Since the sixties, Oak Parkers have been consumed with the so-called race issue. Their reasonable anxiety has been that Oak Park will resegregate like Austin, driving property values down, causing "whites" (Euro-Americans) to flee, businesses to close and the community to be destroyed. A myriad of regulations have been explored since the village passed a Fair Housing ordinance in the late 1960s that would aid in creating a stable diverse community. While it is unfortunately understandable, I am saddened to see a community of educated people misuse the term "race." Race is a biological term that has for some time been regarded by the scientific community as not a productive concept when it comes to the behavior of Homo Sapiens. Both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has issued statements clearly explaining the problem. If you wish to explore this issue in more detail link to the AAA statement.
What Oak Parkers are talking about are
ethnic or cultural differences not racial ones. As I am not one
to swim upstream, I will use the term most familiar to Oak Parker,
"race" but with quotation marks around it and occasional
reminders like this one that social and behavioral differences
among human beings are not genetic or biological and therefore
not racial.