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I grew up close to Santa Cruz, in the 80's and early 90's. During that time I was exposed to an idea that I now find repellant. I don't think it came from any specific place; certainly not my parents or my friends. It just seemed to float in from the air, as something that "everyone" believed.
The idea was this: Watsonville (a town just to the south, surrounded by cropland) is stuffed full of Mexican immigrants, and a huge number of them are illegal immigrants, and they're useful for picking crops but they need to stay in their "zone" down in Watsonville and should not come up to Santa Cruz because whenever they do they bring drugs, crime, and property damage.
I don't know what the demographics really were in the 80's and 90's, or if anyone even managed to collect them. But it didn't matter to the people holding this idea. Watsonville was the Santa Cruz edition of "the ghetto" and if you looked too Mexican when you walked around in Santa Cruz, people assumed you were visiting from Watsonville, probably to do some odd job, and you were placed apart into an uncomfortable category.
In the late 90's I moved to Watsonville and lived there for several years, then moved to the LA area. I learned that yeah, there is some latino culture in Watsonville, and plenty of bilingual signage, but in terms of drugs, crime, gangs, et cetera - it was barely different from Santa Cruz, and way better than what I saw in parts of LA. What was really going on was, Santa Cruzans were being racist.
Not all, but certainly enough to make it clear to a teenager growing up there.
Here's another angle. At both my elementary school and middle school in Scotts Valley, there was exactly one black student. At my high school in Santa Cruz, there were three. I played with one of them on the football team, but nevertheless, I grew up seeing black people as strange outcasts from another world. Not because of anything they did, but because of the cues I picked up from the kids and adults around me. Black people were not bad, but they were different, and you couldn't just go up and talk to them, and you certainly weren't supposed to forget that they were, above all else, members of the category African American, which was very very important, but at the same time adults could not provide any guidance at all on exactly how you were supposed to acknowledge all that while still treating them the same as anyone else - which was also extremely important. The effect was to create confusion, and the reaction to that confusion was just to avoid it, which translated eventually into "avoid black people".
It wasn't until most of the way through high school that I realized I was taking on an attitude that was, while not racist in its intent, racist in its effect. And I realized I wasn't the only person who took this on. It was all around me, soaked into Santa Cruz like water into a sponge.
Now, I'm not saying that the presence of a particular skin color is a stand-in for some kind of cultural enrichment. The point that this makes for me is, here is a little area of the state whose occupants believe they are the height of liberal activism and multicultural unity, and yet their experience with it beyond the conceptual level is anemic, and that distorts their behavior in an insidious way.
Here's a hyperbolic example to drive the point home. Put a white Santa Cruzan adult in a coffee shop next to a brown person, and he/she will spend about a quarter of the time congratulating themselves for not freaking out. They'll consider their restraint to be evidence of their cultural sophistication, and they'll believe that white adults in the rest of the country, from one coast to the other, would only behave worse. They have no idea how uptight, pompous, and actually racist, their attitude is.
Yes, the above picture is indeed painting all Santa Cruzans with the same brush. The hashtag "#notallsantacruzans" can start up any time. Of course that attitude isn't in every single person in Santa Cruz, and when it is it's usually a milder form, but my point is this:
Santa Cruz is the epicenter for that attitude, in all of California. I've seen a fair amount of the state up close, and I have not found any place where it's worse.
I had to live outside of that bubble for almost a decade before I realized just how much it twisted my own thinking, and that I had to take active steps to correct it. I realized that there really is good reason for ordinary people to have mixed feelings about liberalism and "the left", and for people to find fault with behaviors and policies that strive for the appearance of equality and acceptance rather than the fact of it. The first can have some effect on the second, but that effect can also be corrosive. Nor is the first a substitute for the second, and it sure as hell isn't more important than the second.
I am glad I left that place.
The idea was this: Watsonville (a town just to the south, surrounded by cropland) is stuffed full of Mexican immigrants, and a huge number of them are illegal immigrants, and they're useful for picking crops but they need to stay in their "zone" down in Watsonville and should not come up to Santa Cruz because whenever they do they bring drugs, crime, and property damage.I don't know what the demographics really were in the 80's and 90's, or if anyone even managed to collect them. But it didn't matter to the people holding this idea. Watsonville was the Santa Cruz edition of "the ghetto" and if you looked too Mexican when you walked around in Santa Cruz, people assumed you were visiting from Watsonville, probably to do some odd job, and you were placed apart into an uncomfortable category.
In the late 90's I moved to Watsonville and lived there for several years, then moved to the LA area. I learned that yeah, there is some latino culture in Watsonville, and plenty of bilingual signage, but in terms of drugs, crime, gangs, et cetera - it was barely different from Santa Cruz, and way better than what I saw in parts of LA. What was really going on was, Santa Cruzans were being racist.
Not all, but certainly enough to make it clear to a teenager growing up there.
Here's another angle. At both my elementary school and middle school in Scotts Valley, there was exactly one black student. At my high school in Santa Cruz, there were three. I played with one of them on the football team, but nevertheless, I grew up seeing black people as strange outcasts from another world. Not because of anything they did, but because of the cues I picked up from the kids and adults around me. Black people were not bad, but they were different, and you couldn't just go up and talk to them, and you certainly weren't supposed to forget that they were, above all else, members of the category African American, which was very very important, but at the same time adults could not provide any guidance at all on exactly how you were supposed to acknowledge all that while still treating them the same as anyone else - which was also extremely important. The effect was to create confusion, and the reaction to that confusion was just to avoid it, which translated eventually into "avoid black people".
It wasn't until most of the way through high school that I realized I was taking on an attitude that was, while not racist in its intent, racist in its effect. And I realized I wasn't the only person who took this on. It was all around me, soaked into Santa Cruz like water into a sponge.
Now, I'm not saying that the presence of a particular skin color is a stand-in for some kind of cultural enrichment. The point that this makes for me is, here is a little area of the state whose occupants believe they are the height of liberal activism and multicultural unity, and yet their experience with it beyond the conceptual level is anemic, and that distorts their behavior in an insidious way.
Here's a hyperbolic example to drive the point home. Put a white Santa Cruzan adult in a coffee shop next to a brown person, and he/she will spend about a quarter of the time congratulating themselves for not freaking out. They'll consider their restraint to be evidence of their cultural sophistication, and they'll believe that white adults in the rest of the country, from one coast to the other, would only behave worse. They have no idea how uptight, pompous, and actually racist, their attitude is.
Yes, the above picture is indeed painting all Santa Cruzans with the same brush. The hashtag "#notallsantacruzans" can start up any time. Of course that attitude isn't in every single person in Santa Cruz, and when it is it's usually a milder form, but my point is this:
Santa Cruz is the epicenter for that attitude, in all of California. I've seen a fair amount of the state up close, and I have not found any place where it's worse.
I had to live outside of that bubble for almost a decade before I realized just how much it twisted my own thinking, and that I had to take active steps to correct it. I realized that there really is good reason for ordinary people to have mixed feelings about liberalism and "the left", and for people to find fault with behaviors and policies that strive for the appearance of equality and acceptance rather than the fact of it. The first can have some effect on the second, but that effect can also be corrosive. Nor is the first a substitute for the second, and it sure as hell isn't more important than the second.
I am glad I left that place.
