Equal But Separate?

The student populations at many Bethesda-area high schools are diverse, but there is limited interaction between racial and ethnic groups. Are the benefits of diverse schools being wasted?

By Eugene L. Meyer

Jake Sandler and Alex Lamothe were best friends at Westland Middle School in Bethesda. Lamothe, black, from a modest neighborhood near Rosemary Hills in Silver Spring, and Sandler, white, from tony Kenwood in Chevy Chase, swam in Sandler’s backyard pool and hung out at his 5,739-square-foot house on nearly half an acre.

The friendship ended when the teens entered high school.  Except for a nod when their paths crossed at Bethesda-Chevy Chase (B-CC) High School, they no longer hung out, no longer spoke. Sandler was taking mostly advanced placement courses, while Lamothe was in regular classes. Late last fall, when Lamothe dropped out of B-CC, Sandler didn’t know how to contact him.

The estrangement puzzled and upset Sandler, so much so that the 2008 B-CC graduate wrote his college application essay about his lost friendship and the larger issue of self-segregation in high school.

“As I step through the gym doors, I notice a phenomenon that no longer surprises, yet still puzzles me,” Sandler wrote. “On the right side of the dance floor, there are 300 white kids, and on the left side, 200 black kids. The sight of self-imposed segregation during the school-sponsored dances at my high school perfectly exemplifies how my generation is coping with the race issue. It has become so politically incorrect to suggest segregation still exists that any adolescent who tries to delve into the topic is discouraged. More than 40 years after the forced integration of schools, segregation is still prevalent in society. But it is no longer talked about.”

Sandler then wrote of his lost friendship: “I feel as though we fell victim to expectations. Once we reached high school, it was expected that I would hang out with kids with my same socioeconomic status and Alex would act up in school, rebel against authority figures, and live life how he desired in the short term.”

The essay helped Sandler get into Tulane University in New Orleans, where he is a freshman. But writing it was painful. “I taught him how to swim in my backyard,” Sandler says. “He was really a good, loyal friend. He was just as smart as I was. He used to spend weekends at my house. I never went to his. I know black kids who are very friendly in the halls and classes. But come Friday night, I don’t see them at all. We run in completely different social circles on weekends.”

Self-segregation is a fact of life at B-CC and other Bethesda-area high schools with diverse student bodies. At Rockville High School, where the student population is less affluent and the kids come from more diverse neighborhoods, students self-segregate in school but mix at after-school parties. At Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, which draws from far less integrated communities, self-segregation is more prevalent, both in school and on weekends. At Silver Spring’s Montgomery Blair High School, where the student population and feeder neighborhoods are similar to Rockville High’s, students also self-segregate, a division more pronounced in the competitive math-science magnet program, which is largely white and Asian-American, and the communications arts program, which is overwhelmingly white. Students in the International Baccalaureate program at Rockville’s Richard Montgomery High School are selected in a countywide competition and are overwhelmingly white or Asian, and those students tend to be isolated from the rest of the school. 

Though students at Bethesda-area high schools report little animosity between the racial and ethnic groups, they also say there is only limited interaction, whether in the halls, at lunch or after school. Generally, the white kids hang with the white kids, the blacks with the blacks, and Hispanics with Hispanics etc. Why does this happen? What does it mean? What separates young people of different races and ethnicities in today’s supposedly multicultural society? Why do middle and elementary school friendships fall apart in high school? Is it economics? Geography? Racism? Peer pressure? Academic tracking?

Diversity is a hot topic among educators, along with narrowing the achievement gap between whites and minorities. But self-segregation is a subject that receives much less scrutiny, though it’s on the minds of students and educators.

“Even in the B-CC cafeteria and at school dances, de facto segregation is often an ever-present factor,” student journalist Sam Aleinikoff, a 2007 graduate, wrote last year in the 80th anniversary edition of The Tattler, B-CC’s school newspaper. “Although the current demographics of B-CC are roughly representative of Montgomery County and even the United States as a whole, it appears that integration is not complete.”

