Pardon the cliched title. I want to go back to an entry from a couple of years ago but I can’t find it. I’m pretty sure I blogged on a birthday party for a friend of ours, an elderly woman my wife has known all her life. I remarked in the imaginary blog entry that even though the party took place in a standard restaurant in the middle of a standard middle-American city, out of 200 people I was the only White; everyone else was African-American. It was stunning until you realize that at her age, she never had the opportunity to develop close friends and church mates who were not Black; that was the segregated society.
Over the years, the parties my wife and I have thrown have been somewhat integrated with people of various ethnic backgrounds. They have skewed Black due to the segregation of earlier times when we were making friends as well as my wife’s social background, similar to that of the birthday girl mentioned initially. What I noticed at the party was the number of foreigners: two from the Caribbean, one from the Gambia in Africa, and one from the Netherlands. Out of 30 people, that is a high number compared to what it might have been 40 years ago. Even then, our affiliations made our parties more ethnically mixed than most and I believe that now more and more people are finding foreign-born people among their guests.
It is just one more factor loosening our society up.Lots of factors enter into just who shows up at your parties and there are still a good many Americans who do not interact much with foreigners, but it’s getting rarer and rarer.