The Educated Ethnic Mosaic

So the PC police gave us a new name to describe the mixed ethnicities around us: the ethnic mosaic. Formerly known as the melting pot, the old term conjured up horrible pictures of cultural assimilation, which pained the more sensitive in our caring community. And so in came the term Ethnic Mosaic, which brings in National Geographic images of happy diverse communities, living together, somehow stronger and richer in harmony. And nowhere is it more Mosaic in the United States than right here in San Francisco.

So I look around and apart from the invisible whites, I see asians, a flood of hispanics, and a handful of blacks. Of course this varies greatly depending where I am, from the predominantly hispanic quarter of the Mission to the Asian enclave of Chinatown. But for the overall picture, it's best to turn to the US census,

"Of the 2000 population,
- an estimated 217 mil (77.1%) were White,
- 36.4 mil (12.9%) were Black or African American;
- Asians and Pacific Islanders numbered 12.7 mil (4.5%);
- and the American Indian and Alaska Native population was about 4 mil (1.5%);
- 35.3 mil (13%) were of Hispanic origin.
The Latino or Hispanic population rose nearly 13 million (or 57.9%) between the 1990 and 2000 censuses. In 2000 one half of Hispanics lived in California and Texas."

Now America has been lauded as the land of spectacular opportunity where you can suceed by pulling up your bootstraps. Now, I am working at a cushy research institute, though not the highest pinnacle of success in the United States, it's still an achievement of sorts [insert rant about the utility of a phd]. The ethnic mix at this place makes a good litmus test precisely because science is supposedly blind of all human weaknesses, and can only be seduced by The Truth.

The first thing I notice is there is nary an african-american or hispanic around, although there are spanish speakers around, who come mainly from Spain. But as I look a bit closer, I realise the security guards are mainly black, and the cleaners are hispanic. As I looked even closer, I also realised I'd made a mistake lumping postdocs and grad students. Most of the grad students fall under the white category, well-bred, healthy shiny good-time American kids, with a a surprisingly high number of asian-americans. But once you pass the barrier into the post-doc territory, there are very very few native americans. Here at my institutions, there are a lot of Europeans, Italians, Eastern Europeans seem to dominate, but I hear there are a lot more Asians across the Bay. So this begs the question, where did all the American grad students go?

I don't really know what to conclude from this. As race has been proven to be *not* a genetic property, such disparities must be social. So social as to be all but invisible.