I grew up in a lily-white small town in Michigan and moved as an adult to the Detroit area, then to the Raleigh, NC area. In both of those locations, I got to meet and enjoy knowing people from a variety of races, ethnicities, religions and cultures. When deciding where to live in our retirement, my wife and I looked at a number of active adult communities in the Carolinas and in Florida. We found that basically all of them where overwhelmingly white and The Villages is no exception. That actually concerned us as we have no interest in living in a community that excludes people for their race, creed, color, sexual orientation or whatever. It got us wondering if active retirement communities are actively racist or not. We've come to think that the economics of living in an active retirement community favor those who've been more successful financially and due perhaps to the existing (and hopefully fading) racism of the system in American, that has in the past been more likely to be whites than non-whites. Perhaps we're just now seeing that change as more financially successful non-whites are coming to retirement age. But that's just an idle theory and backed by nothing but speculation.
We finally decided to move here early this year and have been loving in. While admittedly we are living in "the bubble" where real-world problems sort of disappear into days filled with having fun, I am pleased to report that I've never heard anybody here in The Villages speaking despairingly of anybody on the basis of those kinds of things. I have heard some strong political opinions expressed, mostly from the right (when the population here is actually about evenly split between Republicans, Democrats and independents according to voting records), but nothing from a racist or homophobic or whatever point of view. Some from possibly a sexist background but normally in the sense of old-fashioned "gents" being overly polite to "ladies".
I think the majority of folks here (or at least the ones I've met and talked with) would welcome you as you sound like you want the same kinds of things out of your retirement that the rest of us do!
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