#and she's also a half-white latina and we bond about it a lot but...... her dad's a professor

[queridaz]

my roommate saying she’s paying for college w/o her parents help bc it’s her money, but that money is her 529 college fund and stocks she owns like...

[alwaysahiccupandastrid]

the only reason you like hiccstrid is probably because “uwu hiccup is sooo hot”, because they’re straight and white, and because you (like most hiccstrid fans) don’t care about astrid, you just want a self insert/girlfriend for your precious hero

Ooh boy, here we go.

I don’t know why you get that impression about me in particular because I haven’t posted much about HTTYD in a while (and most recently when I have, it’s been reblogging other people’s content), but I can honestly say that’s not true. Like at all.

I’ve written posts in the past about why I love Hiccstrid and why I think their relationship works in regards to the series, including their development in the movies and TV show, one of which can be found HERE. Ultimately though, it’s a cute ship and I love BOTH Hiccup and Astrid as a couple AND as individual characters for various reasons. The post I linked also includes quotes from the cast and crew, including America Ferrera who was Astrid’s voice in the movies and tv shows.

I frankly don’t even know where to start with your claims. I don’t find Hiccup “hot”? He’s cute in a dorky kind of way, but I don’t view him as “hot” - we saw him and the other riders grow from kids to adults in the series, so for me I can’t really view any of them as “hot”. It feels almost like you’re growing up with them when you watch the movies/shows, at least to me it did (and I only joined the fandom a year and a half ago), and I personally just can’t view any of them as “hot”. In regards to Hiccup, I like him as a character because he’s relatable, dorky, brave, a hero, disabled representation etc. There’s literally thousands of reasons I love Hiccup and his character, I could seriously make a dozen posts about why I think he’s an amazing character, and listing them all could take hours.

I don’t know where you got the idea that I view Astrid solely as a love interest but I can honestly tell you that you’re very mistaken. I love Astrid so much as a character, as she is as an individual, and it has nothing to do with her relationship with Hiccup. When I think of Astrid Hofferson, I think of the brave warrior who trained her whole life to prove herself, to become one of Berk’s best warriors and shield-maidens. I think of Astrid risking her own life time after time to save her friends and countless dragons. I think especially of Astrid and her beautiful bond with Stormfly, her good girl; I think of Astrid and Stormfly being a formidable team with a strong love for one another, of Astrid taking an arrow to the leg so Stormfly wouldn’t be poisoned, of Astrid not stopping whenever Stormfly was captured until she had freed her good girl, of Astrid intentionally punching a Slitherwing to poison herself so that it would be on her fist and could be used to save Stormfly’s life when she thought she was dying. I think of Astrid being brave, competitive, confident, intelligent, fierce, loyal, driven, dedicated, strong, and so many other things. Her friendship-to-relationship with Hiccup is wonderful, but I love her as her own character, as an individual, and I think she’s an amazing example of a strong female character for girls and young women to look up to.

As a feminist myself (not a radical one though), I feel that female characters and how they’re represented is incredibly important, especially in films that are viewed by younger and more impressionable audiences. I myself feel that I’m the person I am today because of a multitude of female characters I grew up watching and loving - Hermione Granger from Harry Potter, Jessie the Cowgirl from Toy Story, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Susan and Lucy from the Narnia series, Lisa from The Simpsons, Mallory from The Spiderwick Chronicles, Lyra Belacqua from His Dark Materials. These were characters I saw and aspired to be from the age of four to my teenage years, and they were all incredible examples for girls to look up to in different ways.

As for the “you only like straight white couples” remark, that’s so false for obvious reasons. If you look through my blog, you’ll see that I ship a multitude of M/M and F/F couples: Richie/Eddie (IT), Kurt/Blaine (Glee), Grindelwald/Dumbledore (Fantastic Beasts), Syd/Dina (IANOWT), Santana/Brittany (Glee), Ellie/Dina (The Last of Us), Violet/Clementine (The Walking Dead), Queenie/Vinda (Fantastic Beasts - no, not canon unfortunately but I still ship it hard), Rachel/Chloe (Life is Strange)... That’s just naming the first several that immediately come to mind. As a part of the community myself, I wish there was more representation than there currently is, and that the representation we do get is not minor, badly written or just to serve as a secondary pairing to a heterosexual couple.

