#she’s speaking that yee olde tagalog

[kavalyera]

trying to imagine my filipino vtm ocs interacting with eachother but rosemary is filipino and grew up in san francisco, ophelia is a 1800’s central manila high society lady, florante is cebuano-tagalog, and milena is a pre-colonial creature who speaks in early kapampangan

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

Does Race Matter in America’s Most Diverse ZIP Codes?

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/does-race-matter-in-americas-most-diverse-zip-codes/

Does Race Matter in America’s Most Diverse ZIP Codes?

“The gift about being in close proximity is that you’re desensitized to seeing a different culture and judging it right away,” said Lena Yee-Ross, a 17-year-old high school senior whose mother is Chinese-American and father is black.

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Lena Yee-Ross, center, with her classmates Arabella Compton, left, and Christian Bustos at Jesse Bethel High School in Vallejo. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Living next to one another for generations, since a major naval yard drew large numbers to the town with the promise of jobs, has mitigated much of the tension found in more segregated communities. People of all stripes sing arm in arm during Thursday night karaoke at Gentleman Jim’s bar, where on a recent evening a white man with a cowboy hat sat next to a Filipino man in a biker vest, and the songs ranged from Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” to the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly.”

Students of different races study side by side at one local high school, and their shades of skin color span such a spectrum that it is difficult to tell what races or ethnicities they are when they congregate for lunch.

Still, Vallejo (pronounced va-LAY-oh) is no promised land.

Stubborn racial divisions remain. The typical black family has a household income that is three-fourths of the city’s median. Nearly three out of every four members of the Police Department are white, and all of the City Council members are either Filipino or white.

Academic performance is improving in schools, but achievement gaps remain: Of the 11th graders at Jesse Bethel High School, which is in the 94591 ZIP code, 42 percent of black students and 51 percent of Hispanic ones tested proficient in English this year, compared with 63 percent of white students and 77 percent of Filipino ones.

Spencer Lane, a 17-year-old white senior at a high school where whites are in the minority, said classmates had told him that he looked as if he could shoot up a school. Ms. Yee-Ross said her mother once heard a news account of a robbery and insisted that the perpetrator had to be black. And the Johnsons have battled racial tension in their family and their business.

A white customer who had been a regular at the restaurant once asked the woman taking his order to make sure that a young black employee did not cook his food, Ms. Johnson said. When she heard commotion at the front of the restaurant, she said, she confronted the customer, who told her: “How can you have people like that working here? His pants are sagging.”

The Johnsons met in Vallejo in 2003, introduced by mutual friends. He liked her toothy smile, she liked his respect, but each harbored racial stereotypes.

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Mr. Johnson, 33, assumed that she would be a devoted homemaker who would cook and clean for him. Ms. Johnson, 31, said she was impressed that he did not wear baggy pants and that “he doesn’t talk ghetto.”

As diverse as Vallejo is, Ms. Johnson said she grew up hanging out mostly with Filipinos, a clustering that many local residents of different races said is natural. Immigrants from Mexico or the Philippines may want the company of people who can help them navigate a new country.

But within these groups, stereotypes can fester.

When Mr. Johnson’s mother, Tanja Mayo-Pittman, found out he was dating Ms. Johnson, she thought of the time she worked at Home Depot. She was the only non-Filipino on her team, and felt ostracized in part because her co-workers spoke Tagalog and joked with one another, leaving her to wonder if they were teasing her.

“Until I met them, I couldn’t imagine that they just had open arms toward my child,” she said of her son’s future in-laws.

But those fears and barriers have dropped. “I stopped feeling judged or left out,” she said. “I stopped seeing them as Filipino. I started just seeing them as people.”

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East Vallejo is within the third most diverse ZIP code in the country, 94591. Credit Photographs by Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Ms. Mayo-Pittman, 52, also had to contend with her own formative years in nearby Pinole, when, as a fair-skinned woman, she had trouble fitting in — not black enough for the black people, or white enough to be white.

“To be honest with you, I never wanted my kids to be light-complected because I didn’t want them to have an identity crisis,” she said.

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The Johnsons have four daughters together, from age 3 to 11, each with tawny brown skin.

As the girls lounged on the carpet of Ms. Johnson’s grandparents’ ranch-style home one evening, after a dinner of lumpia and white rice, Ms. Johnson joked about some of the questions that had come from her husband’s side of the family: Do you work at a nail salon? How do you speak such good English?