Karen Lockard, B-CC’s new principal, lives near the school and is the mother of two B-CC graduates. She says self-segregation “is not that simple and it’s not always that bad.” After stints at more diverse James Hubert Blake and Springbrook high schools in Silver Spring, she has concluded that students tend to separate themselves as much by interest as by ethnicity. “At Blake, I had eight African-American boys who all wanted to go to Morehouse [a private, historically black liberal arts college in Atlanta for men]. They’re all there as seniors. In high school, they were a terrific support group for each other. They also had a lot of white friends.”

Lockard, a B-CC assistant principal for two years and a former English teacher at the school adds, “Most would agree that people gravitate to people like them and whom they feel comfortable with.” But that grouping could be as much about shared interests as about anything else, she says. “It’s a mistake,” Lockard says, “to walk into a room and see students of all one race and assume they are all together because of their race.”

Self-segregation inspired Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, a 1997 bestseller by Beverly Daniel Tatum. An African American and a clinical psychologist, Tatum is president of Spelman College, a historically black college for women in Atlanta. “It is because we live in a racist society that racial identity has as much meaning as it does,” she writes in the book.

Sheryll Cashin, a professor of law at Georgetown University who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, argues in her 2004 book, The Failures of Integration, that self-segregation results from academic tracking. Adds Eileen Kugler, author of Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools Are Good for All Kids, “There’s really very little benefit to being in a diverse school if the classes themselves are not diverse.”

What is the face of self-segregation?  The B-CC yearbook is one place to look.  Pages purchased by students feature group pictures of friends separated largely by gender—and almost entirely by race. Lunchtime is another example. At B-CC, lunch starts at 10:54 a.m. and ends 40 minutes later.  Since B-CC is an “open campus,” those with the wherewithal often leave school to eat at Cosi, Potbelly or Chipotle in downtown Bethesda.  Some minority students often patronize nearby McDonald’s, while other minority students occupy the cafeteria.

In the cafeteria one day in June, there’s a table of boys of various races; a table with five African-American girls; two tables of Hispanics; another table is mixed, but the students are mostly black.  In the atrium, a sky-lit interior space where the old and new B-CC buildings meet, five or six groups of girls, mostly white, hang out. Outside, other groups of kids, mostly white, sprawl all over the front lawn facing East West Highway. As the lunch hour ends, a group of 20 or so boys—all but two are white—straggle in from the back parking lot.

Naya Misa, a 2008 black graduate of B-CC, says it’s largely due to economics that “most minorities eat in the cafeteria and white kids go out.” J’Nae White, another June graduate who is also black, recalls overhearing a conversation in 10th grade: “I remember one of the white students saying they had only $5 and [commenting], ‘I guess I have to go to the cafeteria, but it’s so ghetto.’ ”

Angela K. Henry, who is black, was an assistant principal at B-CC last year and is now a principal in Prince George’s County. She has a perspective that transcends race. “When I walk into [the cafeteria] as an administrator, I’m looking at personalities,” Henry says. “I do see some [kids] grouped, sometimes by grade level, or ethnically mixed ninth- and 10th-grade boys hanging together. Then I’ll have one table of black guys who all sit together. Neighborhood kids tend to stick together. The human tendency is to group with people who look like you. So in the cafeteria, you gravitate toward people you feel comfortable with. On a [self-segregation] scale of one to 10, we’d fall somewhere in the middle. It could be a lot worse.”

Stephany Salazar, who moved to Silver Spring from Ecuador when she was in third grade, had “a bunch of Hispanic friends” at B-CC, “but two of my best friends are white. They live in Bethesda.”  Now a freshman at New York University, Salazar says her cafeteria lunch table was “really diverse, but there are others definitely more separated. Sometimes kids go their separate ways. It depends on classes people take. If people don’t make an effort, you can fall apart.”

And if kids self-segregate, does diversity in a school matter? “There is value in coexisting in the same place,” muses Assistant Principal Henry in an e-mail. “It happens all the time in nature. Different species of flowers are able to bloom in the same soil.”

Notes Sean Bulson, who completed his fourth year as B-CC’s principal in June and is now a director of school performance for Montgomery County Public Schools: “Open lunch provides a whole range of different opportunities. While not sitting in the cafeteria, they’re spread around our building. You can see whatever you’re looking for, separated by race or completely mixed. Part of it has to do with the economics.” Immigrant children, Bulson says, “have that extra layer, their country of origin, which can influence it. The kids who can afford to go to certain places for lunch. Where does race leave off and economics pick up?”

