A World of Folks Just Like Us--but Different

It was one of those through-the-looking-glass moments that made me wonder how and when I’d crossed the line, become one of the “us,” allowed to be disdainful of “them.”

I was chatting with a neighbor about a house across the street that had just been sold. “Who bought it, do you know?” he asked. I didn’t, though we’d both seen the procession of families--most of them Asian--touring the home.

“I hope it’s not another one of them,” he said, gesturing to the house down the block. A Korean family had moved in six months before, but we had yet to meet them. They barely acknowledged our waves or hellos.

I found myself nodding, commiserating, longing for neighbors who were more like us, not quite so foreign.

And then I considered the irony, recalled my own fears when we moved here, the cul-de-sac’s first black family. But they welcomed us without reservation. Now here I stood with my white neighbor, sharing whispered prejudices . . . rooting against the minorities.

It unsettled me then, and it bothers me still.

But I recognize that it also reflects the reality of Southern California today, where segregation in housing is alive and well, and discrimination is no longer the domain of whites, aimed solely at minorities, but cuts across racial and ethnic lines.

So black Realtors refuse to show homes to Latino families, white suburbanites complain they’re being overrun by Koreans or Armenians, Latino landlords refuse to rent to blacks.

It is ironic but not surprising. It reflects our stereotypes, our biases, our fears . . . and our imperfect human nature that rejects the “other” in favor of our own, defined today as much by culture as by race.

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A look at the numbers portrays Southern California as the most diverse region in the nation, a veritable melting pot of race, culture and class.

But a closer look at our neighborhoods demonstrates what William A.V. Clark, professor of geography at UCLA, calls “striking evidence of persisting own-race selectivity and avoidance of other races.”

In other words, people continue to want to live with people who look like them, who think like they do, whose lives reflect values they hold dear.

And stereotypes continue to guide our thinking.

“What you hear are not overtly racist remarks but concerns about behaviors, about characteristics attributed to certain groups,” explains UCLA law professor Richard Sander, whose Fair Housing Institute monitors housing discrimination and studies its causes.

A recent study by the group found that, in some parts of town, blacks and Latinos are as likely to discriminate against one another as whites were against them a decade ago.

And when Sander’s group convened a session of black Realtors to discuss the reasons why, the talk turned from race to “cultural differences.

“There were these perceptions about Latinos . . . these concerns about large families and loud parties and cars parked on the front lawn that made it hard for them to convince their clients to sell” to Latinos, Sander said.

“What’s ironic is that these are the same kinds of things whites would say about blacks 20 or 30 years ago. But Los Angeles has become so diverse, the difference between white and black is not that salient anymore. Now it’s a more complicated picture.”

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It is not that we are bigots, social scientists say, but that we tend to value diversity in the abstract, in small doses, and resist it when it threatens our own group’s dominance or disrupts our family or neighborhood.

“There’s a comfort level that comes with not having to deal with new challenges all the time, and diversity can be a challenge,” Sander says. “When people begin to feel overwhelmed by changes--when one group seems to be pushing out another--that’s when they tend to resist.”

But increasing diversity brings not just the potential for conflict, but for increasing tolerance.

So we learn to greet one new family on our block in Arabic, to explain Halloween to another set of neighbors just here from India. Our kids make friends with the new Korean family and teach us to remove our shoes when we enter their home.

“We’re this big experiment in multiculturalism, and by and large, it’s working,” Sander said. “You always have to push yourself to become more tolerant. But diversity is not going away. It’s an artifact of modern society, a test of life in Southern California today.”

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.