Diversifying Suburbs

Dear Willow Lung-Amam,

I found your book very interesting in the way it traces the Asian American experience in American suburbs. I’ve never read anyone before who explores suburbanization from the perspective of people of color. I saw a lot of the issues you talked about reflected in the conversations I’ve had with my Asian American friends in my town. Like Fremont, Wellesley is an affluent, educated, white collar suburb that attracts many because of its schools and family-based environment. It also has a high Asian American population, for many of those reasons. My friends have told me that they have felt pressure to conform to the white mainstream culture, but that they’ve also found community with other Asian American students who face many of the same pressures. I’ve also observed how the Asian American experience differs from my experience as an African American suburban resident. There are only a few black families in Wellesley, preventing me from finding a community in which I can struggle with others going through the same process of defining our identities. It is also unique for me because of a system we have called METCO, which buses students from Boston to suburban school districts to give them access to more resourced schools. But because most of the METCO students are African American, it leads to the “othering” of black students, which makes it hard to find my place as a black Wellesley resident. I don’t feel like I have room to explore my identity because I need to fit into the Wellesley community. In that vein, I wonder how we can spread the trend of Asian American people having wider latitude to define their identities to other people of color, and how we can build on this progress to complete the goal of diversifying and equalizing suburbs.

Sincerely,

Julia Chaffers