Most of B-CC’s minority students live in the eastern end of the school district, close to downtown Silver Spring.  Latinos and blacks are concentrated there in apartments and single-family homes in the neighborhoods near Rosemary Hills Primary School. Compared with Bethesda and Chevy Chase, where many of the white kids live, the homes and apartments are modest, and so are the incomes.

Danny Fersh, a 2008 WJ graduate, lives in a Bethesda census block that was 90 percent white, 4.1 percent Hispanic and 0 percent black in 2000. Corneila Poku, a Rockville High senior whose parents are from Ghana, lives in a census block that was 63.7 percent white, 10.3 percent Hispanic and 9.8 percent black in 2000. There is a wide disparity in the incomes between their neighborhoods, and both say they spend most of their time with people of the same race. “No one thinks of it as a race thing,” says Fersh, who is white. “They think of it as who they have classes with or who lives in their neighborhood.”

Says Poku, an Advanced Placement honors student: “We just blend in with the African Americans and hang out with them. It never happens on purpose, like no one intends to reject anyone. It’s just you end up where you feel comfortable. It bothers me, but because I can’t do anything about it, I’m just learning to accept it.” Weekend parties, however, are different. “I feel like a house party is more of a relaxed environment,” she says. “It gets really integrated. It’s not separate, like in school.”

At Blair, students of African descent tend to sit together by nationality, and Dominican kids tend to find each other, according to Elena Gooray, who is of Indo-Caribbean descent and is co-editor-in-chief of the school paper, Silver Chips. “When I talk to kids about it, they always say it has to do with comfort. I do think it becomes a bigger deal in high school, because things become more cliquish.”

Academic Tracking

Tracking, which critics say fosters racial and ethnic divisions, starts in elementary school, when students who do not test “gifted and talented” receive less challenging instruction. It continues in middle school, when advanced students are assigned to “honors” classes. By high school, critics say, too many students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are academically left behind, reflecting racial and ethnic divisions. Thus, schools might appear “diverse” by the numbers, but the reality could be different.

Just by the numbers, B-CC ranks relatively high in diversity among Montgomery County public high schools. The enrollment in 2007-08 was 61.2 percent white (compared with 63.1 percent at WJ and 77.1 percent at Walt Whitman), 16.5 percent African-American, 14.7 percent Hispanic and 7.4 percent Asian.  But what does that mean inside the school?

“At B-CC, they tout diversity,” says 2008 graduate Anna Van Hollen, who is white. “But there is still segregation. In [International Baccalaureate classes], the four African-American girls stick together, unless you go out of your way.”

Van Hollen produced a radio segment on self-segregation for WAMU-FM’s “Youth Voices” program. “I had a lot of [minority] students,” Van Hollen says, “who said their counselors, when they said they wanted to take IB classes, discouraged it, and the teachers were surprised when they were doing well. There were low expectations along racial lines.”

Says B-CC Principal Lockard: “We in Montgomery County are trying to fight the tracking. Here, IB is wide open. There are no gatekeepers.” While it is true, she says, that sometimes there’s only one minority student in an IB class, “we encourage kids of color to go into IB/AP classes. We offer support classes for them, so they will be successful.”

Nationally and locally, there is a push to narrow the so-called achievement gap between whites and minorities.  In Montgomery County, Superintendent of Schools Jerry Weast has sought to increase the number of non-white students in accelerated courses. But the emphasis is on improving scores, not on social integration. In the last school year, 60 percent of all county graduates took at least one Advanced Placement exam, including 34.2 percent of African Americans, 75.9 percent of Asian Americans, 47.4 percent of Hispanics and 70 percent of whites. Overall, 18 percent of African Americans, 34 percent of Hispanics, 60.6 percent of Asian Americans and 57.3 percent of white students scored high enough to receive college credit. At B-CC, 45.6 percent of African Americans took one or more AP test, and 32.4 scored high enough for AP credit; that compared with 68.2 percent and 54.3 percent for Asian Americans, 40 percent and 26.7 percent for Hispanics, and 82.2 percent and 72.3 percent for whites.

