Diversity

I live a very insulated life. Although my co-op building welcomes a diversity of residents, I tend to remain in my apartment, rarely interacting with neighbors. The friends I do have are reflections of me: older white single (divorced, widowed, or never married) women. Only when I go to the theater—a setting where everyone is accepted based on talent, not on ethnicity, racial background or sexual orientation—do I enter a world of diversity.

Dear readers,

I grew up in a segregated neighborhood–not in Alabama or Mississippi, but in New York City. Stuyvesant Town, a coveted Manhattan location where I spent my youth, was built for veterans–white veterans–after World War II. It did not offer apartments to Black families until the mid-1960s.

When I was a boy, the area below Fourteenth Street, now the desirable East Village, was home to recent immigrants from Puerto Rico. Friends of my parents shook their heads when discussing that community and “those people,” who I grew leery of.