Why do kids seem to separate by race when they sit down to lunch?

Jean Nash Johnson / The Dallas Morning News

CEDAR HILL – Just as church on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week, lunchtime in high-school cafeterias is the most segregated period of the school day. And at a glance, Cedar Hill High School is no exception . . . until you look closer and listen. The separation is so seamless that students barely notice it until it is brought to their attention. That may have something to do with Cedar Hill, a small community that has grown from 3,000 to 30,000 in the past 20 years. Tucked away in the far southwestern corner of Dallas County, the high school, like the town, enjoys an exceptionally diverse population. The school is 45 percent white, 38 percent black and nearly 14 percent Hispanic.

Cedar Hill, which is dominated by relative newcomers, is a useful laboratory for probing matters of race. The city has no entrenched culture from generational traditions, bad or good. One recent spring morning, an hour before the first of three lunch periods, a throng of students shuttles from Algebra or PE to Speech or Math. They barely have time to look up when a friend greets them in passing. At 10:56, though, the bell sounds, and the pace and tone change. Freshmen go to their cafeteria with rectangular tables lined up in rows. Sophomores gather at round tables in their eatery, and the upperclassmen crowd the junior-senior common. Black kids go to their table, Hispanics to their spot, and whites to theirs.

The ‘why’ factor. School principals, teachers and cafeteria workers see this phenomenon daily and wonder why. Beverly Tatum, a dean at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., has a theory. “As teens struggle with identity,” she says, “one of the most obvious things black teens focus on is race, because they begin to notice they are being treated differently.” In Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, (Basic Books, $15) Dr. Tatum explains further. As racial identity unfolds, particularly around adolescence, she says, we tend to seek a comfort zone, and that usually comes from within our races. As adolescents seek answers to “Who Am I,” ethnicity is one of the first areas confronted.

And high school is where it starts. An unlikely scenario:

During lunch at Cedar Hill High, and in the center of the junior-senior common, five young men eat Mexican food and sandwiches. These music buddies staked out this table for lunch at the beginning of the school year. “Squatter’s rights,” they tell their visitor. When the young men hear that they are an unusual group – a mixed group – they shrug, and their eyes ask: “And your point is?”

Jayson Carraway and Greg Holloway are black; Paul Elliott, Richard Pugh and Michael Mohler are white; Raymond Tuquero is a Hispanic of Puerto Rican descent. Race is not something they dwell on. “Some of us have been together since we met in freshmen band,” says Jayson, the self-appointed spokesman. “We all like music. . . and most of the time, we like each other.” “Except for that guy. We take pity on him,” Richard says, laughing and pointing to Michael, the only junior at the table. The table roars, as Michael takes his teasing good-naturedly. “That’s right. We’re a big old fruit salad,” says Paul. “With some chocolate,” responds another voice (who won’t own

up to the wisecrack), as laughter prevails.

“I wish there were more tables like theirs,” speech and debate teacher Heather McGregor says. As one of the teachers who performs lunchroom duty, she gets a daily picture of cafeteria culture. Self-segregation “spills over to the classroom, too,” she adds. “If I let the kids divide up into groups on their own, most of the time they group themselves by race. When I’m assigning teams, I go out of my way to make the groups more diverse.”

Raymond Tuquero is philosophical about cafeteria culture. “I believe that when you come to high school your freshman year, everything is a new, clean slate,” he says. “After freshman year, you start to join groups and find out where you fit in best. Then the whole friendship thing changes.” And not, he believes, necessarily by race.

The music makers are sandwiched between two other, very different tables. On one side, junior and senior girls’ basketball players; on the other, a table of Hispanic girls and boys. The team concept. Ashley Paul, a junior who plays guard, and her closest buddy, Raashida Birmingham, are quick to point out that the musicians’ table is almost an anomaly. “That’s not normal,” the girls say, referring to the boys’ integrated table. All the girls at their table are black.