As someone who is white, I admit that I am incredibly privileged in that I have always been represented in the media. I really do wish there were more non-white characters in movie and television because there’s not nearly enough right now, especially from major companies/studios. Perhaps that’s why there’s admittedly few non-white characters mentioned in my list above - because I don’t watch a lot of TV, the movies I watch don’t have that representation, and there isn’t enough representation anyway. But within the couples I’ve just mentioned, a few aren’t white: Dina from “I Am Not Okay With This” is black, Santana from “Glee” is Latina, Clementine from “Telltale’s The Walking Dead” was described by one of Telltale’s staff as “African-American”, and Dina from “The Last of Us 2” isn’t white either - she’s described as Jewish-American, and modeled after an actress called Cascina Caradonna, who is not white (she apparently has Italian ancestry).

So I’m sorry, anon, but I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with you on this one.

[toongrrl-blog]

The Mommy Myth: Threats from Within (Part One)

Okay time to see the Moms “gone bad” and other Moms who required a lot of empathy but only got vilified on the media or were given anxiety inducing media. 

This was the era of the tabloid show like A Current Affair and America’s Most Wanted, “the crack baby epidemic”, depraved maternal figures, teen moms, smothering mothers, Lifetime movies where shit goes wrong, surrogacy, and the news that no you cannot let your kids go walking to the park by themselves. The era of sensationalism made no care for maternal ambivalence nor for the nuances of individual mother’s lives, only for black and white. Heroes or villains. No grey area. 

The “deviant mothers” featured were vilified for being supposedly narcissist and self-indulgent, odd given that I previously covered celebrity moms. But the celeb mom is portrayed as self-indulgent and narcissist on behalf of her kids and everyone who looks at her. Throwing money on diets, spa treatments, workouts, beauty treatments, and clothes were “necessary” as it was so someone had something pretty to look at. But have needs or desires that had nothing to do with your family, you were so bad! 

Scene: Suburban New Jersey, 1985. Dr. Elizabeth and Mr. William Stern wanted a baby but Dr. Elizabeth Stern was in her late thirties and had multiple sclerosis and they went to the New York Infertility Institute and were approved for surrogacy and hooked up with Mary Beth Whitehead, a homemaker and high school dropout with two children and a husband who was a sanitation worker. As she said:

I don’t have an education. I don’t have a skill. The only skill I know I do well is being a mother.

A contract was signed where Mary Beth would be paid $10,000 upon the Sterns receiving the baby, where she’d be impregnated with William Stern’s sperm and the Sterns would pay her medical expenses and a $7,500 finders fee to the Institute. On March 27, 1986 Mary Beth gave birth to a baby she named Sara and she had a change of heart and decided to keep the baby. The Sterns wanted the baby and the judge awarded temporary custody to the Sterns, who named the baby Melissa. When William came to pick up Baby M, the Whiteheads bailed for Florida with the baby, leaving their two older kids with the grandparents there and lived on the run (BTW this is a perfect scenario for a movie, I think Raising Arizona was loosely inspired by this).

Mary Beth’s actions flew in the face of what “surrogate moms were supposed to do”, they were supposed to be like Elizabeth Kane in 1980 and kiss the baby goodbye to a more affluent life (Kane eventually testified on behalf of Mary Beth). Or get pregnant and give the baby away to your infertile sister or be like Glenn Close in The Big Chill where she let her single friend sleep with her husband so she can have a baby of her own. Like Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaels, I subscribe to Mo’Nique’s school of thought regarding your friends and your man (maybe the Smug Marrieds should watch this and think twice about flaunting their rings to Bridget Jones):

