Where to Be Rich in LA

House hunting brings out the demographer/sociologist in me. I haven't lived here long enough to have a total handle on what are the "good" and "bad" areas, but I'm starting to get some ideas.

(I apologize in advance for all the feathers I'm about to ruffle.)

Areas that are good tend to have:

• Rich people
• White people
• Maybe Asian people
• "Good" schools as defined by a score of 8+ on Great Schools
• Well-funded public services
• Crime that is not overt

Areas that are bad tend to have:

• Poor people
• Brown people
• Black people
• Asian people who aren't integrated into mainstream American culture
• "Bad" schools (scores 1-3)
• Poorly funded public services
• Visible crime, graffiti, gangs
• Noise and/or pollution

You know what I see as the main differences on these lists? Socioeconomic status and race. So if I ask myself, "Where should we live?" what I'm really wondering is, what kind of white people are we? Statistically speaking, our income puts us in the third quartile for Pasadena (between 50-75% of median). I feel awkward calling myself rich, but I think it might be true.

Then I see these lists like "Best Places to Raise a Family Around LA" which should be titled "Where Rich People Live." I mean seriously, #1 on the list is Manhattan Beach, where the average sales price of a three bedroom home is $1.8 million. So I guess my family is richer than we are poor, but we're not rich rich.

The point I'm trying to make here is that one can't just choose to be rich. In many cases, the deck is stacked against you from the start. And we can't keep using socioeconomic status as a proxy variable for everything in life. Which leads me to the following scatter plot:



(If that's not displaying properly on your device, or you'd like to see the supporting data, click here.)

What are we seeing in this chart? 
A correlation between a school's rating on Great Schools and the percentage of its student body that is low income, which means qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. (As an aside, that is really poor around here because there's no adjustment made to the calculations to factor in cost of living in your particular area within the lower 48 states.)

What are we not seeing?
A large portion of the not-low-income families in Pasadena that are not represented on this chart, because their children aren't enrolled in these schools.

Pasadena Unified School District has kind of a mixed reputation around here. In the 1970s, the district was ordered to bus students to end de-facto segregation, a bit of history I haven't found anyone too eager to talk about. As of 2016, only 55% of students living in PUSD boundaries attended public schools. The rest are in charter, private, home school, or transfer out of the district. At the same time, there are several schools with new magnet programs focused on STEM, Arts, and IB, and they also offer dual language options. I'm familiar with a group called Pasadena Education Network that seems to be doing good work towards promoting integrated schools. So overall, I'm observing some positive trajectory.

Where should I try to buy a house, then? (I mean, assuming we stay in Pasadena. We also have been looking around Glendale and Eagle Rock, which is a whole other ball of wax.) To complicate matters, PUSD offers open enrollment, meaning that if you don't want your student to attend your neighborhood school, you can go through a lottery system to obtain a seat for your child at a different school. So it doesn't even really matter, school-wise, where we buy because we can put the kids in a different school. We just have to give them a ride.

But you see that? How privileged am I that the need to provide transportation daily to/from a school a few miles away wouldn't even give me pause? We are a two parent family with only one of us working outside the home right now. We have the resources to pay for a vehicle, gas, and insurance. I'm not trying to work two minimum wage jobs just to keep food on the table here. And I have the mental bandwidth to think about all these things two years before my kids will even start kindergarten.

What a world we live in.

If you want to learn more about these topics, here are some resources I recommend:

• How America's Public Schools Keep Kids in Poverty (TED talk by Kandice Sumner)
• Follow Integrated Schools on Facebook
• "The Problem with Great Schools" inspired me to write this post

I Used to Think ____ and Now I Think ____

A blogger I occasionally read, Sarah Bessey, put out a blog prompt today of "I used to think ____ and now I think ___." I'm supposed to write about how I've changed and grown in my opinions, beliefs, theology, etc. So we'll take a little break from the posts about motherhood and explore this topic instead.

*I feel like I should add all sorts of caveats on this post, including the fact that I'm white, most of my readers are probably white, and so it seems a bit weird to write about race. I just want to share how my opinion has transformed over time. I'm certainly not trying to talk for people of color or "whitesplain" anything. This post turned into a big ramble of ideas. Try as I might, I'm having a hard time distilling it into a coherent whole. I'm still a work in progress.*

I used to think that racism wasn't a big deal anymore.

Sure, back in the Civil Rights era, people had problems, but I figured we had moved past all that in the 21st century. I thought that because I embraced diversity, and because I personally held no animosity towards people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, I had fulfilled my responsibility to society. Basically, I perceived racism as an individual problem that happened when a racist person treated another person unfairly because of the color of their skin.

What I was overlooking was the much larger and harder-to-eradicate issue of systemic and institutionalized discrimination.

Now I think that racial discrimination is still a problem in this country, and I have a responsibility to work towards overcoming it on both the individual and societal level.

Why did my beliefs change? I can't pinpoint any specific event that "opened my eyes," so to speak.  More likely, it's the compounding effect of living in different places, meeting different people, and listening to stories of those I might not normally encounter.

Moving to the South definitely had something to do with it. You can't really live in the city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated without it affecting your way of thinking. When DF and I were on our drive to relocate to Memphis, we listened to an audio book about the sanitation workers' strike and MLK's death. It was really eye-opening (of course now I can't recall the name of the book...). The National Civil Rights Museum here in town also gives a solid overview of those events. It's a powerful museum that I definitely recommend visiting if you're ever in the Bluff City.

Last year, I joined a multiracial discussion group through Common Ground Memphis. We met weekly for two months and worked through a curriculum to discuss race relations, both historic and current, in our city and region. As a newcomer to the area, it was an informative and useful experience for me. For example, during the time we were meeting, there was an incident at Ole Miss where a statue of James Meredith was found with a noose around his neck and a confederate flag over his head. I learned from my new friends, who were dismayed over this act of racist vandalism, that Meredith was the first African-American to attempt to enroll at Ole Miss in the 60s, and his presence on campus had been met with violence. Had I not been part of this group, I don't think I would've understood the significance as much.

I have to acknowledge how I personally have benefited from institutionalized discrimination. In fact, I probably wouldn't even exist otherwise, since my ancestors never would've wound up in this country! Three sets of my great grandparents came to the US from Germany in the early 1900s. Because they were white, they were allowed to choose to immigrate here without a problem. Had they been of a different race, they would have been excluded under US immigration law at the time. My other great grandparents lived in Canada, from whence my grandmother also emigrated unencumbered.

Recent events in the news have shown us that race-related tensions still run high in the US. This is not an issue that's confined to history - discrimination still happens today. I am worried about raising two white boys in today's world. How can I teach them to be kind to everyone? I don't want them to become unwitting accomplices in oppression; doing justly and loving mercy is our goal. I want them to start off by having diverse friends, but then I look at my own circles of friendship and have to admit they are pretty...pale. When it's time for the boys to start school, if we're still in Memphis, should we send them to local public schools where they'll be the minority? Will we be tempted to move to the suburbs for better (and whiter) schools?

In closing, I must say thanks to Jon Stewart for encapsulating it thusly, "Do you not understand that life in this country is inherently different for white people and black people?"

For further reading:

• The 7 Stage of White Identity (I'm probably vacillating between stages 4 & 5 currently)
• White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack - a classic piece to help you check your privilege

File under: NaBloPoMo Day 5