I’m living in the future.
That became more evident to me last week in the cafeteria of Peachtree Ridge High School.
I’m a wrestling dad. And at Thursday night’s award banquet, we celebrated our kids.
For every Alex Williams, Max Bell and Bryce Jones who got a certificate and a handshake that night, there was also a Samuka Jabaleh, a Sarosh Taufig and a Sayed Ali.
This is what America will look like someday. Demography, as the saying goes, is destiny. And what America is destined to become soon is a nation where no race will claim a majority.
That’s how we’re living at Peachtree Ridge High today.
The student body of this Gwinnett County school is 32 percent white, 26 percent African-American, 24 percent Asian and 15 percent Latino. That makes it more diverse than Gwinnett County as a whole, where white residents, according to the latest U.S. Census reports, are now 41 percent of the county’s population. Consider that Gwinnett was more than 90 percent white in 1980. By 2000, white residents were still a healthy majority, accounting for two-thirds of the population.
Today, 4 in 10 Gwinnett residents is white. Among residents under 4 years old, Latinos are the dominant group (31 percent), followed closely by whites (28 percent) and African-Americans (25 percent). One in four Gwinnett residents are foreign born. By 2060, 1 in 5 Americans will be foreign born.
What this means and how it affects us is one of the most important stories of our time. The growing diversity of our nation has deep consequences for us all, in how we run our schools, our hospitals, our local governments. How we conduct foreign policy. How we talk to and treat each other. How we define what it means to be an American.
We see the influence of our growing diversity in our politics, both in who gets elected and in what types of policies are considered. An obvious example is immigration policy. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has devoted considerable resources reporting on both state and federal policy decisions and how those affect our local communities.
A less obvious consequence of this growing diversity is the tension that exists at times between young voters, who are racially diverse, and older voters, who are a solid white majority. Politics is personal. So as fewer young workers are available to support an expanding aging population with public benefits, a legitimate question to ask is how willing are young people to pay more to support folks who aren’t their grandparents? A large segment of our young diversity is foreign born. And will an older, solidly white, over-60 voting bloc be willing to generously support public schools, when the majority of those enrolled aren’t their grandchildren? Already, a majority of public school children in America are racial minorities.
As America prepares to nominate candidates for president in 2016, who winds up on the ballot and which issues are aired will reflect our demographic divisions.
Think about how younger and first-time voters fueled President Obama’s first run for president. Or, how enthusiasm among older voters influenced the 2014 mid-term elections and the Georgia governor’s race.
As the deputy managing editor who oversees government coverage for the AJC, I often think about our growing racial diversity in broad, political terms. Those are important stories to tell, as well as the occasional flashpoint. We had two of those recently: an upstate New York school apologized last week for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic, in celebration of national Foreign Language Week. Three weeks ago, AJC.com reported an incident where middle school students called a fellow student wearing a turban a terrorist.
Those stories get plenty of attention. Others less so, such as the quiet cultural transformation you see in a place like Gwinnett, where the face of the county is changing by the minute.
That’s a much more personal story. Especially for those of us who are over 40 and who grew up in the South.
I grew up in Greenville, S.C., less than two hours north of here, the son of parents raised in segregation. When Leroy and Carolyn Chapman bought their first home in 1976, I remember having white neighbors. They were gone before Reagan was inaugurated.
Integration outside of school in my hometown was rare then. School desegregation and controversial busing remedies were still fresh when I was a kid. Distrust lingered. So even as I got older — and over the years collected several white teammates and friends — it’s hard to remember a time when one visited my home.
Fast forward to today. I have three children, 17, 15 and 12. Carpools, practices, school projects and birthday parties force parents into each others’ lives. And for me that has meant getting to know my children’s friends, who are white, black, Asian, African and Latino.
They come to our home. Some nights I’ve walked into our home to see descendants from five continents sitting around my kitchen table. We go to their homes. Plenty of times my wife or I have taken kids home and introduced ourselves to parents who either spoke only barely functional English or who needed their kids to interpret.
Those experiences crystallize what’s common among us.
My children’s experiences are vastly different than mine. Where I can hardly recall having friends of another race visit my house, such visits are routine for them. They’ve never given it a second thought. And that’s a good thing.