People had a lot of shit to say about the Baby M situation, it involved issues like classism and sexism, who deserved the baby? The woman who carried her for nine months but was lower middle class and married to the garbageman or the biochemist who donated the sperm and paid the money? The trial started in the New Jersey Superior Court on January 5, 1987 where Whitehead was hit with several old-fashioned stereotypes about women: they can’t make up their minds and they are hysterical. Gary N. Skoloff, attorney to the Sterns, went Maddy Perez like the Whiteheads were a pot of chili. Skoloff listed 35 reasons why Mary Beth shouldn’t get the kid, amongst them was her mental health and her marriage to the garbageman with a alky problem. Also Mr. Stern recorded a phone conversation with Mary Beth unbeknownst to her. She was frantic: the Sterns had a judge freeze her family’s assets (which included the home, furnishings inside, car, and bank accounts). The media didn’t hear that or report it but they did on the desperate Mary Beth saying “I’m going to do it Bill....I’m going to do it; you’ve pushed me to it...I gave her life. I can take her life away”. The subtext also that being under educated and working class were not factors in making a good parent.

Honestly if your assets were frozen by someone who had the means and connections, wouldn’t you be unhinged? I think that Mary Beth needed to be treated for postpartum psychological issues rather than reviled as “The Crazy Woman” and don’t we make the worst arguments, imagine if you appeared saying and doing dumb shit like Bridget Jones and it was played on TV? Also on the tapes she was recorded as saying “I’ve been breastfeeding her for four months. Don’t you think she’s bonded to me? Bill, I sleep in the same bed with her. She won’t even sleep by herself...she knows my smell, she knows who I am--don’t I count for anything?” The media didn’t show that. More judgments came as her background opened up: her husband is an alcoholic, she and her husband separated for a while and she was on welfare in the past, her son had school issues (imagine how many affluent parents have kids with that problem), daughter Tuesday had frostbite when the furnace broke down (I’m not hating, winter in the East Coast sounds rough), and they went to the slut-shaming route when they got Mary Beth to admit she worked as a “barroom dancer”. 

And now it got really nasty: she didn’t play patty cake right (!), took pots and pans away from the baby and gave her a stuffed panda (uh I don’t know what kind of pots and pans they were around but I’m Latina), she dyed her prematurely gray hair brown (oh the horrors!)...a word from Karen Wheeler for now:

All these made her not an ideal mother. Okay am I getting some pissed off women in this post? Unicorn colored haired girls? Bottle blondes? Fake redheads? Anyone covering the grey? Henna heads? Well soon feminists and celebs like Our Queen Meryl Streep, Gloria Steinem, Carly Simon (one of our reigning Ladies of shady breakup songs), Lois Gould, and Betty Friedan all issued a statement of solidarity with Mary Beth Whitehead reading “By these standards, we are all unfit mothers”.  Thank Jesus for this action of solidarity because the media was playing one of it’s favorite games: pit women against each other. Dr. Elizabeth and Mary Beth were represented as doctor vs. housewife, barren vs. fertile, educated vs. under educated; so far the media was on Dr. Elizabeth’s and her husband’s side, which was okay for her but while the media cut her slack for being a quiet ride-along who was professional and educated and “of the right class” she got away with things that the media wouldn’t be kind with. While the media covered Mary Beth’s deteriorating mental health, they didn’t cover her testimony which read like a list of things that would normally get moms judged:

She wasn’t going to cut back on her work because “I didn’t realize how much time is required to raise a child.”

She claimed she was the “psychological mother” and therefore the true mom.

Her husband’s testimony said they’d have the kid in full-time day care (probably a nice day care like the academy in Daddy Day Care).

Activities with Baby M were trips to Bloomingdales.

During a cross-examination, Dr. Stern said she wouldn’t want to see the baby if Mary Beth was awarded custody

So what of Mr. Stern? He was basically cosplaying Ted Wheeler.

