Hi Berkeley High: my high school alma mater. Depending on where you come from, you can excel with the best of them or be expelled like the rest of em’. Of course, an adverse race relation comes with the territory of housing one of the most diverse student bodies in America. The school has been the center of some very interesting studies surrounding the achievement gap and other educational inequities, as seen in the 1994 documentary “School Colors”. Recently 300 frustrated students protested some inflammatory FaceBook postings where various black BHS students and staff were tagged as “niggers”.

It’s a small world, but Berkeley is considerably big to have only one high school to serve its youth. The city can most easily be broken up into at least four different parts (North, South, West, and Downtown) and at least two different slopes (flatlands, hills). In any given Berkeley high classroom you might find a student from an immigrant family living in a cramped west Berkeley apartment, who works after schools to help the family pay rent quietly seated next to the only child of a home owning Berkeley hills living-Prius driving-college educated-dentist.

As a frustrated high school junior, I came to loathe some of my liberal white Berkeley teachers who thought that simply bringing together people from different backgrounds, races, and cultures would cure racism. That we need only to hear each other’s opinions and build off of the framework that we’re all starting at different places in life but if we just come together and learn blah-blah-blah hippy philosophy.

The truth of the matter (of course this is my truth not the universal truth) is that sometimes it can be more detrimental than enriching to have people who live in vastly different realities share such tight quarters. Even though BHS is diverse, most students tend to hang with their “own kind” identified most easily by race but also socioeconomic background. So, at the end of the day we have teens from here and there who instead of creating circles that mirror the schools diversity, but rather join packs to distinguish the “us” and the “them”. Meanwhile, the educators who are either too naïve to understand that this is not enough, or too indifferent to care don’t see the tension that stirs in the yellow and gold hallways.

I can recall numerous awkward moments, racial showdowns and protest worthy interactions during my stint: Not enough black people on the school news paper; who should be able to say “nigger” during the reading of August Wilson’s Fences; why don’t white students get their own graduation separate from the collective like that of Black, Latino, and Asian students, or why Berkeley Alternative High school is open to all students facing social or academic difficulty but only manages to attract the black and brown ones? All of these questions or concerns were the cause for a hot debate at one point or another. This latest stunt will be added to the skeletons in the liberal Berkeley High closet.

And all of this, less than a week before the school prepares to send out another batch of graduating seniors, all wide-eyed and hopeful, happy to be rid of the things about Berkeley High that get under your skin regardless of color, to the experiences you may have had based on your color, but who ironically find that they have been made stronger through the whole thing.
—Jazmyne Young