I grew up in Orinda, California, a well-to-do suburb of San Francisco, from the time I was eight through high school, and my parents lived there for another ten years after that. The town made the news this last week, not in a good way, when it was reported that the school district had hired a private detective to determine that one of the students in their elementary school did not, in fact, live in Orinda, and so could not continue to attend Orinda schools. The case made the local papers, and Robert Reich picked up the story.
The girl in question spends most of her time, including most nights, in Orinda, where her mother works as a live-in nanny five days a week. But you can begin to see the problem already: her mom is The Help, and on top of that, she is Latina, not the usual very white shade of white that most Orindans are. So the school district used a private detective, who determined that the girl's true home was at her grandmother's house, where she goes on weekends, outside of Orinda.
My friends and I knew we were leading a sheltered life, and we talked about it a few times, but mostly we just enjoyed it. Orinda is all about exclusivity. The town actually borders both Oakland and Berkeley, but no taint of those two multicultural cities made its way to our side of the hills. Almost the whole town was zoned so that no house could be built on less than one-half acre. Many of the houses were on bigger lots than that, back from the street, hidden by trees and hedges, no two the same. Most Orindans were probably like my family, what we called Upper Middle Class, in the top 5% of incomes, but not super rich. But there were also the super rich and some celebrities interspersed among us, especially on the country club side of town, but in my neighborhood too. It wasn't any big deal to us, just part of the setting. Not surprisingly, we had some of the very best schools in the state.
Reich's column says that Orinda was 82.4% white as of the 2010 census. In the 1960s and 1970s, I bet it was a higher percentage. In a town of about 15,000, there were a handful of African-American families, under 1% of the population I'm pretty sure. Hispanics? My friend Raul, son of a Mexican mother and an Irish father who taught physics at Berkeley, was about as close as we got. It seems strange now, but as kids we definitely thought his name sounded so foreign. I had a couple of Indian friends who moved to Orinda during high school, but I don't even remember many other Asians. We were white, nearly every last one of us.
It isn't my town anymore, but I can't say I'm very surprised, nor very proud, of what the Orinda School District did to try to keep an outsider out. I grew up like most of them, Republican and fairly conservative, so I understand the mindset. (I'm not sure what changed me over time, but I like to think it was a combination of basic decency and rational thinking.) In any case, I can see the people I used to know quietly applauding the effort to keep the riffraff, who didn't pay for those fine schools, away from their children.
The story has a happy ending, however. To their credit, the family the little girl and her mother live with fought back, and even signed the necessary paperwork to give the school district cover to change their minds when they were slammed with bad publicity. So the girl gets to stay in her school for the foreseeable future, and Orinda doesn't look quite so bad in the end. But they still look pretty bad.