This article is 6 years old

Opinion

Student Behavior Reinforces Segregation

Illustration by Eloni Bickham

Segregation: The enforced separation of different racial groups in a country, community, or establishment. To talk about such a serious topic such as this we need to know the definition, especially when it is something that is so apparent in the daily life of a Berkeley High School (BHS) student. Although BHS is very diverse and has many people of different backgrounds, races, and cultures, when you look around at lunch or after school, it doesn’t seem to reflect that reality.

Many BHS students become very comfortable with staying within their groups. And because of how our society is organized, those groups will usually be categorized by race. Whenever you have cliques, there are always problems, but those problems become worse when they are based on an identity such as race. It exaggerates racial tension and divides communities. It makes it so that people look at each other as the “other.” Which, in my opinion, is a very strange way of thinking. We all go to the same school, we all are around the same age, we live in relatively the same area. In short, we have a lot more similarities than differences. So then why, when we walk through the school, do we see so much division?

It is very hard to identify an exact cause. There’s the fact that we usually inherit our parents’ ways of thinking, or that we like to be comfortable, and stepping outside of our comfort zones can be very scary.

It  doesn’t help that BHS has small schools, which makes it much easier to exclusively hang out and make friends with the same type of people. I come from the Arts and Humanities Academy (AHA), which is a very diverse small school. Due to this sense of inclusiveness I have met some of my best friends, who I don’t think I would have talked to otherwise. This type of school system can work really well, but if done wrong can do more harm than good. Students of color in Berkeley International High School (BIHS) can feel like a “token,” or an outsider, because most of their classmates are Caucasian. These students are often ostracized or in other cases, exotified by students or teachers. This makes an environment where students of color don’t feel respected or accepted, so they can not access the same chances at happiness, sense of community, and education, as their white peers.

Part of the reason why we have one public high school in Berkeley is to try to combat this segregation. In the 1930s, there was a policy called “redlining” where banks could legally refuse to sell property to people based on race. The way that it worked in Berkeley and Oakland is they would refuse to sell property to African Americans above Martin Luther King Jr. Way. So if they wanted to buy property, they would have to buy in the flatlands, not in the hills, which created  very apparent segregation. Even though we live in the “Berkeley bubble,” we need to realize that Berkeley was built on institutional racism. Once we become aware, we will begin to understand why and how segregation became and remains a factor at BHS.

I will admit, there is a lot of integration and diverse friend groups at BHS, but there is still work to do. You can especially see this in the events of the last month. There is definitely a problem with racial divides at BHS. And although it won’t change overnight, we, as a community, can always try to make it better. The bare minimum you would have to do to help remedy this problem, is just say “hi” to somebody you don’t know. Who knows, maybe you will find your next best friend.