Oct. 21st, 2011 01:03 pm
No place like home
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textualdevianceAt the risk of irritating some ...
I admit that one of the reasons I love living in the PNW (the Western half, at least) is that we tend to be socially standoffish. We're exceptionally polite and compassionate, but not overtly friendly. It takes quite a long time to get a native (or near-native, like m'self) to warm up enough to socialize with regularly, and get close to. But the benefit of that is that once you do make it past the polite smiles and handshakes, the friendship you do get out of it is deeper and far more sincere than you might find elsewhere.
See, people are always talking about how legendarily friendly people are in the South and Midwest. They talk about how folks will bring casseroles to a new neighbor, chitchat in line at the grocery store, etc. People coming here from those environs tend to describe our local social customs as cold, at best, and perhaps even rude. (Our habit, for instance, of not RSVPing to social events until the last possible moment.)
But the difference is that the friendliness one tends to find in those other places only goes so far, because it's a custom borne of the safety of sameness.
Aside from racial divisions, most of the people one finds in these places tend to be pretty similar in terms of culture, values, worldview, etc. They may go to different churches, but they have the same general tenets of faith. They may vote for different candidates, but they have similar politics. The people in these places can afford to be friendly to strangers because the strangers in question usually aren't all that strange to them, when it comes down to it.
If someone actually IS strange, however? That friendliness not only dries up, but can turn into hostility in the blink of an eye. Queer folk, non-Christians, immigrants, etc. all tend to be incredibly isolated in these areas because that legendary friendly hospitality doesn't apply to them.
The irony in our culture here is that generally speaking, we won't reject people unless they're bigots. What little prejudice there is tends to come from transplants from elsewhere (or is directed at such--don't get us started on Californians.) We still have problems with racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.--it ain't Utopia--but in general, we can't afford to be bigoted because there isn't really enough of any one kind of us to oppress anyone else. The us-v-them stuff of other places rarely happens here because we don't easily organize into binary camps like that.* Try assuming the fellow white Christian guy next to you shares your prejudice against x, and you'll find out that his brother-in-law/boss/doctor/neighbor is x, and you've just scratched yerself from his Christmas card list.
It's true we're largely white folk here, but we don't have only one or two other dominant minority groups (AA & Latino) like you usually find elsewhere. It's true that generic Protestant is the majority religion, but we don't have a unified Catholic or Jewish presence, rather a major assortment of minor faiths and a significant minority of non-believers or people who are simply "meh" about religion. We don't have a huge Spanish-speaking population, but we have hundreds of thousands of people who are bilingual in dozens of other languages, from Arabic to Tagalog. Heck, we really don't even have much in the way of a gender divide here because few of our men and women are all that married to stereotypical gender roles. Even our sports fans and fashionistas aren't hardcore (and are likely as not to be the opposite of traditional gender for those things.) Truly, our only real dominant cultural groups here are queer folk, geeks and neo-hippies (and gay granola geeks. ;) )
But it's perhaps that level of diversity that leads to the polite-but-distant social code. We accept and coexist with thousands of people who are different from us in fairly significant ways, but when it comes to going further--getting from acquaintance to friend--it can be a little harder to find members of our own tribe, so to speak. It's like trying to find a match for an argyle sock when you're in a drawer full of argyle socks of similar colors and patterns. And because it takes a certain level of scrutiny to determine whether a similar pattern really is a match, we keep folks at arm's length until we know for sure. When we do find a match like that, however? We'll break out the U-Haul in less than a month. We know we've already done the necessary top-level sort if we're even socializing together, so the next step isn't as fraught with potential disaster.
So, yes, it's easier to feel isolated living here than it might be for people who easily fit in with the majority elsewhere. But the benefit is that the friendships we make here are much more satisfying than an insincere hug from some stranger in Texas might be. I've heard us described as the Northwest Mafia, and that's not entirely inaccurate. It's a damn hard time getting into a "family" but once you're in, you're in for life. Granted that if you screw up, that life's pretty damned short, but still. ;)
*The one binary social divide we do tend to have is economic class. We have many very, very rich people, but also many very, very poor ones. However, since 80% of the rich folks here are new money, and worked for it rather than inheriting it, there isn't the inherent disdain for the working class you find elsewhere. You can go to parties where one person shows up in a new Jag and parks it next to his buddy's 20-year-old Honda Civic, and people with some extra cash hanging around tend to spend it on their less-flush friends or donate a chunk of it to Northwest Harvest or an AIDS charity. Hell, we're the region that produced one of the world's richest men, who has a goal of giving away the vast majority of his fortune before he dies, rather than leaving it to his kids. How many other billionaires from elsewhere would do that?
I admit that one of the reasons I love living in the PNW (the Western half, at least) is that we tend to be socially standoffish. We're exceptionally polite and compassionate, but not overtly friendly. It takes quite a long time to get a native (or near-native, like m'self) to warm up enough to socialize with regularly, and get close to. But the benefit of that is that once you do make it past the polite smiles and handshakes, the friendship you do get out of it is deeper and far more sincere than you might find elsewhere.
