For the first time in my life, I am not a racial minority when I move to Johns Creek, Georgia. People from myriad cultures, ethnicities, religions, and nationalities deem this patch of earth home. Persian and Indian markets bookend strip malls. Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Korean, and Chinese restaurants perch on the corners of major intersections.
One blustery winter morning, I tour a preschool for my then-youngest child. The director, a petite woman with light brown hair, greets me warmly in the foyer, hands me a pamphlet describing the classes, the curriculum, the school’s philosophy. At the end of the tour, she asks if I have any questions. I shake my head, thank her for her time, and open the glass door to the parking lot when she calls out in a cautionary tone: “This area has changed quite a bit in the past few years. It’s really, really different.”
I’ve heavily researched this suburban dream of a town, analyzed pertinent school and safety statistics. Her hesitation doesn’t reflect the fruits of my labor.
“How so?” I ask.
Her lips disappear into a thin line. “It’s just, you know, changed.”
Over the next nine years, I have front row seats to a white exodus from Johns Creek, a suburb located 25 miles outside of Atlanta. The majority of these white families do not relocate closer to Atlanta or to jobs elsewhere in the metro area. They move across a newly expanded four-lane road to the adjacent northern county, Forsyth, a stone’s throw from their former domiciles.
I ask our neighbors, point blank, why they are moving.
Nora’s good at math. There are too many kids here good at math. They’re affecting her self-esteem.
Asian parents take their kids for extra tutoring. It’s not fair for the “regular” kids.
The high school is too competitive. My kids won’t get into a good college because of all of the Asians.
I want my children to grow up in the real world. This is not the real world.
In a decade, the white population at our local elementary school plummets from 397 to 195 white students, or from 55 percent to 23 percent of the total student body. Our children lose some of their dearest friends. Our Parent Teacher Association loses valuable leadership. The local middle and high schools tell a similar story. When the subdivisions in our community first opened, white families were among the first to move in. They are among the first to move out, leaving behind brand new homes they built themselves, the paint barely dry.
I bump into former neighbors at the grocery store, the bookstore, the bakery. They tell me how much they save annually in property taxes, but in the same breath, admit how many thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, they lost in the sales of their homes at the height of a brutal recession. They rave about their new, friendly neighborhoods, compliment the stellar academics of their children’s new high school, which has the same number of Advanced Placement courses, the same intense preparatory curricula, as the old high school.
Except it’s whiter…At neighborhood gatherings, white flight comes up frequently in conversation. Parents shrug their shoulders. Teenagers crack jokes, but at the same time mourn the absence of some of their closest friends at school functions.
These Asian students graduate high school with the knowledge of a singular truth. Even with few white people around, the racism still cuts so deep.
SAT Scandal: The Global Tong War Over Test Scores
One of my concerns over the last decade is that the high end testing systems in the U.S. are falling apart under the onslaught of millions of Tiger Mothers and their progeny.
I’ve heard that the Emperor of China made high stakes testing for mandarin jobs a necessity in 605 AD, which suggests that the Chinese became obsessed with gaming the test prep system around 606 AD. But Americans haven’t really faced up to the implications of globalization of our elite institutions…
So, my point is that if you go back 70 or 80 years, the people worried about high stakes testing were serious superstars like Conant, but in recent decades they’ve been West Virginia politicians and McKinsey consultants. For a long time, that wasn’t a problem because we actually had a pretty good system set up by guys like Conant that Americans didn’t much abuse.
But globalization should have wiped out that confidence. This is global tong war over test scores.
But Americans have yet to figure out what’s going on. That would be racist.
