Were you ever scared you’d be the last one picked for a game of dodgeball in your high school gym class?
A couple of high schools around New York City show how there is a clear division between race when picking teams for school sports.
During a game of dodgeball at the Institute for Collaborative Education, the gym teacher picked one white girl and one white boy as the team captains. Both started picking people to be on their teams. Out of a class of sixty five kids, 15 percent are black, 30 percent asian, 5 percent mixed, and 50 percent white.
While watching this game of dodgeball, the team captains picked white kids, most specifically white males, first than any other race.
“I usually don’t think about it too much. I just pick who I think will make me win,” one of the team captains said. Many kids acted like this was normal.
At two other dodgeball games the next few days, the same thing happened. Most of the time, the white captain would pick a white kid first.
A couple of 11th grade black girls who were part of the game, said they began noticing that they were usually the last one picked as they got older. “When we were in 9th grade we would play all the time, but now we never get picked! None of them white boys want to pick us,” one said.
During one of the dodgeball games, as the kids were playing, it also became apparent that most white kids were trying to hit the black kids on the opposing team, more than the other white kids.
Talking to some teachers about whether or not there was a race divide in their classrooms, most of them said there was. “I think it’s hard to see that there is because it is so internalized. We live in such a segregated society, especially in America,” a humanities teacher said.
“Kids are taught at such a young age, to play with their biological race. This is a bi-product of the segregation in communities, schools and neighborhoods,” a professor at NYU said. A couple students exhibited this during an interview. “Yeah I gotta say like all my friends are black. I mean I got a few white boys in my class and we joke around a lot.” A black boy in the 9th grade said.
A recent article published by the New School, reported that in New York City 332 of the city’s 734 neighborhood elementary schools have enrollments that are more than 90 percent black and Latino. Most of these are in neighborhoods that are also predominantly black and Latino. They found 59 schools with enrollments of more than 90 percent black and Latino students in neighborhoods that are more racially mixed, that is, neighborhoods that are less than 80 percent black and Latino. These schools have a combined enrollment of 28,175 children.
“Our analysis found the sharpest discrepancies between the demographics of schools and their attendance zones in District 3 on the Upper West Side, District 5 in Harlem, and District 13 in downtown Brooklyn—neighborhoods which have undergone gentrification and where public housing sometimes abuts luxury high-rise apartment buildings or high-priced brownstones,”the report said.
From a dodgeball game to housing projects to schools and the education system, people all over NYC have been remarking about this internalized segregation. “We need to integrate everyone of all races, genders, orientation. That’s how this segregation ends,” the NYU professor said.