Ms. Johnson’s father, Al Remorin, 51, grew up in nearby Richmond, where most of his friends were black. He moved to Vallejo in 1979, when he was 13. That’s when he came to know a lot of other Filipinos. He was surprised, he said, to hear some of their racism. People asked him why he talked as if he were black.

Mr. Remorin quickly bonded with Mr. Johnson, often discussing sports. So Ms. Johnson said she was caught off guard by her father’s reaction when she became pregnant.

“How can you?” Ms. Johnson said her father asked. As in: How could she think it was O.K. to have biracial children?

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Tanja Mayo-Pittman with her granddaughter Serenity Johnson. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Remorin said he did not recall saying that. He never had an issue with his daughter having biracial children, he said. Back in his day, he rarely saw “half-Filipinos and half-blacks, or half-this and half-that,” he said. “It’s hard enough as it is being nonwhite, and you imagine when they’re half-this and half-that.”

Things are different today. In the Vallejo-Fairfield metropolitan area, 22 percent of marriages from 2011 to 2015 were interracial, more than double the national rate in the same period, according to a Pew Research survey.

Even in 2001, The New York Times was reporting that Vallejo was one of the most racially balanced cities in the country. Then, as now, racial and ethnic groups often stuck with their own.

Back then, there were also concerns about the racial makeup of the police, with no African-Americans above the rank of sergeant. Today, the longest-serving member in the history of the department is black and currently a lieutenant, but there are no other African-Americans above the rank of sergeant.

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“There is not really the interaction in the way we would like,” Liat Meitzenheimer, who is black and Japanese, said in 2001. “Kids in the neighborhoods play with each other, but by and large, people stay to themselves.”

A decade and a half later, Ms. Meitzenheimer still lives in Vallejo and she says those divisions still exist.

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Al Remorin with his granddaughters Cheyenne and Serenity Johnson. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

“For somebody who has lived here for 32 years now, it really hasn’t changed,” she said in a recent interview. “There are people actively trying to find ways to bring people together so that we participate from different communities together on single issues, whether it be sports or some artistic endeavor.”

Vallejo is even more racially balanced now, with the white population dropping and other racial and ethnic groups growing. Hispanic and white residents each make up about 25 percent of the population. A little more than 23 percent of the city is Asian and nearly 21 percent black.

The 94591 ZIP code — where the Johnsons live, own their business and send their children to school — is a sprawling swath of the city known as East Vallejo. Among ZIP codes with at least 50,000 residents, it is the third most diverse in the country, according to a Times analysis of census data.

Vallejo’s diversity stems from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which for nearly a century and a half attracted families with the promise of stable jobs. The yard closed in 1996, and with it went much of this town’s fortunes; the city declared bankruptcy in 2008. It remains a largely working-class bedroom community, though some fear that the relatively affordable housing could lure more affluent Bay Area residents, displacing low-income residents.

Past restrictions that kept people of color confined to certain neighborhoods have largely fallen, but glaring disparities endure. Black households rank lowest in median income, at $42,000. Residents have complained of brutality by the police force against black and brown people, and the seven-member City Council currently does not have a black or Hispanic member.

“I think that’s part of that racial divide, where Filipinos want to have Filipino leadership or African-Americans want to have an African-American leader or whites want to have a white leader, so they specifically target an individual for election,” said Bob Sampayan, who was elected the city’s first Filipino-American mayor last year.

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But Mr. Sampayan and other local residents see promising signs of integration, like the diverse neighborhood watch patrols that sprang up after cuts to the Police Department and the diverse group involved in the city’s participatory budgeting process.

The Vallejo Chamber of Commerce, once a mostly white organization, now has its first Latina chairwoman, and nearly half of its board members are people of color. Different ethnic chambers of commerce — Filipino, Hispanic and African-American — work more closely with the city chamber under a group called the Vallejo Business Alliance.

Then there are the day-to-day interactions that blur conventions of race and culture.

Christopher Morales, 17, said his black friends were not offended when he, a Mexican-American, used an anti-black slur because their relationships transcended race. It is an attitude, he conceded, that puts Vallejo in something of a diversity bubble.

“It doesn’t really offend us,” he said, “until someone from, like, an outside town comes over here.”

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