I was just curious as to how many people went to a high school where blacks and whites were really separated. My roommate is from Chapel Hill, and I took her home (Martinsville, Va) with me one weekend. We went to the high school football game and she was amazed at how the black people sat on one side of the stadium and whites on the other. The blacks and whites at my old high school do not get along. True there are a lot of exceptions, but for the most part, they have no respect for each other. The school has become dominantly black, and violence has increased quite a bit. If you accidently bump into a black person in the hall, you get cussed out. Just wondering if anyone else went to a school like this.

Erin,
that is so weird to me. I don't know maybe it just wasn't noticeable to me in my school, since there weren't so many blacks, but I never saw that much of a separation between blacks and whites. I mean, blacks usually hung out more with their black friends, but they weren't treated different. I would have probably been amazed as well if i had seen the separation at a hight school football game!!

It's definitely getting worse. It's not so much the blacks and whites being violent towards each other; it's mostly blacks being violent towards blacks. A great track athlete that I grew up with was shot to death last year by a group of seven black students from the school they were competing against just because he won the track meet that previous afternoon, and I recently found out from my cousin (who is still in high school) that last year's homecoming king (who was black) shot another black student in the head. I can't believe this stuff is happening here. It's definitely scary, but the segregation in the school systems is unreal.

It makes me so sad to hear this! I went to a school that was about 35% minorities and 65% white. I can say that the black students did hang out more with the other black students and same with the white students, however there was not a seperation like the one that you [Erin] have at your school. We all sat together at the football games and other athletic events. My two very best friends are black and that was ok at my school. We were very integrated. It sounds like that would not have happened at your school. I am so sad to hear about all the violence and anger there is at your school. It is my hope that one day things will change.

My high school was pretty evenly divided between the white and black students and there were never really any problems. I think it is sad to hear how the stadium was divided up at the football games. I guess since I never saw it at my school, I was pretty naive to the fact that other schools still experienced these things. Not to say that our school was perfect and peaceful all the time, because it wasn't, but most everyone hung out together and got along well.

If there was a lot of seperation at your school, as a teacher do you address the issue in your room? If so, how? I see there being two options. 1. try to get the two groups to interact in your class by group work, etc. 2. Let the students do their own thing and how that they arent distracted by the tension. As a teacher how do you know which to do and not have your class as a whole turn against you?

I think I would try to get the kids to interact with one another. Somebody needs to try and make a difference. I never really noticed the students turning against teachers at my high school, and I'm not really sure why they would do that if they were simply doing group work, discussions, etc. I think that in order to have a good learning environment, the classroom should be a comfortable place, not one where everyone is tense and uncomfortable with their peers. Although there was a lot of separation at my old school, more fights and arguments took place between people of the same race, not between races. It seemed like the whites and blacks just stayed out of each other's way (horrible I know).