And he said “Fathers have feeling, too” which made him appear like the victim to the public when he had the means and access to a lawyer who went savage on Mary Beth. On April 1st (haven’t you heard, irony is dead), Judge Harvey Sorkow awarded custody to the Stern family on grounds that they provide better care than Mary Beth could (or afford). Mary Beth Whitehead was denied visitation rights by the judge, enabled the Sterns to adopt Baby M who was officially named Melissa Stern. Later that month it got bittersweet for Mary Beth: she regained brief visitation rights but got divorced and she remarried and had two more children, which the Sterns’ lawyer said was proof of “her personality problems” (wow imagine if the Duggars were tarred with that brush) while she tried to fight for longer visits. The next year saw Sorkow’s ruling thrown out by the appeals court on grounds of condoning baby selling, the adoption invalidated, and Mary Beth’s standing as mother restored. She got visitation rights, years later Mary Beth and older daughter Tuesday went on Dr. Phil where they talked about the case. Tuesday said the case contributed to the divorce and the strain was too much for the late Mr. Whitehead, who died from cancer years before their appearance. Mary Beth said she wouldn’t recommend this and if she had the chance, she’d never do it again, being a surrogate mother. At that time, Melissa was 16 and according to Mary Beth their relationship wasn’t good and she did attend Tuesday’s wedding though but claimed the Sterns made it difficult for the two half-sisters to have a relationship. Then five years later, Melissa was a junior at George Washington University as a sorority member and religion major and found it strange when the case was brought up in her Bioethics class, she hoped to become a minister and a mother and at 18 she allowed the Sterns to fully adopt her, terminating Mary Beth’s rights. 

And those fixing their lips to say that the Sterns had more rights because they could afford a “good life” for her? I leave this for you to watch.

So the media savaged Mary Beth Whitehead, a working-class white mother who gave birth to a healthy and chubby baby, how did the media treat poor, drug-addicted black mothers and their “crack babies”? (TL;DR, it was bad, very bad, you know it’s bad bad really really bad!). 

Up next...and for all you moms dealing with the judgements from an unhelpful world, here are words from Lois Foutley

[remembertae]

East Los High  - Jessie’s Story

(Photo: Hulu) S1 E13 - 24, released 6/18/13 WRITTEN BY: Mary Feuer, Chris Franco, Zoila A. Galeano, Evangeline Ordaz, Joaquin F. Palma, Carlos Portugal, Shelley Acosta Smith, and Sasha Stroman SYNOPSIS East Los Angeles High School junior Jessie vomits before her dance group performs. Afterward, she approaches choreographer Cristian -- with whom she had a secret one-night stand -- and tells him she might be pregnant. He blames her for not using birth control and denies having any responsibility for her situation. Jessie later learns she is pregnant and visits a clinic to get some advice. The doctor presents her options - raise the baby, give it up for adoption, or terminate.

