Reply #13: I have the opposite reaction now [View All]

[Rumba]

I moved to the San Francisco bay area (silicon valley) about 5 years ago, from a college town in Illinois. I grew up in Ohio. The college town (Urbana-Champaign) is not large, about 130K people, but for a midwestern town that size it's relatively diverse due to the university population. Still, when I moved to the bay area it was initially a bit of a culture shock. This area is incredibly diverse and even a progressive white guy from the midwest needed a little getting used to it.

Then, about a year later, I went to Vail to go skiing with my girlfriend. We were walking through the ski village at the base of one of the resorts and I had a stragely unsettled feeling. All of a sudden I realized why I was feeling a bit out of place, and I turned to my girlfriend and said "honey, everybody here is *white*!".

She turned to me and replied "yeah? how do you think *I* feel?". (She's Chinese ethnically and American culturally).

In that moment it became totally clear to me that I had gotten very used to the diversity of the bay area. It's just a matter of what you're used to.

I had thanksgiving this year with some friends in the city (around here, that means San Francisco). Among the nine people present, the following nationalities were represented: american, german, croatian, chinese, japanese, indian, and philipino. 9 people, 7 nationalities from all around the world. That's diverse. And we had a great time, with mostly traditional dishes and also with an indian curry and a southeast asian rice dish and a croatian pepper dip thrown in. We ate, drank, danced, played games, and talked, and it was a great time.

Celebrate diversity.

Oh, if we all have to be the same skin color, I vote for chartreuse. Or mauve.