Altered reality: Diversity and my hometown community

In my hometown racial diversity was not a reality with the exception of Monday through Friday from 7 am until 3 pm. Our school system was so economically and ethnically white that only a handful of local college professor’s exotic children could be construed as minorities. Fortunately due to the good sense of civil rights activists in the year of 1966 a program was created that changed the racial climate and make up of many suburban towns in Massachusetts. The mission of the Metco program is as follows:

…to provide, through professional leadership and voluntary citizen action, the development and promotion of quality integrated educational opportunities for urban and suburban students in the Greater Boston community and to work towards the expansion of a collaborative education program with the Boston and suburban school systems. http://www.metcoinc.org/aboutus.htm

In short, every year about 30 racially diverse students hailing from poor inner-city communities would make their way on a long bus ride to my little town in search of better “integrated” educational opportunities. Graduation rates, standardized test scores, and college enrollment suggest that the academic component has been achieved, but I still find myself wondering at what cost to the abandoned inner-city community, and more importantly to the developing identity of each child.

In elementary school, Metco kids were just like any other kid as far as I was concerned. The only difference perhaps was that I wasn’t able to go over to their houses and play after school. Middle school brought greater awareness of differences. My peers from Boston were almost always visibly tired after their 5 am bus ride from Boston. I didn’t know any of the music they listened to, I wore different clothes, and my after school experiences were quite unlike their own. With adolescence came acknowledgment and hyper awareness of these differences and more.

Late middle and early high school brought a new beast: academic competition and labeling. Students were filtered into low, middle, and high achieving groups. While we all struggled to differentiate and integrate ourselves, the school began to reinforce the negative judgments we made upon one another. Penelope was a smart girl and a know-it-all, Jonah was funny, but a trouble maker, Arnold was a little weird and sometimes made people uncomfortable. The school began to separate us off into our future social stratus spheres. Have you ever noticed how all the AP students sit at the same lunch table and the remedial math kids hang out together after school in the smoking corner?

The same was true for Metco kids. I can remember one and only one Metco student I ever saw in any of my AP classes. In addition, she was socially isolated from her Metco peers. While most of the Metco students had their own chosen area, sitting in their own corner of the cafeteria, this student sat with a table of similarly tracked white girls from Wellesley.

I’m not trying to say that this program was bad or that numerous benefits weren’t had by the increased cultural diversity, but rather that our community wasn’t able to behave in a completely unbiased manner. Tracking is one institutionalized mechanism that separated us, but so too did the socialization compounded by our perceived academic levels. I wonder sometimes if coming to my high school didn’t send a powerfully negative message to these young minds. Act white, learn like a white student, and you too might be a rich “white man”, but at the same time we’ll never see you as deserving of AP status.