At home, Jessie's mother Lupe is livid after discovering her daughter's pregnancy test. Lupe guilt trips Jessie for getting knocked up as a teen (just as she did) and ruining her college ambitions. When Jessie says it's still early and she has "options," Lupe says, "You mean an abortion?.. You know we don't believe in that." Lupe's one consolation is that Jessie's nice boyfriend Jacob (who, like Lupe, has no idea Jessie slept with Cristian) will be a good, responsible dad, unlike Jessie's father. Meanwhile, Jacob is planning to break up with Jessie so he can be with her cousin Maya, who lives with Jessie and Lupe. Jacob is shocked when Jessie tells him she's pregnant. They had sex only one time (he assumes she'd been a virgin until that point) and he used a condom. Jessie says it must have broke. Jacob asks her to consider terminating, as he was planning to attend the University of Indiana on scholarship. Jessie is torn. Later, Jacob's disappointed father Hernan tells his son he'll have to step up and take care of the baby. Then Lupe -- who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer -- begs Jacob to marry Jessie as a favor to her. He agrees and later proposes to Jessie, though he is actually in love with Maya. Knowing how her fiancee and cousin feel about each other, Jessie begs Maya to leave her home forever. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Jessie must reckon with the possibility that she may not finish high school, much less attend college. Jacob's heart breaks over the loss of his scholarship and Maya's sudden disappearance. With nowhere to go and no other family to take her in, troubled Maya turns to stripping, drugs, and alcohol; she eventually overdoses and winds up in rehab. Meanwhile, Lupe's doctor speaks to Jessie about her pregnancy in private and tells her she needn't go through with it. But Jessie can't imagine acting against her dying mother's wishes. Even after Lupe passes away, Jessie intends to marry Jacob, especially once she learns it's too late to have a pill abortion. Jessie and a newly sober Maya reunite for Lupe's funeral, along with Lupe's sisters Paulina (a successful fashion exec) and Reina (Maya's drug addicted mom). Reina can tell Maya and Jacob have a thing and encourages her daughter to forget about him; the two make plans to leave town the day of Jessie and Jacob's wedding. But before they leave, a heartsick Maya sneaks into the church just long enough to see Jessie walk down the aisle. Shortly after Maya bolts, Jessie stops the ceremony and tells Jacob she needs to speak to him in private. She finally admits to him that she had unprotected sex with Cristian, who is the actual fetus father. Now off the hook, Jacob immediately leaves the church to find Maya. Jessie later confesses her situation to Tia Paulina. Paulina tells her niece it isn't too late to have an abortion. Jessie says, "Good girls don't have abortions." Paulina responds, "Yes, we do," and tells Jessie all about the abortion she had as a teen, which she never regretted. A few weeks later, Jacob and Maya graduate high school. Paulina delivers the keynote address at their commencement, which is all about life being a series of choices. As she speaks, we see a montage in which Jessie visits a clinic with Maya at her side and has a surgical abortion. In an epilogue, we learn that one year later Maya and Jacob are still together and Jessie is going to college to study medicine. KEEPING IT REAL QUOTIENT I watched the whole first season of this series because I had no idea where the abortion story would begin or end. It's usually easy for me to glean that information just by scanning reviews, but this program (which features an entirely Latino cast) doesn't appear to get a lot of English-language press. I had no idea that Jessie's unplanned pregnancy would stretch over 12 episodes, or that so much drama would hinge upon whether or not she births this child. Beginning in the first half of the season, there's this other unplanned pregnancy story about Jessie's friend Ceci, a homeless teenage girl who gets pregnant by accident and faces enormous struggle after she decides to keep the baby. When Ceci speaks to the same clinic doctor whom Jessie would later visit, the physician explains California abortion laws in clear, non-judgmental detail. This was when I began to notice that East Los High isn't just a steamy teen soap. It's also full of these handy public service announcements about preventing and dealing with unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. In fact, this production is bankrolled by a nonprofit organization called Population Media Center, whose mission is "using entertainment-education for social change". Essentially, PMC commissioned a group of producers to create an engaging scripted drama in response to high rates of teen pregnancy among Latinas, While exploring the sex lives of these young characters, the writers sprinkle in useful facts relating to sexual health, such as how various forms of contraception work, the difference between medical and surgical abortion, and how to use Plan B. Oftentimes the delivery of these messages can be a bit clunky. Sometimes the action pauses abruptly so the producers can deliver an important public service announcement to the teen viewing audience. But it helps that the action surrounding these messages is very entertaining in ways you'd expect a teen soap to be, with all the sex, love triangles, and dark family secrets that keep viewers like me hooked. But unlike a teen soap in the vein of Beverly Hills 90210, which focuses on the lives of wealthy, white teens living in one of the country's poshest zip codes, East Los High is gritty and sometimes very harsh in realistic ways. My favorite thing about Ceci and Jessie's stories is that, in both cases, neither fetus father has any interest in raising a child. I find it odd that in so many TV depictions of unplanned teen pregnancy (see 21 Jump Street, Degrassi: The Next Generation, Parenthood, Friday Night Lights, and the aforementioned 90210) the boy wants the girl to keep the baby. On East Los High, the boys' responses to their sex partner's unplanned pregnancies range from, "That's not my problem," to, "Please have an abortion." Not one fetus father on this show wants to get stuck parenting a kid they didn't plan, and that sentiment certainly tracks more with my personal experience and the real life abortion stories I've witnessed. I also love that we see an unflinching portrayal of how an oops pregnancy can upend so many lives. Obviously, Jessie and Jacob are sacrificing their ambitions to do the "right" thing. And of course, their impending marriage quashes Jacob and Maya's chance for romance, which is sad because they have this intense bond forged by their working relationship (talented cook Maya has helped revive Jacob and his father Hernan's failing taqueria). When Maya leaves her family's home and dives into this other work situation that makes her miserable, her disappearance not only breaks Jacob's heart but also threatens his family's business. Some of these melodramatic developments can feel a bit contrived -- it is a soap opera, after all -- but none of it is unbelievable. In Jessie and Jacob's case, this fetus is causing lots of problems for both them and their love ones. The only person who is at all relieved at the thought of these two kids marrying is Lupe. To be honest, she really got on my nerves. As an ex-Catholic, the scene in which she confronts Jessie about her pregnancy made me angry in a very familiar way. Here we see the cycle of guilt and martyrdom at work. Lupe is enraged with Jessie for getting pregnant young, because she assumes her daughter would have learned by her example of constant suffering and sacrifice. At the same time, she won't even consider "allowing" Jessie to abort (though as physicians on the show repeatedly note, Jessie doesn't need her legal permission).  When Jessie tells her mom, "I didn't know what to do! You never told me what to do," Lupe ignores her, saying, "At least you won't have to raise this baby alone." As far as she's concerned, Jessie must resign herself to a life of working multiple, low-paying jobs as punishment for having sex. There is no joy in her daughter's situation. According to Lupe's worldview, her daughter is damned if she aborts, but she's also damned if she becomes an underage mom. Jessie's only chance at redemption is sacrificing her dreams by bearing a child she doesn't want, and setting her own kid up for future guilt trips by marrying a guy she's not that into. I find Lupe's martyrdom rather self-serving, in a demented way. But again, it's familiar to me and very real. Given all this, it makes sense that Jessie pretends Jacob is the fetus father. When she confesses the truth to him, she admits, "I wanted it to be yours so bad. I even convinced myself it was." And why wouldn't she? Especially after her mom dies, his presence as a spouse and father would be the main difference between her and Ceci, who has to live in a shelter for teen moms because she doesn't have anyone to help her. 

