For Whites in Prince George's, a Mirror on Race

Abby Hopper at a Prince George's pool with daughters Madeline, left, and Ellie. The Hoppers moved to the county from a white area of Baltimore. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

There was the time last month when Abby showed up to a friend's baby shower right on time at 2 p.m. "and I was the only one there for 45 minutes," Hopper said, laughing. Time, says Hopper, can often be more of a suggestion in Prince George's.

My friend "just laughed at me. She was like, 'Oh, Abby, 2 didn't really mean 2,' " Hopper said.

Hopper, who is a child support and divorce lawyer in Greenbelt, grew up in Bowie and University Park and attended Prince George's County public schools until sixth grade. She then switched to the National Cathedral School in Washington, and went on to Dartmouth and the University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore.

She says her parents exposed her and her brother, Justin Ross, now a Democratic state delegate from Greenbelt, to all the diversity the county had to offer -- "the Irish festival, the German festival, the Jamaican heritage festival, we went." The county's racial and ethnic mix helped her appreciate differences. "I feel like I can find some area of commonality with almost anybody. Children, music, food -- there's always something," she says. "That's what you learn when you have to be flexible and find different ways of relating."

Hopper thinks parents who limit their children's exposure put them at a disadvantage; the United States will be majority minority by mid-century. "My goal as a parent is to raise kids who are confident in their skin and essentially around anyone else's skin," she says. "That doesn't just happen by looking at books and videos and talking about it."

Two years ago, they moved to Fairwood, a new thousand-acre planned community about five miles outside the Capital Beltway in Bowie, with a pool, tennis court, clubhouse and park amenities, and $500,000-plus homes. When they were looking, real estate agents would always describe the area as "diverse," says Greg Hopper, 33, a former Baltimore prosecutor now in private practice, "but we were the only whites looking at the models."

Politically and in terms of what they want for their families, Hopper says, he has much in common with his neighbors, but has had to make some social adjustments. He's become better at mingling at holiday and Super Bowl parties, but the golf situation is still kind of funny. At the course on Enterprise Road, "There's always a minute where everybody is looking around, and it's like okay, who's got the white guy in the cart?" Hopper, who grew up in southwestern Missouri, is not used to wondering if he'll be accepted, or working to fit in.

"I don't want to say this is a unique experience, because it's not from an African American perspective. But it feels awfully unique to me at the time," he says.

Once a white couple drove through the cul-de-sac, and Jabril, the black 8-year-old boy across the street, told the kids, there's your grandparents . "It was kind of beautiful though," says Hopper, "like it was the most natural thing in the world," that all white people would be related. "It was a funny flip."

The Hoppers say that coming from Baltimore, where Abby was held up twice, they aren't worried about high crime stats, which seem to be isolated to certain parts of the county. But they fret about the schools. They've been looking at a few of the county's magnet programs and private Catholic schools. Greg says there were only two blacks in his school system. He tries to imagine how they must have felt and wonders how his own children will feel when they get to school.

But when his parents visited, he had fun watching them try to contextualize a community day: mostly black neighbors, hip-hop music, a beautifully appointed swimming pool, an enclave of $900,000 homes.

Many black neighbors say they love the neighborhood mix. Although it is majority African American, at times it can look like a mini-United Nations. Michelle Jackson, a part-time consultant and Habitat for Humanity volunteer, says her 10-year-old son "plays with a Caucasian boy, an Asian boy, a boy from the Caribbean and an Indian boy."