When 2008 B-CC graduates Bianca Davis, J’Nae White and Naya Misa, all black, enrolled in IB classes, Misa says, “We were forced to step out of our comfort zone.”  Adds Davis, “In IB English, I looked around and I was the only [black] person there.” Says Misa, “I saw Bianca in history, English and psychology, and I was like, wow, a black person in three classes!”

It is significant that the three young women are the children of immigrants. Misa’s parents are from Guinea in West Africa; Davis’ are from Liberia (her great-grandfather was the late President William Tubman); White’s parents emigrated from Panama, where their grandparents had come from Barbados and Jamaica to help build the Panama Canal.

These three first-generation Americans led the Black Student Union in 2007-08. 

However, ethnic distinctions exist just below the surface of the statistics that measure “black” and “white.” Though some students are first-generation Americans, they may carry with them the ethnic animosities of their parents and grandparents. For instance, students from African immigrant families don’t always get along with each other, much less sit together. Lockard, the new B-CC principal, notes that while she was at Springbrook, in the White Oak section of Silver Spring, some Eritrean and Ethiopian students barely spoke, a tension resulting from conflicts between the neighboring countries in Africa.

‘He used to be my friend’

The day after B-CC graduation in June, Alex Lamothe is not at his parents’ house on Sundale Drive in Silver Spring, a tree-lined street off East West Highway with mostly modest, postwar brick colonials and ramblers.

The Lamothe house, built in 1950, has a well-tended front yard. The parents immigrated from Haiti; the sons were born here. Alex’s older brother, Andrew Lamothe, 20, who graduated from B-CC in 2006, sits on the concrete front steps with a comic book. He says the family doesn’t know where Alex lives or how to reach him.

Andrew says he took only “regular classes” at B-CC. As for self-segregation, he says, “It happens, but it’s nothing like no racist situation where I don’t like you because you’re colored.” In the school cafeteria, he says, he sat with his girlfriend.

The Gwendolyn E. Coffield Community Center is a few blocks away, an appendage of the historically black community near Rosemary Hills that had unpaved streets and outdoor toilets well into the 1960s, around the time its children began attending newly desegregated B-CC.

The center has a regulation-size gym where neighborhood youths, mostly black, some Latino, can be found shooting hoops. Outside are tennis and basketball courts and a large playing field.

Outside on the basketball court are Steven Inman, 16, a junior at B-CC, and Jonathan Dersaud, 18, a senior.  Inman lives with his African-American father and stepmother; his mother is white. Dersaud is from English-speaking Guyana in South America. Both live nearby in Claridge House, a high-rise apartment building. Before coming to Maryland, Inman lived in a small South Carolina town where “it’s just black and white.” Here, he says, “It’s pretty much everyone from all over the world; that’s a good thing.”

Inside the Coffield Center, director Ron Martin says that when the center opened in 2000, students from Westland Middle School and B-CC felt “frustrated” and “full of distrust with the schools. It wasn’t ‘us vs. them,’ but they didn’t feel part of the activities of the school[s].”  Martin met with B-CC school officials, resulting in a study hall and tutoring at Coffield. Grades improved, and so did relationships between the minority students and the school, Martin says.

“It’s hard to say that we haven’t overcome a lot of stuff, because I see it,” says Martin, who is African American. “I think the self-segregation has begun to change during my eight years here.” But there are some blacks, including Alex Lamothe, he says, who still feel that there are [racial] barriers. Martin knows Lamothe well.  He is a Coffield regular, Martin says. Just then, Lamothe enters the building and heads to the gym.

When Lamothe emerges from shooting baskets, he plants himself in front of a large TV screen in the lobby. He is sporting a goatee, wearing a white T-shirt, black, calf-length shorts and a neck chain. Yes, he has a child now. Yes, he dropped out of B-CC, but he says he has since earned a diploma from Montgomery College’s Tech Prep Program. He is reluctant at first to talk about Sandler. “He used to be my friend,” he says at last. “We used to hang out a lot. We used to chill together. We got caught in different crowds when we got to high school. I guess things change.”

And if he could send a message to Sandler, what would it be? “Just tell him I said, ‘Hi,’ ” Lamothe says. “Ask him how he’s doing. Tell him I miss him a lot.”

Eugene L. Meyer, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, is a regular contributor to Bethesda Magazine and lives in Silver Spring.