Fortunately, Jessie does have another ally - Tia Paulina. As a jet-setting business woman, Paulina cannot always be there for her nieces. But when she is, she comes with clear-eyed, thoughtful advice about safe sex, and encourages these girls to envision their futures beyond locking down a husband. I pumped my fist heartily when she revealed her own abortion story. The writers did really good job of explaining how this woman of faith processes her termination. When Jessie asks her aunt what the hardest part of her abortion was, Paulina says, "I just wondered if there was a spirit that was getting ready to come and be with me. And I had to tell that spirit to wait. That was hard. But at the same time I was happy too, because there was something that I could look forward to in the future." It's really important for young people who believe in God to see examples of faithful adults who are okay with abortion. This isn't something we often see on television. For that and all the other reasons mentioned above, Jessie’s story is really special.

GRADE A- Most of my issues with this story arc are aesthetic. It drags for a long time. The abruptly interspersed Very Important Messages Regarding Teen Sex can be distracting. The slut-shaming aspect of Maya's strip club misadventures -- especially the way her surly coworkers are portrayed -- is a bit insulting and kinda square. But for all its melodrama, this first season of East Los High speaks a lot of truth about abortion, teen pregnancy, and teen motherhood. None of the principal characters are demonized for the difficult choices they make (for instance, Ceci comes out the other end of her teen mom story with more dignity than she had at the beginning). This is a very compassionate and thoroughly considered tale. And I also like that I didn't predict how it would end. - by Tara

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

Does Race Matter in America’s Most Diverse ZIP Codes?

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/does-race-matter-in-americas-most-diverse-zip-codes/

Does Race Matter in America’s Most Diverse ZIP Codes?