Do they all happen to be black because they all happen to be on the basketball team? “Well, yes. . . . There are no white juniors and seniors on the team,” Ashley volunteers. If there were white teammates, would they be excluded from the table? “Of course not,” she replies. The musicians are not so different after all, she later concedes. Ashley’s coach, Jim Murphy, who monitors the lunch area, is known to the students as the Lunchroom Guru. “I would say 90 percent of the students do this [separate by race] – without even thinking about it,” he says. “The honors kids are the big exception. They don’t seem to care, as long as they are sitting with students in their classes.”

“High school is very cliquish,” says junior Juan Zamora, whose table is on the other side of the musicians. “Kids want to fit in,” says Juan, a junior. “I was home-schooled last year because in my freshman year I got picked on a lot. . . .When I came back [this year] I had contacts, and nobody recognized me.” On his first day back, Juan sat by himself at lunch. Soon other Hispanic kids gravitated his way. “As the year went by, more and more Mexicans started sitting with us, and a tradition was started for the whole school year,” Juan says. Juan acknowledges that racism exists among some students, but he says most kids get along fine. “I don’t think any kids care where we sit. . . . We’ve had black students and white students come by and want us to teach them Spanish. They want to know what we’re saying when we talk Spanish, and that’s cool.”

Prejudice, is two-way. Principal Alfred Ray, who is black, questions labeling tables by racial groups. “I don’t think it’s race specifically,” he says. “When there are kids of the same race sitting at one table, I think it’s more about the other things that they have in common. You can ask, ‘Why are all the white kids sitting together?’ ” Peer grouping is not new, Dr. Ray says; he remembers kids grouping themselves through common links when he was young. “In high school and junior high school, there also is a tendency to

succumb to peer pressure,” he says. “Those who choose to be independent are seen as independent thinkers who do things on their own volition. . . . [They] often are seen as the outcasts in a race peer group.” Declaring independence Sophomore Megan Snipes is a Cedar Hill newcomer, and from this black 15-year-old’s perspective, race-mixing is all about comfort level. The honors student moved to Cedar Hill from San Antonio a year ago, and she met Ashley Martin, who is white, in English class during those first days. Ashley, also 15, moved to Cedar Hill from DeSoto in seventh grade. Her other closest friends, Risa, a Hispanic, and Brianna, who is black, are Megan’s friends, too.

“My mom and dad taught me to live and let live,” Ashley says. But Megan, who also is on the girls’ basketball team, believes there are ill feelings among other black students about the choices she has made. “There was diversity in the culture I grew up in, and I think that is a better experience,” she says. “I know there is resentment, I hear it. . . . I figure you’re entitled to your own opinion.”

Talking white, acting black. Jayson Carraway recalls how junior high students teased others because they didn’t “act black” in their choice of music or friends, or in the way they spoke. “It’s easy for me [to be open-minded] because my mom has friends from all walks,” says Jayson, who plans to study aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. “Plus, I’ve experienced enough school situations that I think I’m

better prepared.” Jayson went to predominantly black Marsalis Elementary in Dallas and attended junior high in Grand Prairie, where most students are white. “Cedar Hill has been the best preparation. The ethnic breakdown here is the real deal,” Jayson says.

Walk the walk. Kathy Bacutaq likes to study in the quiet of the choir room before coming on the cafeteria scene, often walking from table to table and eating a sandwich while visiting classmates. She is Asian-American, but she doesn’t recall ever seeing Cedar Hill’s small group of Asian students (less than 2 percent of the school) sitting together. Kathy, who is president of the student council and the National Honor Society, is the rare student who has been in Cedar Hill schools since kindergarten. The Cornell-bound senior admits that her views on race are skewed, in part because of her charmed high-school life. “I don’t think there is a table in this room where you will find kids together because they want to separate,” Kathy says, looking around during a recent third-lunch session. “Quite the contrary: They are together because they are friends. “When I’m in a situation that’s not diverse, it seems unnatural. In chorale competitions, I’ve visited Highland Park,” which is nearly all white and mostly well-to-do. “Not to pick on that school, but . . . let’s face it,” Kathy says. “The real world is not Highland Park. “When I came back to my own campus after first visiting there, I said, ‘Whoa! We have something wonderful here.’ I mean, I have classmates who are literally millionaires, and some on welfare.”

The freshman camp. Sophomore Marlaina Ort