I AM a minority in my neighborhood, and have BEEN one in every neighborhood I've lived in since 1995 and it hasn't made a single bit of difference.
This morning when I went to the store, I drove down my little suburban street in Whittier, and right there in the street, a herador (farrier) had a horse tied to a phone pole and he was changing out the horse's shoes.
The herador is hispanic and so is the owner of the horses.
His house is one of the oldest houses on our street, and he has a couple of stables in his backyard, which is maybe 2/3 of an acre.
He has a very tiny front yard, so the total lot size might be 1.25 acres.
So there it is, what would, to the untrained eye, be a typical suburban Los Angeles neighborhood, with the usual collection of chock-a-block suburban houses and he has the old old house that was there before the rest of the neighborhood was built, and he has horses.
80% of my neighbors are hispanic. They go to work the way everyone else does, they mow their lawn like everyone else, they kiss their wives and hug their kids, some of them have an ATV or motorcycles, a couple of them have an RV, and a few of them have hot rods or a classic car.
Nothing about my neighborhood is different except maybe the smells coming from the BBQ's or the music when someone has a party during the weekend.
But when I was a child growing up in the DC suburbs of Maryland, a lot of our neighbors worked at the embassies in downtown DC or in the consular agencies, so there were families from every country imaginable, and the other half of my little neighborhood might as well have been just as foreign because THEY all came up to DC from North Carolina or West Virginia, or Georgia for all those good gubmint jobs.
I was STILL something of a "minority" because I was the Jew-talian kid whose off the boat immigrant parents had moved to DC from New York after WW2, and my house had funny smells coming from the kitchen, funny to all the foreigners and down South folks who spoke with a twang.
When I lived in Minneapolis during the 70's, almost everyone else had blue eyes and blonde hair and they said "oh yah" and "you betcha" and
"a couple three" a lot and they said "pop" instead of "soda" and they went hunting and fishing a lot, something I'd never done back home when I was a kid.
And the other majority were all native Americans, Chippewa, Sioux and Winnebago.
I was one of the few guys with black hair and dark brown eyes and a lot of body hair. I was the exotic.
My bandmates used to joke and ask if I was actually a secret Iranian.
So the question about "being a minority" is something of a puzzle to me, because despite it all, I've always just felt like this was normal life.
