As California’s major political and business leaders tout their supposed support for diversity, it appears that their commitment may end at their own front doors.
California is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states in the country, with its population of over 39 million containing no majority demographic and containing a Hispanic plurality.
However, many of California’s major business and political leaders live in affluent, overwhelmingly white communities wholly unrepresentative of the state’s considerable diversity, which largely appear inaccessible to the state’s poor, working and middle-class through sky-high price barriers to entry and costs of living.
California Governor Gavin Newsom eschewed living in the historic Governor’s Mansion at the state capitol in Sacramento, instead opting to move into a luxurious mansion in Fair Oaks, California. Fair Oaks was gauged to have a whopping 85% majority of white residents in the 2010 survey, whereas the city containing the Governor’s Mansion Newsom declined to move into has demographics similar to that of the state of California as a whole.
Notably, the ultra-affluent gated community in which Nancy Pelosi lives was the only neighborhood in San Francisco historically restricted to whites only. Presidio Terrace, which consists of 36 large lots located on a single privately owned street, utilized a segregation-style racial covenant in its zoning code from its inception in 1906. It wasn’t until the 1948 Supreme Court case of Shelley v. Kramer that Presidio Terrace’s whites-only zoning laws were ruled unconstitutional.
Recent census data indicates that 74% of Presidio Terrace residents are non-Hispanic White.
Google oligarch Eric Schmidt, one of the wealthiest people in California with a net worth of over 14 billion dollars, counts a luxurious mansion in Atherton, California as one of his primary properties. Atherton is a San Mateo community known for having the highest per capita income for any city its size in America. Schmidt, who ran Google for ten years, is a corporate Democrat currently under consideration to run a technology task force in Joe Biden’s tentative administration. Atherton recorded an 80.5% majority white demographic in the 2010 census.
Schmidt is currently in the process of obtaining citizenship of the Republic of Cyprus, in a tax avoidance scheme that could alleviate him of the inconvenience of his American citizenship entirely.
Kamala Harris’s residential neighborhood of Brentwood contrasts sharply with the composition of Los Angeles, the city in which it’s located. Brentwood possesses a distinctly white majority demographic of 84%, perhaps most strikingly having only a 6.5% demographic of Latinos in one of the most heavily Hispanic cities in the United States. 2010 Census data indicated that Los Angeles had a white demographic of 49%, a figure that is likely to have decreased over the past ten years as longtime middle-class residents exit California.
There are some notable examples of Californian Big Tech oligarchs who live in communities that are inhabited nearly exclusively by Whites and Asians, a common phenomenon in high-tech Silicon Valley ‘company towns’ such as Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Mark Zuckerberg lives in Palo Alto, which is 64% White and 27% Asian, with Blacks forming a mere 2% and Hispanics 6% of the city’s residents respectively.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai lives in ultra-affluent Los Altos Hills, California, which contains the third wealthiest ZIP code in the United States. Los Altos Hills has a White population of 68% and an Asian demographic of 27%. A mere .5% of Los Altos Hills residents are Black, and 2.7% are Hispanic or Latino of any race.
As elite corporate progressives situated in California- which has tragically become one of the most economically unequal states in the country, and arguably the most economically disparate major jurisdictions in the entire western world- lecture the rest of the country on diversity and equality, it appears many of them are wholly unwilling to take on the challenge of living in an actual diverse community.