Posted on 11/18/2003 9:53:29 PM PST by yonif
DURHAM -- If Sunday morning at 11 o'clock is, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, the most segregated hour in America, 11 o'clock on any weekday morning is the most segregated part of the day at Durham's Northern High School.
Lunchtime at the 1,600-student school is when, students say, the school's cafeteria takes on a rigid racial geography. Black students occupy most of the tables in the upper tier of the rectangular room, groups of white students generally gather on the lower tier, and the school's small but growing Hispanic population congregates at tables here and there.
"This table right here is usually the Mexican table," said sophomore Alicia Bell, pointing to the table next to where she and other black students chatted over cheese- and Tabasco-soaked french fries.
"This table is usually black people. It's separate tables for each race," she said.
However, for at least one lunch hour Tuesday, a group of students tried to break up that self-segregation as part of a national event called Mix It Up at Lunch. The event is promoted by Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Students in each of Northern's two lunch periods were asked to voluntarily submit to randomly assigned lunch tables in hopes of prying open the tight grip that cliques, both racial and otherwise, can have in high school.
"We're trying to get people to challenge boundaries and talk to people they wouldn't normally hang out with," said Dorothy Allen, a junior who helped organize the event.
Students said the results were mixed, with most choosing their normal routine, but the event's organizers, a multiethnic group of students, admitted that they didn't expect wholesale changes overnight.
"People don't like to leave their comfort zone," said Ricky Green, a white student who spearheaded the project.
Northern's student body is 50 percent black, 42 percent white and 4 percent Hispanic, according to the most recent school system enrollment report.
Junior Christopher Webb, who also helped plan the event, said he sees the lunchroom divisions as a legacy from the old days of enforced segregation and overt racism, rather than as a sign of simmering tension among students today.
"People are just afraid to talk to other races because of things that happened in the past," said Webb, who is black.
All the students interviewed Tuesday agreed that racial divisions in the cafeteria are pervasive. Many also said they thought that the Mix it Up idea was well-intentioned but doomed to failure.
"When me and my friends first heard about it, we fell out laughing," said senior Reese Marsalis. "We thought there was no way."
Marsalis, who is black, gave mixing it up a chance, sitting, talking and laughing with a group of mostly white students. However, he said he had doubts that one day would have a lasting effect.
"This is a good experience," Marsalis said, "but, unfortunately, tomorrow, it will be forgotten."
Other students said it just wasn't worth the trouble to sit with a new group for a day. Two students, Zack MacDonald and Ed Hobbs, sat at their usual table Tuesday, with their usual group of white friends.
"I didn't participate because I wanted to sit with my friends, not a bunch of people I don't know," said McDonald, a junior.
Hobbs, also a junior, said he has no problem with people of different races, or from different social groups, but he found the Mix it Up event pointless.
"Just because you sit at a different table doesn't make you a different person," he said. "I can hang out with kids who have Mohawks, or cornrows or skinheads, but at lunch, I want to sit with my friends."
Meanwhile, even at the randomly assigned tables, some students ended up sitting together by race anyway, and the conversations developed accordingly. At others, the students mixed their seating, but found the resulting conversations strained.
Marcus McDow, a senior who did not participate, said he thought the awkwardness helps maintain student cliques. Those from different racial and ethnic groups don't have enough shared experiences to keep the conversation flowing, he said.
"Mexicans and blacks don't have anything to talk about," said McDow, who sat with other black students. "Most of the blacks and whites don't have anything to talk about."
Principal John Colclough said he thinks the students at Northern relate well across racial and ethnic lines for most of the school day, but that there remains a "barrier" each day at lunch. He said the Mix it Up event was a way to at least make students aware of the issue and to promote dialogue.
"I think once it's brought up and discussed, there's a solution [to be found]," Colclough said.
Green, the student who led the project, agreed, saying that while students are not likely to change their seating habits permanently after just one day, they may remember the exercise.
"At least for the next month, people will still think about it," he said. "The thought will still be in their heads, subconsciously."
They also have the same crappy music in common.
I don't think it about what happened in the past .. but rather what is happening in the present
It's been over 20 years .. however, the school I went to had blacks, whites, asians & hispanics .. yes there were cliques .. but we also didn't need people to tell us to mix it up .. they already were
Sounds like they are segregated by hair style.
The "barrier" is each individual student's freedom of choice.
This is simply one more blatant and silly example of social engineering and one more instance of our so called education system acting out their distraction from their legitimate goal.
People are afraid to talk, because they are afraid they might 'offend' someone or some culture and be expelled for a week. That's what the PC idiots have brought us to. They help create the very thing they are trying to squelch.
I agree .. but I also think that is what they wanted to happen
Cause more of a riff
4% of the student body is unaccounted for or the author didn't care to mention their ethnicity because white, black and brown are the only ethnicities the liberal new media wants to try to set against each other.
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