“The gift about being in close proximity is that you’re desensitized to seeing a different culture and judging it right away,” said Lena Yee-Ross, a 17-year-old high school senior whose mother is Chinese-American and father is black.

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Lena Yee-Ross, center, with her classmates Arabella Compton, left, and Christian Bustos at Jesse Bethel High School in Vallejo. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Living next to one another for generations, since a major naval yard drew large numbers to the town with the promise of jobs, has mitigated much of the tension found in more segregated communities. People of all stripes sing arm in arm during Thursday night karaoke at Gentleman Jim’s bar, where on a recent evening a white man with a cowboy hat sat next to a Filipino man in a biker vest, and the songs ranged from Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” to the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly.”

Students of different races study side by side at one local high school, and their shades of skin color span such a spectrum that it is difficult to tell what races or ethnicities they are when they congregate for lunch.

Still, Vallejo (pronounced va-LAY-oh) is no promised land.

Stubborn racial divisions remain. The typical black family has a household income that is three-fourths of the city’s median. Nearly three out of every four members of the Police Department are white, and all of the City Council members are either Filipino or white.

Academic performance is improving in schools, but achievement gaps remain: Of the 11th graders at Jesse Bethel High School, which is in the 94591 ZIP code, 42 percent of black students and 51 percent of Hispanic ones tested proficient in English this year, compared with 63 percent of white students and 77 percent of Filipino ones.

Spencer Lane, a 17-year-old white senior at a high school where whites are in the minority, said classmates had told him that he looked as if he could shoot up a school. Ms. Yee-Ross said her mother once heard a news account of a robbery and insisted that the perpetrator had to be black. And the Johnsons have battled racial tension in their family and their business.

A white customer who had been a regular at the restaurant once asked the woman taking his order to make sure that a young black employee did not cook his food, Ms. Johnson said. When she heard commotion at the front of the restaurant, she said, she confronted the customer, who told her: “How can you have people like that working here? His pants are sagging.”

The Johnsons met in Vallejo in 2003, introduced by mutual friends. He liked her toothy smile, she liked his respect, but each harbored racial stereotypes.

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Mr. Johnson, 33, assumed that she would be a devoted homemaker who would cook and clean for him. Ms. Johnson, 31, said she was impressed that he did not wear baggy pants and that “he doesn’t talk ghetto.”

As diverse as Vallejo is, Ms. Johnson said she grew up hanging out mostly with Filipinos, a clustering that many local residents of different races said is natural. Immigrants from Mexico or the Philippines may want the company of people who can help them navigate a new country.

But within these groups, stereotypes can fester.

When Mr. Johnson’s mother, Tanja Mayo-Pittman, found out he was dating Ms. Johnson, she thought of the time she worked at Home Depot. She was the only non-Filipino on her team, and felt ostracized in part because her co-workers spoke Tagalog and joked with one another, leaving her to wonder if they were teasing her.

“Until I met them, I couldn’t imagine that they just had open arms toward my child,” she said of her son’s future in-laws.

But those fears and barriers have dropped. “I stopped feeling judged or left out,” she said. “I stopped seeing them as Filipino. I started just seeing them as people.”

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East Vallejo is within the third most diverse ZIP code in the country, 94591. Credit Photographs by Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Ms. Mayo-Pittman, 52, also had to contend with her own formative years in nearby Pinole, when, as a fair-skinned woman, she had trouble fitting in — not black enough for the black people, or white enough to be white.

“To be honest with you, I never wanted my kids to be light-complected because I didn’t want them to have an identity crisis,” she said.

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The Johnsons have four daughters together, from age 3 to 11, each with tawny brown skin.

As the girls lounged on the carpet of Ms. Johnson’s grandparents’ ranch-style home one evening, after a dinner of lumpia and white rice, Ms. Johnson joked about some of the questions that had come from her husband’s side of the family: Do you work at a nail salon? How do you speak such good English?

Ms. Johnson’s father, Al Remorin, 51, grew up in nearby Richmond, where most of his friends were black. He moved to Vallejo in 1979, when he was 13. That’s when he came to know a lot of other Filipinos. He was surprised, he said, to hear some of their racism. People asked him why he talked as if he were black.

