Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb

“I think about race all the time... So for the last three years, I’ve been in a one-third-life crisis because I’m telling you [about this], but I cannot talk about this with the average person, so I don’t say anything. Sometimes I will if I sense that somebody can identify with me. Last year, I went to a few different therapists because I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I just want to talk about my life and what I think.’”

Priya told me this when I asked her about her life in Fort Bend. A second-generation Indian American woman, she had grown up there and was well versed in the three narratives of the diversity contract, the local racial ideology: Fort Bend is racially harmonious, it lacks racial inequality, and, for these reasons, it is superior to other communities. These narratives construct a surface-level racial harmony and obscure racial inequality. After decades of viewing the community almost entirely positively, she had become anxious and frustrated. During the three years before our interview, Priya had undergone what she described as a racial awakening. She began reading books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. These books gave her a new language for understanding racism – and a new lens for reinterpreting experiences in Fort Bend that she had previously regarded as isolated or difficult to name.

Priya’s experience reveals one of the costs the diversity contract imposes on residents of color. When they recognize racial inequality beneath the community’s peaceful surface, they have few avenues through which to discuss or address it. Priya used our interviews as a reprieve from these dynamics. She arrived at both with lists on her phone of incidents she wanted to discuss. Afterward, she emailed me about others she recalled. She treated our in-person and virtual conversations as a space to break the community rules that had left her anxious, frustrated, and searching for somewhere she could speak freely.

Not every resident experiences the diversity contract as intensely as Priya did. But the intensity of her experience makes the usually invisible terms of the contract easier to see. Her decision to seek therapy simply to discuss her thoughts and feelings about race reveals how powerful this unspoken term of the contract is: racism and racial inequality are not to be brought to the surface. Doing so would disrupt the carefully constructed peace.

I hope Priya’s account invites readers to question the silences in their own communities. When racial inequality is rarely discussed, it is easy to assume that it is absent. But silence may instead mean that people have learned what can and cannot be said. We should ask whose experiences remain unspoken, what it would cost to voice them, and what the appearance of harmony protects.