To better understand what has been happening in the suburbs and the bearing that shift has on politics, I spoke to R. paranoia might have been in that race but more in how much Youngkin’s strategy exposed oversights and misconceptions within the Democratic Party - its fundamental misunderstanding of Asian American voters and the ways in which it tends to focus on race and inequality in urban areas while mostly ignoring what’s happening right outside city limits. My interest in this lies not so much in how effective the C.R.T. Readers of this newsletter have surely noticed that I have been focused on the recent Virginia gubernatorial election and the ways in which the G.O.P. but also as the most recent nationwide response to demographic changes in the suburbs. Youngkin’s strong showing in Virginia’s suburbs, then, should be seen not only as a triumph of manipulation and messaging by the G.O.P. Today that number has dropped to 43 percent, after a large influx of Asian American and Latino families. In the 1990s, over 80 percent of Loudoun County’s students were white. Loudoun County, Va., which became ground zero of stoking panic about education and critical race theory by the incoming governor, Glenn Youngkin, has become an example of many different political ideas, but they can’t be understood outside the local context. Spats over critical race theory and what should be taught in schools are just the latest iteration.
As suburbs have gotten browner over the past two decades, they’ve hosted all sorts of racial fights. These transitions don’t always go smoothly. In an earlier edition of this newsletter, I wrote about the Sweet Home Central School District in suburban Buffalo, where - with an influx of Black, Latino and Middle Eastern refugee families, many of whom were poor - the schools had to adjust, adding language support and other social services.
At the same time, the number of people in these areas who are living under the federal poverty line grew by 57 percent between 20. Millions of minority families have moved outside the country’s largest cities over the past 20 years. But even many of those privileged spaces have likely seen significant demographic change over the past few decades. All-white classrooms with a few token Asians, expansive, well-kept playing fields and pickup circles filled with Volvo S.U.V.s driven by anxious, potentially reactionary mothers might still exist in small pockets of the country. The suburban school is an imagined space that invites an unhealthy amount of hyperbole, misinterpretation and fear.