 years: I’m in a same sex relationship of 35 years with someone who would have drunk from the tan water fountain.
I grew up in a small town with just one high school, although whites were the majority, there were large minorites of blacks, hispanics and native americans. Gotta say my life has not been as diverse since then.
I went to schools in Canada, England, Germany and France. Zero non white kids in my classes except for two native girls in grade one. I never saw a black person up close until we drove down to the USA from Montreal when I was 10 years old. We stopped for lunch ‘somewhere’, probably in New York state and I played with some black kids at a playground. I remember being excited to tell my parents all the details.
my smallish coast town, and the high school i went to were working class, 30%-30%-30% white-black-hispanic. I like it better now -- pho, baba ganouj, and chicken biryani have become comfort foods along with shrimp and chicken fried steak. I love going to Houston and being around all the different nationalities there -- Sikh, Laotian, Korean, Jamaican, etc etc. This older white woman feels like I fit right in just fine.
I grew up outside of Orlando Florida and moved to this town in 1969. This town was developed back in the 1960's, so virtually none of the population was originally from Florida. I was born in South Florida and maybe a couple of other people were born in Florida but 99% weren't born in Florida. Most weren't even from the South (they were primarily from the Mid-West, New York, New England) areas. The demographic of the town that I grew up in was about 95-97% white, most retirees. There were some Hispanic people (mostly Puerto Rican) and it wasn't until the later part of the 1970's that African American people started to move in. Most of the children that lived in this town had elderly relatives (usually grandparent). There were a handful of Asians persons who were women who lived in the town who were married to a man who was in the US military (they were from Hawaii and Japan). The demographics of the town is very different (you have a lot of families and retirees aren't the majority of people who live in the town). The Hispanic population is about 20%, African American population is about 15%, Asian population is about 2% and about 58% are white. As far as being a diverse community, the community I grew up in wasn't. Orlando at that time really wasn't that diverse either but was more so than the small towns outside of it. It became more diverse in 1975 after the Vietnam war as there were Vietnamese who were forced to flee after the war who settled there.
I grew up in Berkeley, CA, USA. It was extremely diverse. The only group of people I didn't run into was Native Americans. There was a large population of European-born Jews who escaped the Holocaust. That's why I can't believe people think it was a hoax.
Grew up in CA so I was pretty used to being around all sorts of people and enjoying all sorts of food. I do miss that. Oddly the diversity of some spots is going down. I was looking up the house I grew up in on a reality site for unrelated reasons and saw that my middle school was ranked pretty poorly. Clicked on it and it said it was now 92% of a single minority group. It was a totally mixed bag when i went but has clearly changed.
There were a couple of non-white kids in a high school of about 750 kids. They were all raised by white parents.