apjordan

FYI: An agnostic is someone who believes we can't know whether or not there is a god. So someone who "believ[es] in a god" is not agnostic, by definition. Your speculative religious belief for JJ strikes me as more akin to deism.

Congrats, Mark and team! You consistently produce some of the very best fiction available on the net, for which we are all grateful!

I've been to LA twice, and for long enough to observe that it's a racially diverse city, but that's really not at all relevant here. We aren't discussing your perceptions of LA, or mine, or anyone else's. We're discussing the city's actual demographic makeup. The Census data (at least in the source that I'm using, which is here) doesn't provide a deep enough set of crosstabs for us to work this out very precisely. But we can see unambiguously that 28.7% of the population is "White, not Hispanic." We can also see that 31.9% of the population specifically indicated Mexican origin (the Census asks those identifying a Hispanic ethnicity to further indicate whether they are Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, or Other). No less an authority than you informed us that Mexicans are white: From these two categories alone (which are mutually exclusive), LA has a white population of 60.6%, and this doesn't count people who identified as "White, Hispanic" but aren't Mexican and people who identified as "Some Other Race, Hispanic," aren't Mexican, but are racially white. These two groups are small (although the first could potentially be on the order of 10%—we can't get a more accurate figure without the crosstabs). So I'll again acknowledge that my original 70% is probably generous, but it's not off by that much. If you have data to suggest otherwise, I'd love to read it. But otherwise, I don't think there's any point to continuing this conversation.

Do you have a source for this? "Black and Latino" is of course available as a race/ethnicity pair on the Census. It was chosen by 0.5% of the LA city population. Slightly more popular was "Two or More Races" and "Latino," but it was still less than 3%. I did quite a bit of searching to see whether anyone had reliable estimates for how the "Some Other Race" folks might break down, but I didn't find anything. There are a lot of stories on this topic right now, because there's a recent proposal to add "Latino" to the race category in the 2020 census. The anecdotes in those stories suggest that the folks choosing "Some Other Race" embrace the full gamut of racial backgrounds; if those stories are at all representative (which is of course hard to know for sure), then your claim that the number who are racially white "would be a very small number" is not substantiated. My suggestion of a total of 70% might be generous, but I don't think it's very far off base. Here's a New York Times story that suggests there was a concerted effort to get "blatinos" to identify specifically as "Black" and "Latino." But the story doesn't indicate whether the campaign had any presence in Los Angeles. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/us/for-many-latinos-race-is-more-culture-than-color.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Since we're pretty far off the actual topic of this thread, I probably won't write more.

Anyone who doesn't care about statistics or general number nerdery should just skip this post... I'm probably the only person who read Private Tim's demographic data on Los Angeles and immediately thought "if only 48% of LA residents identify as white (including Hispanic whites), what do the other 52% identify as?" Looking up that answer reminded me of the central problem of data collection about race and ethnicity: such data are collected based on self-reporting, but classified following a scheme that is at odds with how many people (especially people of Hispanic origin) interpret the terms "race" and "ethnicity" with respect to their self-identities. Here's the breakdown for the City of Los Angeles from the 2010 US Census. I'm listing the primary race/ethnicity combinations, by percent of total population: White, not Hispanic: 28.7 Some Other Race, Hispanic: 23.5 White, Hispanic: 21.1 Asian, not Hispanic: 11.1 Black, not Hispanic: 9.2 These five categories represent over 93% of the population. No other race/ethnicity pair exceeds 3%. In interpreting these categories, it's important to remember that the US Census has the following official race categories: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Some Other Race, Two or More Races. Note that none of these is "Hispanic or Latino." Hispanic origin is considered an ethnicity, not a race. But you can see that 23.5% of the LA population identified as "Some Other Race" and "Hispanic." This is the disjunction between how people identify and how the demographic data is reported. The vast majority of these individuals chose "Some Other Race" because they consider their *race* to be "Hispanic." But among the official categories—if "Some Other Race" were not an option—a significant number of them are almost certainly "White." So while it is true that the population in LA that *identifies* as white is a minority (it's 49.8% in the 2010 Census, but most estimates for 2011 or 2012 have the 48% figure Private Tim gave), the number of people in LA who are racially white (in the sense of being predominantly Caucasian) is really more in the vicinity of 70%. (edited to correct a spelling error)

I'm a little late to the recent discussion of fraternities, but I'd be remiss not to remind everyone that not all fraternities offer the "traditional" fraternity experience (such as the one documented/described in Jwolf's "The English Year"). When I was an undergraduate 20 years ago, I was a member of a fraternity that was co-ed, dry, and 10-25% queer. Our pledge process was more of an orientation and included absolutely no hazing. It was a wonderfully terrific environment in which to come out. I went to a school where fraternities and sororities exhibited a wide spectrum of membership and social traditions. Some were overwhelmingly WASPy and others were incredibly diverse. (And since I've graduated, I know that spectrum has become even broader.) There are many fraternities there where I could see someone like Will (or Darius or JJ) fitting in very well. In contrast, the fraternities at the school I teach at now are almost all cookie-cutter animal houses. No racial diversity, no queers, all sons of privilege. Every school with fraternities and sororities has a different greek atmosphere. So, unless we already know what schools this generation of Schluter kids will attend, we really can't make any generalizations about whether or not they'd participate in the greek system. For the record, I think the school I attended as an undergraduate (MIT) is much more likely to be attractive to Will than the school I teach at now (large state university in the southeast).