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News >> ................................................................Last updated: 3/22/2010 |
Blurring color lines: East is more likely to be tolerant of race than other schools
Morgan Smith ~ News Editor
This is East: 84 percent of students are Caucasian. Approximately two percent are black, seven percent are Hispanic, and four percent are Asian. With these numbers, people would probably say that East is predominantly white, not really the most diverse school, and wonder how exactly minority students get along with Caucasian students.
To find information about race relationships between adolescents on a national scale, sociology professor James Moody of Duke University, who specializes in studying relationships between high school students, conducted an extensive study.
As reported in Newsweek magazine, Moody gathered data from over 90,000 high school students attending 112 different high schools throughout the country.
“This study was part of a large team effort conducted over many years,” said Moody in an email to The Xray.
The results were surprising. Students
from the more diverse schools tended to clump together in groups with students sharing their ethnicity while there was generally more interaction between races in schools that were less ethnically diverse.
In the study, Moody had the high school students involved name their five best male and their five best female friends, and then matched the names of the friends the students wrote down to the race of the friends and then compared the number of friendships involving students of different races to the overall diversity percentages of the school.
Moody concluded that the reason for this was that teenagers tend to feel that they are only accepted within groups of people that are similar to them.
With these facts, it appears that East has a great potential to be very open to different ethnicities and their ideas. “Race does not matter, it’s what’s on the inside that counts,” said Freshman Yash Bhatia.
To further study the different race relationships and friendships at East, the staff of The X-Ray interviewed two pairs of best friends who belong to different races.
Senior Jorie McElvain once watched Tae Guk Gi (The Brotherhood of War), a Korean film on a Saturday night just for fun- something she would have never done if it wasn’t for her best friend, senior Yena Jeon.
McElvain said, “I remember watching the movie and it was just so sad. Even though I couldn’t actually understand what they were saying, Yena helped out and there were also subtitles.”
“Yeah, remember how we were reading Seventeen magazine and then we saw something that reminded us of the movie and we freaked out,” Jeon said to McElvain.
Jeon immigrated from South Korea to Michigan late in elementary school. She didn’t know any English. During seventh grade, her family moved to St. Charles where she continued to learn English through the ESL curriculum.
“Jorie helped me adjust a lot even though I knew some English already, it was just nice being with someone who was like me. She’s just hilarious, and thanks to her, I learned a lot of fun slang-some good and some bad.”
Laughingly, McElvain said, “I’m glad I can take credit for that, but yeah, I think we first met in art class. We also had lunch and gym together too. Oh, and remember how, at first, we met through our mutual friend Elyse in gym. We would literally talk through her. I would say something to Elyse, then you say would say something through her, but we wouldn’t say stuff to each other.”
“Wait, really? I don’t remember that!” said Jeon.
“Yeah, but then somehow we got to know each other and just couldn’t stop talking. You would always say the most hilarious Asian jokes,” McElvain said.
“We definitely connect so easily. It’s kind of weird, but sometimes we’ll go a week without and then once we’re on the phone, we end up talking about things for like three hours,” said Jeon.
Both Jeon and McElvain attribute their friendship to many of the new foods and activities they have tried.
“I think I had my first sandwich ever at Portillo’s because you took me back in seventh grade,” Jeon said to McElvain.
Freshmen Yash Bhatia and Ryan Wealther have been friends for four years.
“I was at Lake Michigan, right? So then I was swimming and then I started drowning and Ryan came and saved me,” Bhatia said sarcastically about how they met.
“You are twice my size!” Wealther exclaims.
Actually, Bhatia said that because both his and Wealther’s mom work in the medical field, they talk often and have a connection through that.
The fact that Bhatia is Indian and that Wealther is Caucasian has never been an issue in the friendship. In fact, they try to share aspects of different cultures. “My mom tries to force feed him Indian food. Sometimes I say things about him in Hindi and he gets annoyed because he can’t understand what I’m saying,” said Bhatia.
“It annoys me because I can’t understand what he is saying! Didn’t you come to my house for Thanksgiving once?” asked Wealther.
“Yeah, once I came to his house for Thanksgiving, and there was a turkey and pie,” said Bhatia.
Outside of school, Wealther and Bhatia hang out a lot of the time. “We do stunts on the trampoline,” said Wealther.
“We play a lot of Mario Kart…it’s a fun game. Um you know… what do we do that’s cool…we snowboard,” said Bhatia.
How do you snowboard in St. Charles?
Bhatia said, “Um, we go to…”
“Little woods,” Wealther finished, “like the Little Woods hill.”
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