At Chicago`s Brother Rice High School, where separate black and white proms were held last weekend, some students hope next year`s graduating class will be dancing together at a single prom.
For the first time ever at Evanston Township High School, students voted to have a disc jockey choose which music to play at the May 31 prom, thus settling a dispute over rock versus rap.
At Northern Illinois University, black students attended their own graduation ceremony two weeks ago and some white students are still resentful.
These are instances of the tensions occurring at schools across the country when the goals of integration seem at odds with the desire of minority students to hold on to their identities and cultures.
To provide a source of mutual support and preserve their identity, black students are voluntarily choosing to separate themselves at social and cultural events, in campus dormitories, cafeterias and lounges, at study sessions, athletic games and other activities.
The groupings, although they seem to be becoming more common, are neither new nor limited to blacks. Campuses long have had separate black and white fraternities, various ethnic clubs and religious organizations.
Sociologists say the racial and ethnic groupings are understandable and in many ways enrich campus life for all students.
Yet they also can act as barriers to cross-cultural mingling, they warn, unless enlightened administrators and faculty provide leadership to help students bridge the gaps.
”What`s happening is that students aren`t interacting much,” said Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.
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Poussaint said he doesn`t see the racial groupings as unhealthy but rather as ”a missed opportunity. They are limiting their chances of experiencing the world in a better way and enhancing their intellect.
”They will have to get along with different kinds of people in their lives. They`re going to have to learn in the workplace when they could have learned in college,” Poussaint said.
Despite society`s efforts to become more colorblind, the reverse seems to be happening on some college campuses where segregation is pronounced.
Troy Duster, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, studied the tendency of minority students on that campus to spend most of their time in ”racial and ethnic enclaves.”
”What`s dramatic about the racial and ethnic groupings is the fact that we are in a post-civil rights era, which people in the 1960s thought would produce an assimilation or connection across group lines,” Duster said.
Instead, as minority groups gain identity, there is less willingness to give up their cultures to fit in with the white majority.
That`s what happened at Brother Rice, when black students organized their own prom after a disagreement over what kind of music to play at the school-sponsored prom. Black students, who make up 12 percent of the enrollment, said they felt they didn`t have enough say in the school`s planning process.
Several days afterward, reflecting on the two proms, Brother Rice students said they believed black students had made their point, and they hoped it paved the way for more cooperation between blacks and whites in planning next year`s event.
”We felt the seniors did what they had to do,” Rob Matthews, a black junior, said last week. ”Next year, if it`s like that again, where we can`t have any say-so, we`ll split up again. But we don`t want to.”
Tyrone Johnson, another black junior, said the prom issue united black students, who feel they`ve had no mentor at the school because of a lack of black faculty.
”If we had one or two black teachers, maybe they could be the voice for us,” Johnson said.
Barriers also exist at Evanston Township High School, where enrollment is about 42 percent black and black students usually organize student dances. The music is typically black-oriented and the functions are poorly attended by whites.
”It just doesn`t appeal to (whites),” said Melissa Kelz, a white senior. ”The resentment is that no one goes.”
Though the students compromised on a disc jockey for selecting prom music, black and white students said they plan to go their separate ways to parties after the dance is over.
During free periods at the school, students tend to cluster along racial lines. ”Everyone goes to where their friends are,” Kelz said.
Rarely have students there spoken openly about racial issues.
”It`s too scary that you`ll say the wrong thing or someone will misunderstand you, so you just skirt around it,” said Devon Herrick, a white senior at Evanston Township.
But emotions ran high during the Persian Gulf war, and when a student activities director set up a microphone allowing students to air their opinions, feelings rushed out.
”A lot of blacks thought it was a racial war,” Kelz said. ”I was surprised because usually people don`t talk about it.”
Black students also voiced feelings that they are treated differently by the faculty and held to more stringent standards.
”There`s this alternative wing, where the problem kids go, and there is only one white kid. The rest are black. I think that`s racial,” said Letasha Francellno, a black student.
”If you`re white, you can have a lot of chances,” agreed Sandra Pierre, a black student.
