The swimming pool in Abby Hopper's Bowie development was already crowded when Hopper, her husband, their two toddler girls, her sister-in-law and her two young kids arrived in a cloud of plastic buckets, kickboards and Cinderella floaties. Just settling in was a huge production. Then, sitting in her lounger, Hopper finally looked around. There had to be 75 people at the pool.
They were the only whites.
Hopper, 35, felt that stab — call it acute self-consciousness. She didn't know the people around her, and they didn't know her. What if Madeline made a splashy mess or Ellie took another child's floatie — because that's what little kids do. What if the other moms thought her girls were some entitled-feeling white kids, with their entitled-feeling white mother looking on?
Pause.
Okay, what would happen ?
Long pause. "Well, nothing physical," Hopper says slowly. Maybe just a bad scene.
The pang passed as fast as it came. Hopper recognized a mom from the neighborhood toddler play group she helped organize and saw the family from down the street in the baby pool. Everything was back to being all good; just a regular these-are-the-people-in-my-neighborhood kind of thing.
In search of diversity
Two years ago, the Hoppers moved from a nearly all-white neighborhood in Baltimore to Prince George's County, where Abby Hopper had grown up around all kinds of people. She says she wants that for her kids. Her husband, Greg, also likes that they got a lot more house for the money.
Whites moving into black neighborhoods often follow the pattern of gentrification: The influx leads to higher property prices, displacement of residents who can't afford to stay and lingering resentment. But the paradigm has shifted in Prince George's, one of the few suburban counties nationally with wide swaths of black wealth.
Some white families are being drawn by the upscale amenities of subdivision life at relatively bargain prices. There's little tension about displacement, because they move into neighborhoods with people of similar economic statuses, and by and large, they say they are being welcomed.
Amiable demographics
Decisions about where to lay your head and raise your family have been among those most resistant to the integrational ideals of the civil rights movement. But residents say the educated, affluent demographics of Prince George's help make integration calculations, and the conversations around them, a little easier for everybody.
Inside the Hoppers' kitchen, which still looks model-home new, there's plenty of room for Ellie, 2, to walk around the dinner table passing out bread as Greg and Abby recall their Prince George's stories.
There was the time last month when Abby showed up to a friend's baby shower right on time at 2 p.m. "and I was the only one there for 45 minutes," Hopper said, laughing. Time, says Hopper, can often be more of a suggestion in Prince George's.
My friend "just laughed at me. She was like, 'Oh, Abby, 2 didn't really mean 2,' " Hopper said.
Hopper, who is a child support and divorce lawyer in Greenbelt, grew up in Bowie and University Park and attended Prince George's County public schools until sixth grade. She then switched to the National Cathedral School in Washington, and went on to Dartmouth and the University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore.
Commonality with everyone
She says her parents exposed her and her brother, Justin Ross, now a Democratic state delegate from Greenbelt, to all the diversity the county had to offer — "the Irish festival, the German festival, the Jamaican heritage festival, we went." The county's racial and ethnic mix helped her appreciate differences. "I feel like I can find some area of commonality with almost anybody. Children, music, food — there's always something," she says. "That's what you learn when you have to be flexible and find different ways of relating."
Hopper thinks parents who limit their children's exposure put them at a disadvantage; the United States will be majority minority by mid-century. "My goal as a parent is to raise kids who are confident in their skin and essentially around anyone else's skin," she says. "That doesn't just happen by looking at books and videos and talking about it."
Two years ago, they moved to Fairwood, a new thousand-acre planned community about five miles outside the Capital Beltway in Bowie, with a pool, tennis court, clubhouse and park amenities, and $500,000-plus homes. When they were looking, real estate agents would always describe the area as "diverse," says Greg Hopper, 33, a former Baltimore prosecutor now in private practice, "but we were the only whites looking at the models."
The white guy in the golf cart
Politically and in terms of what they want for their families, Hopper says, he has much in common with his neighbors, but has had to make some social adjustments. He's become better at mingling at holiday and Super Bowl parties, but the golf situation is still kind of funny. At the course on Enterprise Road, "There's always a minute where everybody is looking around, and it's like okay, who's got the white guy in the cart?" Hopper, who grew up in southwestern Missouri, is not used to wondering if he'll be accepted, or working to fit in.
"I don't want to say this is a unique experience, because it's not from an African American perspective. But it feels awfully unique to me at the time," he says.
Once a white couple drove through the cul-de-sac, and Jabril, the black 8-year-old boy across the street, told the kids, there's your grandparents . "It was kind of beautiful though," says Hopper, "like it was the most natural thing in the world," that all white people would be related. "It was a funny flip."
