The High School Racial Divide?

[Anonymous]

The day I entered my freshman year of high school many years ago, it was the first time in my entire life within the confines of a school, organization, club, or program, I was not considered to be an only, or a "minority" in the sense that I attended a school which actively recruited minority students seeking to join the medical profession. School was a veritable cornucopia of races with names like Nguyen, Onwudiwe, and Vasquez dominating the school roster as opposed to the typical Smith, Jones, and David’s I was used to seeing. I cannot express how absolutely liberating it was for the first time in my life to be in a place where my culture, my heritage, and my race needed no explanation and there were people just like me who could share like stories, and history, without any justification or explanation needed. I had gone from one of 3-10 students in my entire class, to one of almost a hundred in our official class of 300 some odd students. What also made the experience wonderful was that we had culture days in which you could come in your native cultural garb (we wore uniforms most other days), and they had programing meant to celebrate everyone's culture, and they basically asked you as a student to not only shine, but succeed in the incredibly demanding, rigorous, and sometimes mind numbingly difficult medical based curriculum which often had us doing 4-5 hours of homework a night, turning in full 10-15 page papers, and taking 2-3 final exam style tests a day.

One of the side effects of this type of curriculum is that we didn't really have any sports teams what so ever, and the clubs and organizations and extracurriculars weren't anything to brag about. The emphasis was on maintaining the matriculation rate of nearly 100% to college, the 99% attendance rating for all students across the grades, and the success rate of the medical based clubs and organizations. This left an interesting hole in what for most is a typical high school experience where your social life and the social groups you join are largely based on connecting through sports, teams, clubs, or school wide organizations. Without these groups to sort of force allegiances and friendships, we didn't really have any of the typical cliques of jocks, band geeks, theater people, etc. Everyone at our school was a recruited nerd who had a lot of drive an ambition to want to succeed in a future medical profession. So this brings me to the lunch room and the racial divide.

When lunch time arrived, it was the only time of day where we could really relax and sit with who we wanted--again, at a typical school, you sit with your social group--but without that here, our lunch room took on a much different appearance. Instead of the social group divide, we had the racial group divide. At the front table (which is where I sat), we were the only true group with a mix of all types of minorities, at the first official long row of tables were the Indians, second tables, a mix of Indians and Asians, the third tables, the Latinos, and the final long row of tables, plus one side table, were the African Americans and a few biracial students. The white students chose to eat lunch outside in the common seating area. It was a sight to see really, and people didn't really make an effort to mix with other tables. This is not to suggest that if you wanted to sit at a different table, you couldn't, because people were mostly friendly and welcoming, but most people never tried. You sat with your race and that was it. My table developed because we somehow all found each other at the right time and place and I suppose didn't care too much about sitting with "our own kind," and formed our own table separate from all the rest. We were often told by other groups that they admired our diversity which was the true irony attending a school meant to celebrate our diversity. I did love my 'official' race table, and made several visits there to hang out, but I also really cherished my group with all sorts of differences of opinion and experiences. So in many ways, I felt I reaped the benefits of both groups throughout my high school experience.

This experience led me to a few conclusions whether erroneous or not, which were that no matter the situation you're in, I think for most people, you tend to stick with your own kind whether that be the cheerleaders or your own race. As a group, you are stronger, you have common ideas and identity and you feel safer. This divide also made me wonder somewhat about the white group who chose to sit outside rather than at least in the cafeteria with everyone else. Were they now experiencing what it was truly like to be in some small degree, a minority? Were they now feeling that they didn't have the power they may have had at other schools being in the majority? Did they purposefully choose to segregate themselves from the general population? I had been, after all, in their position my whole life...being an only, a few, the most different, and on and on. It also made me wonder, even at a school with an almost 75% minority rate, how integrated of a population were we all really if the vast majority of people only sat at lunch an interacted with people who looked like them. Was this just inevitable because of the similarities that existed or were we all generally actively trying to form cliques in the only way we had available to us, through race? All in all, despite the differences that may have existed between us all, people were friendly and outside of the seperation at lunch, got along pretty well with each other. Incidences of bullying all together were pretty low (we had an extremely strict code of conduct which was most definitely upheld and enforced), and as you can maybe imagine, issues with racism were pretty much non-existent. Oh, and that group of friends I sat with at lunch, are still all my very good friends to this day.

[youknowitt]

It's safe to say that I am very blessed that my school isn't too cliquey when it comes to race. :-)

[myTake Owner]

That's really nice.