Outside the Beltway

POST-RACIALISM

James Joyner · Wednesday, July 9, 2003 · 1 comment

Jonathan Rauch has a piece in the print edition of Atlantic Monthly not available online except for this summary:

Coming to America With its diverse and dispersed immigrants, our nation’s capital is a model of the post-racial society we’ve been awaiting.

He notes that, in the DC suburbs, nearly two hundred countries are represented, most notably El Salvador, Peru, Vietnam, South Korea, Ethiopia, Iran, the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. The thing he finds especially noteworthy is that, rather than settling into ethnic enclaves, each of the area zip codes is very diverse. This quote (print only) is interesting:

A member of Congress who wonders what a genuinely multicultural country might look like need only rustle up taxi fare to Arlington and walk around. My immediate neighbors include a black-white couple, a Filipino psychiatrist, a Korean accountant, and two Indian families, whose kids’ names I can’t pronounce. I have never lived in a more neighborly neighborhood. If this is the future, it seems to work.