Bucks County, Pennsylvania is a wonderful place to live. It has great schools, lovely scenery, and friendly communities. Unfortunately, the gates of opportunity are not open to all people. Bucks County, one of the richest in the State and the nation, is quite exclusive and the area in which I lived is even more so. As a resident of the community for well over 15 years, I have come to accept that the county in which I call home has a people problem, a diversity problem.
In all my years of living in Bucks County, I never came to realize the lack of diversity until I was much older. In elementary school it was non existent, we were too young, in middle school we didn’t care but once I reached high school, I started thinking. What got me thinking was the complete lack of diversity within not only the student body, but the entire faculty. I cannot remember a single diverse faculty member besides two teachers of Asian descent; one was the Chinese teacher and the other was the business teacher for a year. It seems irrational to me that despite the amount of teachers I had, none of them were racially diverse, going all the way back to elementary school. Our student body was more representative but it was nonetheless dominated by the white majority.
The lack of diversity in teaching staff began my train of thought but then I started seeing it all around me, hearing it from the mouths of others. Stories from coworkers or listening to simple conversation between classmates informed my growing suspicion that something was amiss, that Bucks County wasn’t as open as I’d like it to be. I was originally a dishwasher, my first job, and I worked with several African Americans who took a bus to come work at the restaurant. When I had time to talk with them, they would retell of injustices they faced as a minority. Then I overheard a conversation in which a person heading off to college was fearful of living with an African American.
These stories and experiences have shaped my bias towards this issue. I believe that we need more diversity, more exposure to the wide range of differences between humanity in order to come to some greater understanding. I believe that the problem with diversity is not only isolated in a few communities but a problem that needs addressing at the national level. I believe that in order to preserve our American democracy which has lately been under attack by bigotry, hatred, and rhetoric which is simply vitriolic and divisive, we need an informed society, free of ignorance and prejudices.
Despite my admitted bias as an observer of the ongoing problem, I went on to do some independent research on the subject, all of which you will find here on the site. I wasn’t looking for a particular outcome, instead, I was looking for the history of how Bucks county arrived in its current situation and the facts behind it. I hope this research sheds new light onto a problem which has existed for centuries in this nation, and more importantly, affected the lives of Bucks County residents.
Racial Diversity in Bucks County 