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C h a p t e r 1 Color Full Before Color Blind: The Emergence of Multiracial Neighborhood Politics in Queens, New York City The United States is in the midst of a great transition. Within a few decades, Americans of African, Asian, and Latin American ancestry will outnumber those of European origin. According to a recent U.S. Census Bureau projection , by 2042, the proportion of whites will fall from its present 65 percent to 50 percent, and by 2050, the country’s population will be 46 percent white, 30 percent Latin American (or ‘‘Hispanic’’), 15 percent black, and 9 percent Asian. The great transition among America’s children will arrive even sooner. By the year 2020, fewer than half of children under age 18 will be white.1 The pace of multiracial change is faster on the nation’s coasts and in its cities than in its heartland and suburbs.2 New York City crossed the ‘‘majority minority’’ threshold in the early 1980s,3 and by 1990, the city’s white population stood at 43 percent, down from 52 percent in 1980. Two decades later in 2010, New York City was 33 percent white, 29 percent Latin American, 23 percent black, 13 percent Asian, and 2 percent biracial or multiracial (a category first enumerated in 2000). It is in New York’s diverse, changing neighborhoods, such as ElmhurstCorona in northwest Queens, that clues about the future of us all may first be glimpsed. Elmhurst-Corona underwent its ‘‘majority minority’’ transition in the 1970s. Between 1960 and 1970, the neighborhood’s white population fell from 98 percent to 67 percent, then to 34 percent in 1980, and 4 Chapter 1 18 percent in 1990. Over these same decades, immigrant and African American newcomers arrived in substantial numbers, and by 1990, ElmhurstCorona was 45 percent Latin American, 26 percent Asian, and 10 percent black. Established residents of German, Irish, Polish, Italian, Jewish, and other European ancestries now lived among Africans, African Americans, Chinese, Colombians, Cubans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Filipinos, Haitians , Indians, Koreans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other new neighbors. In 1992, New York’s Department of City Planning called Elmhurst-Corona ‘‘perhaps the most ethnically mixed community in the world.’’4 My fieldwork in this neighborhood began in 1983, and I followed its changing political life over more than a dozen years. I worked with a team of researchers who mirrored the cultural and linguistic complexity of the Elmhurst-Corona population. Their work focused on Chinese, Korean, African American, Indian, and the diverse Latin American residents. My assignment was the white folks.5 Our team’s overall charge was to assess how far Elmhurst-Corona’s diverse population had come in forming what Lani Guinier terms ‘‘an integrated body politic in which all perspectives are represented, and in which all people work together to find common ground.’’6 I took primary responsibility for this by focusing on what Jane Jacobs defines as the ‘‘districtlevel ’’ political field. Anthropologists envision any political ‘‘field’’ they study as a set of linked ‘‘arenas’’ in which ongoing political events may be observed; the field also extends beyond these ‘‘enclaves of action’’ to include ‘‘encapsulating’’ structures of power at larger-scale levels.7 In her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs distinguished three levels of urban existence: ‘‘the city as a whole,’’ in which people find jobs, visit museums, support baseball teams, and vote for mayor; ‘‘the street neighborhood’’ of immediate daily interaction; and ‘‘the district,’’ which ‘‘mediates between the politically powerless street neighborhoods , and the inherently powerful city as a whole.’’ In contemporary New York City, she noted, districts range from eighty thousand to two hundred thousand residents in size. Jacobs envisaged district-level political power emerging from ‘‘churches, PTAs, business associations, political clubs, civic groups, and block associations .’’ For a district ‘‘to be big and powerful enough to fight City Hall,’’ political ‘‘interweaving’’ of its groups and associations was required. In a ‘‘successful’’ district, ‘‘working relationships [exist] among people, usually leaders, who enlarge their local public life beyond the neighborhoods of Color Full Before Color Blind 5 streets and specific organizations or institutions, and [who] form relationships with people whose roots and backgrounds are in entirely different constituencies. It takes surprisingly few people to weld a district into a real Thing. A hundred or so do it in a population a thousand times their size.’’8 The composition and scale of Elmhurst-Corona’s district-level political field matched Jacobs...

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