When the students reach college, the groupings become even more evident.
At the University of Illinois at Chicago, for example, students have organized the Black Student Organization for Communication, the Black Graduate Business School Association, Black Architecture Students for Excellence, African-American Studies Organization and African-American Students Interested in Law.
The large, urban campus can be overwhelming and impersonal, students said. The groups provide a comfortable social network and supply academic support and boost morale for students who find themselves struggling because of poor preparation by inner-city high schools.
”These organizations definitely provided me with educational support,”
said Jessica Netterville, an engineering major at UIC. ”I wasn`t prepared in math. I got tutoring.”
White students view the groups as exclusionary, and they are often perplexed by the separatism, which adds to feelings of resentment over campus affirmative-action policies and fierce competition for admissions and financial aid.
At Northwestern University, Jonathan Bunce is one of several student journalists who last week published the results of an investigation into university admissions policies regarding minorities.
The students contended that Northwestern`s rate of admissions for black student applicants was considerably higher than for whites, Hispanics or Asians, even though their average test scores were lower.
A similar student newspaper article at Georgetown University last month said black law students` qualifications were inferior, igniting a heated controversy at that campus. Black students said the story was insulting and unfair.
”Among white students, I see a sense of resentment that the policies exist, to instinctively think, `Is this person here to fill a number or is he qualified?` ” Bunce said. ”I want to attend a school where students are intellectually qualified to be there regardless of race.”
Black students say their need for mutual support is misunderstood. At NIU last month, black students held their own graduation ceremony, with recognition certificates and black-green-and-gold tassels, attended by about 36 seniors. Kim Davis, one of the organizers, said the event was planned ”to motivate black freshmen and sophomores by example.”
”In most of my classes, I`m the only black student,” Davis said. ”I see the way other students react to me. They think I don`t deserve to be there and that I got in under a special program.”
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Davis said that when she first decided to major in business, she saw few other blacks in NIU`s business school.
”Some black students said it was too hard. I was discouraged. I didn`t see blacks graduating from NIU, period,” she said. ”I wanted to bring all of us together so we could all see who is graduating.”
Davis said she didn`t see the black ceremony as a substitute for participating in the official university commencement, which she also plans to attend.
The student newspaper, the Northern Star, ran an editorial critical of the event.
White students ”saw this as another wall put up between the races,”
said Greg Rivara, the student who wrote the editorial. ”They said everyone was welcome. But you`re not going to get white students to go to a
predominantly black function.”
Rivara also criticized the black students for billing the ceremony as a
”minority” graduation, while not including Hispanics or others in planning it.
When it comes to racial crossover at cultural or social events, ”the general animosity and tension really prohibits people” from attending events sponsored by other groups, Rivara said. ”Rarely can you walk through campus and see racially mixed groups.”
Many white students arriving on campus aren`t accustomed to an integrated environment, yet they have ”a sort of naive good will” about it, said Berkeley`s Duster. They wind up being turned off by the separatism.
”They don`t want simply to be in racial clubs or groupings. They want to experience each other. Instead, they`re confronted by enclaves and a balkanization process,” he said. ”They feel unwelcome.”
Both groups are sending double messages when they say activities are open to all, yet do nothing actively to encourage participation, Poussaint said.
Many whites would like to mingle with blacks but when they see blacks keep to themselves, they don`t feel they can, Poussaint said. And they are uncomfortable when the tables are turned and they are in the minority, he said.
Poussaint emphasized that school officials are going to have to take a new tack in building students` tolerance and understanding.
He suggested students be urged to participate in more multicultural events. One solution might be to create a ”pan-ethnic” council of student leaders from many racial and ethnic backrounds who jointly would organize activities of cultural significance and ensure they are accessible to all.
At Berkeley, Duster urged faculty to ask randomly chosen student groups to tackle classroom assignments together so students of different backgrounds would have more chance to interact.
He also recommended establishing a seminar in which small groups of students would meet monthly to discuss issues of integration.
”It`s more urgent than ever for schools to think about how to get students to partake of one another,” Poussaint said.
”Students aren`t doing it themselves.”