Neighborhood mix
The Hoppers say that coming from Baltimore, where Abby was held up twice, they aren't worried about high crime stats, which seem to be isolated to certain parts of the county. But they fret about the schools. They've been looking at a few of the county's magnet programs and private Catholic schools. Greg says there were only two blacks in his school system. He tries to imagine how they must have felt and wonders how his own children will feel when they get to school.
But when his parents visited, he had fun watching them try to contextualize a community day: mostly black neighbors, hip-hop music, a beautifully appointed swimming pool, an enclave of $900,000 homes.
Many black neighbors say they love the neighborhood mix. Although it is majority African American, at times it can look like a mini-United Nations. Michelle Jackson, a part-time consultant and Habitat for Humanity volunteer, says her 10-year-old son "plays with a Caucasian boy, an Asian boy, a boy from the Caribbean and an Indian boy."
She met Abby at a social committee meeting and liked her right away.
"I really don't feel threatened by people of any race moving in here," Jackson said. "I guess it's because we have such a large number of African Americans doing well, we're so fully entrenched here, there's a great deal of wealth in these areas and I don't think you have the concerns like you have in D.C. in terms of gentrification happening."
Kimberly Arnold, a black neighbor and CIA contractor who lives across the street from the Hoppers with her husband, Greg, a Red Cross project manager, and Jabril, their son, says she'd even prefer to have more whites move in, because then maybe the county would get more restaurants and stores.
‘I'd just feel uncomfortable’
"I want a mix because we live in a world that's a mix," says Arnold, "and nobody who's been brought up to know better wants to live in an all-one-race neighborhood." Although she sees the new faces as a good sign, both the Arnolds, who spent time in Prince George's growing up, have seen white flight at eye level, having watched white neighbors succumb to distrustful panic. So now Arnold waits and watches. It's great that they're coming in, she says. "Let's see how long they are actually going to stay."
The Hoppers are cool people, the Arnolds say, and when the girls see Jabril outside, they always want to come play. The couples get each other's mail when someone's out of town, and Gregory Arnold says Greg Hopper will often come over and shoot hoops.
For all that, he says he doesn't know that he would let his son go over to their house to play.
Pause.
Why is that?
"I'd just feel uncomfortable," Arnold says.
Maybe, if they had boys, it would be different, but who knows, he says. It'll just be one more conversation to be had on the front lines of integration.
Businessman observes
Jim Estepp, chief executive of the Greater Prince George's Business Roundtable and former chairman of the Prince George's County Council, has lived in the county almost his entire life. He watched it grapple with rancorous busing debates in the 1970s and decades of seismic population shifts.
For two years, Estepp, who is white, says developers and home builders have been saying that the number of whites signing contracts for new homes "has gone from absolute zero to reliably 10-15 percent of their new contracts."
According to census figures, the population of the county held fairly steady between 2000 and 2004, with non-Hispanic whites making up about 25 percent of the population and African Americans accounting for about 63 percent. There is no reliable up-to-date data, however, on demographic changes in specific neighborhoods.
But some real estate agents agree with Estepp's assessment and cite a variety of reasons for the change. There's the promise of new entertainment and development hubs such as the National Harbor along the Potomac, scheduled to open in 2008. More prestigious builders are coming to the county. Prince George's is a close-in county with a highly developed road system, with less gridlock than Montgomery County and Northern Virginia.
And "mainly, a half-million-dollar house in Prince George's is almost double the size they could get in Fairfax and Montgomery County," says Greg Bennett, a Prince George's real estate agent.
Bennett, who is black, said crime and poor public schools remain the largest impediment to attracting affluent residents of all races. But whites are "moving into neighborhoods where their black neighbors are very professional, they want the same things in life, they are the same type of people financially."
Mark Dumais, a white physician at Southern Maryland Hospital Center for seven years, lives in Alexandria and is having a home built in Clinton about a mile from the hospital. Dumais, who is single with no kids, says he could buy a million-dollar town home where he lives now, "whereas in Prince George's County, I can get a wooded acre with a much nicer home, far more upgrades and amenities with far less than that price."
‘Interesting wrinkle’ on race
Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin calls non-gentrifying whites moving into black communities an "interesting wrinkle" on usual integration patterns. In her book "The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream," Cashin writes that in surveys where non-blacks are asked to choose between a range of neighborhood types, the neighborhoods least preferred are those with large numbers of black people. "Prince George's County is a rare context" where whites, typically in the majority, must develop the ability to be comfortable with difference.
State Del. Ross, Abby Hopper's brother, says he's lived in Prince George's "every day of my life."
"The impressive part of our legacy is as a majority African American county, but there's a contingent of over 200,000 white folks still here and who are moving into this county and want to be part of this multicultural experience."
Estepp sees the county as "absolutely the model for this grand American experiment. . . . I hope that's not sounding too idealistic."
Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
