A polychromatic day

One of my school kids told a funny joke to me today. "Ms. Warren, where would gangsters live in a jacket?" he asked.

"I don't know, the pocket?" I responded.

"Nope, in da hood!" he quipped.

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Although it's only been eight short years since I graduated from high school, I can still see a drastic changes in the social scene from when I went.

I went to a high school in northern California that had students from 28 different countries. The demographics were broken down roughly into a third caucasian, a third Hispanic and a third of everything else mixed together. There wasn't much contention between the different groups. In fact, there was hardly mixing of the groups at all. Everyone kind of kept to themselves.

At lunch, your race generally determined where you would ate- Hispanics munched in the cafeteria, Polynesians and African Americans dominated the quad, Asians lived it up in the AP classrooms and the white people ate pretty much everywhere else. That division of races was often reflected in every aspect of the social scene.

One day in the 11th grade, I went to the cafeteria because my Latina friend from church had invited me to sit with her during lunch. I still remember my feeling of discomfort as I walked across that seemingly endless cafeteria to where she sat, with a hundred pairs of eyes boring into me. While no one seemed angry about my presence in the room, it seemed like they couldn't figure out why I was there. I felt so awkward that I never attempted to cross that boundary again.

My first day of my teaching position at a local high school in Nevada, I felt taken aback by how those boundaries and barriers of race were being torn down. I noticed dozens of mixed-race couples strolling hand-in-hand down the halls. I observed groups of friends that were like kaleidoscopes of different colors.

Of course, I still see evidence of those walls on a daily basis. I hear more racial slurs uttered in a single class period than in an episode of the George Lopez show. One day at lunch, we had a school-wide brawl between "the Rednecks and the Mexicans." The entire school turned out for the fight and the administration had to ring the bell 15 minutes early to break it up.

I am excited for the changes I am seeing as I see those racial boundaries coming down. I only hope that we can keep moving in a direction that pulls us together instead of further wedging us apart.