See, people are always talking about how legendarily friendly people are in the South and Midwest. They talk about how folks will bring casseroles to a new neighbor, chitchat in line at the grocery store, etc. People coming here from those environs tend to describe our local social customs as cold, at best, and perhaps even rude. (Our habit, for instance, of not RSVPing to social events until the last possible moment.)
But the difference is that the friendliness one tends to find in those other places only goes so far, because it's a custom borne of the safety of sameness.
Aside from racial divisions, most of the people one finds in these places tend to be pretty similar in terms of culture, values, worldview, etc. They may go to different churches, but they have the same general tenets of faith. They may vote for different candidates, but they have similar politics. The people in these places can afford to be friendly to strangers because the strangers in question usually aren't all that strange to them, when it comes down to it.
If someone actually IS strange, however? That friendliness not only dries up, but can turn into hostility in the blink of an eye. Queer folk, non-Christians, immigrants, etc. all tend to be incredibly isolated in these areas because that legendary friendly hospitality doesn't apply to them.
The irony in our culture here is that generally speaking, we won't reject people unless they're bigots. What little prejudice there is tends to come from transplants from elsewhere (or is directed at such--don't get us started on Californians.) We still have problems with racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.--it ain't Utopia--but in general, we can't afford to be bigoted because there isn't really enough of any one kind of us to oppress anyone else. The us-v-them stuff of other places rarely happens here because we don't easily organize into binary camps like that.* Try assuming the fellow white Christian guy next to you shares your prejudice against x, and you'll find out that his brother-in-law/boss/doctor/neighbor is x, and you've just scratched yerself from his Christmas card list.
It's true we're largely white folk here, but we don't have only one or two other dominant minority groups (AA & Latino) like you usually find elsewhere. It's true that generic Protestant is the majority religion, but we don't have a unified Catholic or Jewish presence, rather a major assortment of minor faiths and a significant minority of non-believers or people who are simply "meh" about religion. We don't have a huge Spanish-speaking population, but we have hundreds of thousands of people who are bilingual in dozens of other languages, from Arabic to Tagalog. Heck, we really don't even have much in the way of a gender divide here because few of our men and women are all that married to stereotypical gender roles. Even our sports fans and fashionistas aren't hardcore (and are likely as not to be the opposite of traditional gender for those things.) Truly, our only real dominant cultural groups here are queer folk, geeks and neo-hippies (and gay granola geeks. ;) )
But it's perhaps that level of diversity that leads to the polite-but-distant social code. We accept and coexist with thousands of people who are different from us in fairly significant ways, but when it comes to going further--getting from acquaintance to friend--it can be a little harder to find members of our own tribe, so to speak. It's like trying to find a match for an argyle sock when you're in a drawer full of argyle socks of similar colors and patterns. And because it takes a certain level of scrutiny to determine whether a similar pattern really is a match, we keep folks at arm's length until we know for sure. When we do find a match like that, however? We'll break out the U-Haul in less than a month. We know we've already done the necessary top-level sort if we're even socializing together, so the next step isn't as fraught with potential disaster.
So, yes, it's easier to feel isolated living here than it might be for people who easily fit in with the majority elsewhere. But the benefit is that the friendships we make here are much more satisfying than an insincere hug from some stranger in Texas might be. I've heard us described as the Northwest Mafia, and that's not entirely inaccurate. It's a damn hard time getting into a "family" but once you're in, you're in for life. Granted that if you screw up, that life's pretty damned short, but still. ;)
*The one binary social divide we do tend to have is economic class. We have many very, very rich people, but also many very, very poor ones. However, since 80% of the rich folks here are new money, and worked for it rather than inheriting it, there isn't the inherent disdain for the working class you find elsewhere. You can go to parties where one person shows up in a new Jag and parks it next to his buddy's 20-year-old Honda Civic, and people with some extra cash hanging around tend to spend it on their less-flush friends or donate a chunk of it to Northwest Harvest or an AIDS charity. Hell, we're the region that produced one of the world's richest men, who has a goal of giving away the vast majority of his fortune before he dies, rather than leaving it to his kids. How many other billionaires from elsewhere would do that?
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no subject
That said, I've also lived all my adult life in cities not towns; SF is still the best place in the universe, frankly (aside from the annoying tourists), but Montreal ain't bad either - and while Toronto is probably more diverse ethnically and culturally because there are representative communities from just about every country in the world right there, from an artistic and creative standpoint, Montreal is certainly head and shoulders above pretty much everywhere else at the moment. And (yeah, we're in Canada!) it's a LOT safer than any comparable US city.
Plus, you live in a suburb and to my mind, suburbs don't count. That's where people who don't want diversity go to live....(but that's just part of my rant against suburbs, which I hate on principle)
no subject
The metro area here has immigrants and second-generation folks from just about everywhere, but we have particularly high numbers of South and East Asians. Not just the ones who came for the tech jobs, but plenty of Southeast Asian refugees from a couple of decades ago, folks who moved here when Hong Kong changed hands, people who got out of Somalia, etc.
