COMMENT: Melting Pot
by Rick Reiff
CHALK UP ANOTHER ONE FOR ORANGE COUNTY.
The nation has recently discovered that we’re cool, and that we have a world champion baseball team.
Now, in news reports around the country, it’s been noted that we’re the epitome of desegregation.
That’s right. By some measures in a new Census Bureau study, Orange County is the least segregated place in the nation.
Crunching its 2000 data, the bureau determined that only 39% of OC’s “Blacks or African Americans” would have to move somewhere else within the county to achieve perfect racial balance. That was the best result among 43 metropolitan areas. The worst result was in Detroit, where 85% of blacks would have to move to be evenly spread out. This “dissimilarity index” is the most popular way to gauge segregation, but Orange County also scored best on the composite index that factors in four other measures, too.
But, let’s not be too quick to break into a chorus of, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing in Perfect Harmony.”
First, Orange County only had 59,000 African Americans in 2000, a mere 2% of its population, so maybe it’s not surprising that they’re scattered around. In Detroit, by contrast, blacks constitute one-fourth of the population.
Second, it’s difficult to say what these measurements really mean. For example, are people of the same ethnicity forced to cluster together or do they opt to do so? The bureau acknowledges as much in its fine print: “We do not speculate about how racial discrimination, free choices, or any of several other underlying processes might have contributed to the patterns observed.”
And unmentioned is what I like to call the Quentin Tarantino Factor,that racial mixing and interbreeding is confounding the sorts of surveys that seek to categorize people, as well as undermining the quota-driven government programs and policies that they sometimes gird. I suspect exercises such as this census study will be obsolete within a couple of generations.
Given those caveats, Orange County also did well in the study when it came to the county’s two sizeable minority groups. The county’s composite index was eighth best among 20 cities for “Asians and Pacific Islanders.” And despite the fact that nearly a third of OC’s population is Hispanic, the county’s composite score was 16th best among 36 cities for “Hispanics or Latinos.” OC was ranked as less segregated than Houston, New York and Phoenix, all with lower percentages of Hispanics in their population.
Frankly, I’m not sure what to conclude from all of this. Part of me says, so what? Another part says, hey, pretty darn good. America, who you calling White Bread?
, Rick Reiff
