Race Complicates Senior Care - NYTimes.com: She thought her father, who was 70 and a retired teacher, could use some help. He handled all his personal care, but shopping and cooking and laundry were beginning to tax him. He’d fallen several times.
So she started looking at senior housing options, both in Florida, where she lived, and in South Carolina, where he did.
At the first facility, the daughter — to preserve the family’s privacy in this delicate matter, I’ll refer to her as B. — noticed something she hadn’t thought much about before. “The place was pretty white, for lack of a better phrase,” she told me in an interview. Her family is African-American.
When B. asked the director about diversity, “She said, ‘Oh, we’re very diverse. We have a lot of people who’ve moved here from Europe.’” This wasn’t what B. had in mind.