Mr. Remorin quickly bonded with Mr. Johnson, often discussing sports. So Ms. Johnson said she was caught off guard by her father’s reaction when she became pregnant.

“How can you?” Ms. Johnson said her father asked. As in: How could she think it was O.K. to have biracial children?

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Tanja Mayo-Pittman with her granddaughter Serenity Johnson. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Remorin said he did not recall saying that. He never had an issue with his daughter having biracial children, he said. Back in his day, he rarely saw “half-Filipinos and half-blacks, or half-this and half-that,” he said. “It’s hard enough as it is being nonwhite, and you imagine when they’re half-this and half-that.”

Things are different today. In the Vallejo-Fairfield metropolitan area, 22 percent of marriages from 2011 to 2015 were interracial, more than double the national rate in the same period, according to a Pew Research survey.

Even in 2001, The New York Times was reporting that Vallejo was one of the most racially balanced cities in the country. Then, as now, racial and ethnic groups often stuck with their own.

Back then, there were also concerns about the racial makeup of the police, with no African-Americans above the rank of sergeant. Today, the longest-serving member in the history of the department is black and currently a lieutenant, but there are no other African-Americans above the rank of sergeant.

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“There is not really the interaction in the way we would like,” Liat Meitzenheimer, who is black and Japanese, said in 2001. “Kids in the neighborhoods play with each other, but by and large, people stay to themselves.”

A decade and a half later, Ms. Meitzenheimer still lives in Vallejo and she says those divisions still exist.

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Al Remorin with his granddaughters Cheyenne and Serenity Johnson. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

“For somebody who has lived here for 32 years now, it really hasn’t changed,” she said in a recent interview. “There are people actively trying to find ways to bring people together so that we participate from different communities together on single issues, whether it be sports or some artistic endeavor.”

Vallejo is even more racially balanced now, with the white population dropping and other racial and ethnic groups growing. Hispanic and white residents each make up about 25 percent of the population. A little more than 23 percent of the city is Asian and nearly 21 percent black.

The 94591 ZIP code — where the Johnsons live, own their business and send their children to school — is a sprawling swath of the city known as East Vallejo. Among ZIP codes with at least 50,000 residents, it is the third most diverse in the country, according to a Times analysis of census data.

Vallejo’s diversity stems from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which for nearly a century and a half attracted families with the promise of stable jobs. The yard closed in 1996, and with it went much of this town’s fortunes; the city declared bankruptcy in 2008. It remains a largely working-class bedroom community, though some fear that the relatively affordable housing could lure more affluent Bay Area residents, displacing low-income residents.

Past restrictions that kept people of color confined to certain neighborhoods have largely fallen, but glaring disparities endure. Black households rank lowest in median income, at $42,000. Residents have complained of brutality by the police force against black and brown people, and the seven-member City Council currently does not have a black or Hispanic member.

“I think that’s part of that racial divide, where Filipinos want to have Filipino leadership or African-Americans want to have an African-American leader or whites want to have a white leader, so they specifically target an individual for election,” said Bob Sampayan, who was elected the city’s first Filipino-American mayor last year.

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But Mr. Sampayan and other local residents see promising signs of integration, like the diverse neighborhood watch patrols that sprang up after cuts to the Police Department and the diverse group involved in the city’s participatory budgeting process.

The Vallejo Chamber of Commerce, once a mostly white organization, now has its first Latina chairwoman, and nearly half of its board members are people of color. Different ethnic chambers of commerce — Filipino, Hispanic and African-American — work more closely with the city chamber under a group called the Vallejo Business Alliance.

Then there are the day-to-day interactions that blur conventions of race and culture.

Christopher Morales, 17, said his black friends were not offended when he, a Mexican-American, used an anti-black slur because their relationships transcended race. It is an attitude, he conceded, that puts Vallejo in something of a diversity bubble.

“It doesn’t really offend us,” he said, “until someone from, like, an outside town comes over here.”

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