Seattle actually has the most diverse zip code in the country (98118) and the suburb we're in isn't very far away from that. Wouldn't even consider it a suburb at this point. Hell, even in our tiny little semi-upscale neighborhood, probably half of the residents are PoC. Even whitebread Bellevue isn't so white these days with the number of South Asians working at Microsoft.
no subject
And, well, your comment on South Asians and Microsoft says to me you're basing your assertion on one (admittedly more than one country) group working for ONE company. Which is, frankly, the Seattle area's main claim to fame these days (it was far more diversified economically when I lived there). Not exactly a diversity-plus argument....
Also, before your time, the Vietnamese Boat People, a lot of whom settled in the region. I'm not saying the PNW doesn't have clusters and establishments of PoC or any other group, I'm just saying it's not anything like the MOST diverse region in the US or even in the PNW.
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Conversely, what we have here is a far greater number of different groups. We don't have the high AA and Latino populations of the south and southwest, but we have huge numbers of other groups, and that's the diversity the census is talking about. In the zip code in question, you have everything from Lebanese to Ukranians to Brazilians to Filipinos. Something like 30% is foreign-born, and that doesn't count the second and third-generation folks who live there as well. Is it still majority-white? Yes. But there isn't just one or two other dominant non-white groups, which is what you get in most of the rest of the country.
Also, Microsoft is far from the only game in town. It's the biggest, yes, but not the only thing. In addition to Amazon, we also have major satellites for Google and Adobe, and there are literally thousands of other tech companies based here. They're pulling workers from all over the world because there aren't enough properly educated Americans to fill the jobs.
Believe me. A lot has changed in 40 years. You probably wouldn't recognize it if you spent any time here now. :)
no subject
I forgot Amazon was there, you're right! Sounds closer to parts of California, overall {g}....
Mind you, I'm not sure I'd remember anything about Seattle now, other than that I lived in Ballard and worked in the University bookstore warehouse - I can't actually remember a single other place in any detail, not even Pikes Peak Market (is that the name?)!
no subject
And Ballard explains a lot! It's way more diverse now than it used to be, but even when I moved here in '95, it was still Scandinavian central. Not entirely sure why (I think it had to do with the locks being there, and there being a lot of Scandinavian ship building/fishing sorts involved) but yeah. Definitely a neighborhood where one's more likely to hear Norwegian spoken than Arabic or Portugese.
I was actually looking into this a little more last night, and was amazed that it's even more diverse than I thought here. Still not a patch on SF or Van, of course (which have had a lot more years in which to establish as immigrant magnets) but we have about twice the national average percent of Asian and foreign-born, and something like 60 different languages spoken here. Even just in Renton, there are probably three dozen Asian, Latino and Halal retailers (including two about the size of a Wal-Mart), plus plenty of mosques, Korean-only churches, Spanish mass, etc. One thing the racial breakdown doesn't account for, btw, is the huge number of Eastern European immigrants. It's incredibly common to hear Ukranian, Russian, Romanian, Czech, etc., and there are dozens of Orthodox churches, too. Plus there's all the queer folk. ;)
Personally, I love it. I wouldn't be happy raising my kid in a place where she only saw white faces and only heard English (especially if we end up doing a transracial adoption.)
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Yes, I moved to Ballard because my then best friend (now sis-in-law) was living there, staying in her father's apartment while he was out to sea. He was a fisherman, and Ballard was apparently the neighbourhood for fisherfolk, particularly Norwegian (though Stan was an American Jew, going back a fair number of generations so that I don't know where the family originated - certainly not Scandinavia, though!)
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Part of my problem with generalizations about what it's like to live in the Midwest written by people who haven't is that, well, they're wrong. There are parts of the Midwest that are awful and parts that aren't, just like any other geographical region, but also, having been a person of left-wing ideology and non-standard sexuality living in the Midwest, it's not as awful as
no subject
Also, in terms of race, I do think it's kind of interesting how well AA and Latino folks get by in states whose predominant political landscape is unfriendly to them, at best. I think a lot of that has to do with having a large community upon which to rely, plus religious and other cultural traditions that aren't necessarily at odds with the dominant ones. (Not, of course, that these groups are homogenous; again, it's a statistical thing.) It's a lot easier to suffer social slings and arrows when you have a fairly large army of your own to get your back. Quite a different thing for queer folk and such who are a lot fewer and farther between.
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Also, the Midwest is full of queer folks. You've only heard from the ones who move away, I guess? There are lots who stay.
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Yes, I'm sure that's the case - I think a lot of ideas about the Midwest come from the bi-coastal media which still seems to consider the middle of the country to be "flyover land" only.
Now, I must take issue with that as San Francisco is the best place to live ever {g} - but Van is a close second (I've not lived there, but visited many times) and when you think about it, SF and Van have a lot more in common with each other than they have differences....
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And Montreal would be further up in the running if it weren't for the weather! :)
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Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one,
True enough! When I tell people I moved here from SF, their first question is an incredulous, "but WHY????" Then again, Montreal will never truly be home to me, because I'll never be fluent in French or even slightly proficient. But I always tell my husband, I don't want to be 70 and enduring a Montreal winter, so we've already decided we'll be moving to Vancouver in the next 20 years or so. Whew!