Counterpoint to ‘A Case Study in Racial Ironies’

The irony in Karen Grigsby Bates’ article about View Park (“A Case Study in Racial Ironies,” Sept. 18) was not lost on me.

I am white and grew up in View Park during the late ‘50s when the neighborhood’s first black families moved in. I recall the panic and stampede of white longtime residents that left streets literally lined with For Sale signs.

A multiracial group of idealistic residents--my parents among them--formed Crenshaw Neighbors. The group’s purpose was to preserve the community’s increasingly fragile racial balance by combatting local real estate brokers’ attempts to prevent blacks from moving in, as well as to try and stem the white exodus.

The fragility of the balance was psychological as well as demographic; the ‘60s brought about a black consciousness that frightened whites and raised powerful identity questions for many blacks. But for those of us growing up together in View Park, our multiethnic childhood provided a unique social education that continues to enrich many of our lives.

Inevitably, however, multiethnicity became homogeneity. The white families that had resisted “white flight” until the Watts Riots moved out after 1968, creating today’s black suburb.

I understand and deeply respect the unease expressed by View Park residents as whites begin to return to the area. These black families have certainly more than earned the right to a refuge from “ethnically diverse” professional and educational worlds in which they are often the token.

But it appears that today’s white return is as inevitable as white flight had been. I can only hope that the dream of a truly multiethnic upper-middle-class suburb that grew in the time of Martin Luther King can finally be realized by a wiser, more courageous group of residents than those who left 30 years ago.

RAMAH COMMANDAY, El Cerrito