The lunchroom divide

[Times photo: Jill Sagers] Students at Countryside High School eat lunch recently at the cafeteria. "I guess we just get along with each other," Shirleania Ruffin says of the reason students seem to separate along racial lines as they get older.

As students age, cliques tend to form along racial lines. Opinions about the voluntary segregation vary.

By SHARON TUBBS

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 4, 2000

Jasmine Cooper, Sonya Slocumb and Amber Shonk sit together every day for lunch. The period only lasts 30 minutes -- hardly enough time to discuss homework, boys, summer break and shopping.

They are sixth-graders at Largo Middle School with so much in common that skin color seems insignificant. Jasmine and Sonya are black. Amber is white.

"We don't care," Jasmine says.

In time, they might.

Their principal, Bill Cooper, has noticed an interesting lunchroom dynamic.

During the sixth-grade's lunch period, blacks, whites and Hispanics mingle the way Jasmine, Sonya and Amber do. Eighth-graders, who eat later in the day, are racially divided, with African-Americans sitting in pockets surrounded by all-white tables.

Cooper figures the sixth-graders are mostly concerned with eating, while older kids group along racial lines because they want to be with friends or kids from their neighborhoods.

When eighth-grader Chaison Philpot and his black friends take a seat, there is tension. He notices four white boys who were sitting a few seats away ease to another table.

"They're scared," Chaison says. "They're scared we're going to hit them or something."

The cafeteria scene mirrors a greater schism in society, says Navita Cummings James, director of Africana studies at the University of South Florida.

[Times photo: John Pendygraft] As students age, cliques tend to form along racial lines. Opinions about the voluntary segregation vary.

As black children grow older, they realize the reality of discrimination, James said. When they hit adolescence, security guards start following them around malls; black boys notice a white woman clutching her purse as they pass.

"Race becomes more apparent in terms of how they're treated outside the schools," James says. "They lose their innocence."

In some cases, the separation starts in middle school, but educators say it won't end there.

"You see some tables that are diversified," says school resource officer Todd Pierce, scanning the cafeteria at Osceola High in Seminole. "But for the most part, the white kids sit with the white kids and the black kids sit with the black kids."

Khadeejah Nash, a senior at Osceola, is biding her time at lunch, laughing and talking about who has on the wrong outfit and what she and her friends did over the weekend. Others at the table join in the day's conversation. They are African-American like her.

"We sit together because we're friends and we associate on a regular basis."

She knows white students, too. Yet her ties with them loosen once outside the classroom, where the lessons and group activities give them something in common.

"I don't mind being around them in class," Nash says. "But outside of class, I don't think they'd be too interested in talking. We've got different vibes. They act differently (outside of class). Maybe it's because they're with their friends."

Rod Stephens says he feels more comfortable with African-Americans. "I can just trip out and say anything around them," he says.

Around white students, Stephens is self-conscious of the words he uses. If he says the wrong thing, he risks being criticized. His friends nod in agreement.

"I guess we just get along with each other," Shirleania Ruffin says.

Some of Osceola's black students live in St. Petersburg, others in Largo. They became friends at Osceola and formed a lunchtime clique about 16 members strong at a rectangular table in the back of the lunchroom.

They imagine the topics are different at the predominantly white tables surrounding them. As far as Stephens can tell, white students tend to talk more about problems with their parents and what he called "their dramatic lives.. . . How their mother yells at them every morning."

As he talks, Haley Flesher is tuned in. She is the only white person at the table and is accepted into the group because she relates to African-Americans, Stephens says.

Most of her friends are black, Flesher says, and her parents are cool with that. Farther north, at Countryside High in Clearwater, black students say they, too, feel more comfortable sitting together at lunchtime.

"You can be yourself around people you grow up with and you know," said Leticia Watson, an African-American senior. She has made several white friends participating in sports, but prefers to eat lunch with other black students.

"We speak our own dialect and we understand each other," she said.

Countryside assistant principal Don Casey watched as students filed into the lunch area. Before they took their seats, he correctly pointed out two center tables where he said most Asians would sit.

For these students, language is a barrier, said principal Julie Janssen. The students are studying English and probably sit together because they communicate with one another.

But it is more than that for Annie Luu. The 19-year-old senior moved here from Hong Kong a year ago with her family and eats lunch each day with three Vietnamese students whose native language she does not understand. Still, Luu said, she feels "more free" at this table. She has met students of other ethnicities at Countryside, "but it's not so close," Luu said.

Forcing kids to eat with people they don't know for the sake of integration is not the answer, said Randy Lightfoot, a Pinellas educator who teaches African-American history to teachers for Pinellas County Schools.

What plays out in school lunchrooms simply reflects society, he said.

"If the neighborhoods were naturally integrated," said Lightfoot, "then we wouldn't have to use the schools as a vehicle" for integration.

Kids need to relax and sit with others like themselves at some point, Lightfoot said. "Especially your children of color. . . . It's more of a bonding type situation where they can sit together and feel secure," he said, echoing words from James, the USF professor.

Massachusetts psychology professor Beverly Daniel Tatum said as much in her 1997 book Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Tatum argued black students need time together, away from negative stereotypes they confront everyday.

Janssen, the Countryside principal, says the cafeteria is not as segregated today as it was when she was in school. School officials -- Janssen, Osceola principal Doug Smith, Cooper at Largo Middle -- point out tables where students are integrated.

At Osceola, Anthony Cianciolo and Natasha Allen are dating. He's white. She's biracial.

They eat just a few tables from Chris Maitland, who rotates his seating arrangements between black students like himself and white friends he has made in class. Maitland is bused to Osceola each day from St. Petersburg. On weekends, his white friends sometimes drive from Seminole to hang out.

At Countryside, black student J.J. Ilarraza, who is dating a white girl, mingles part time with his black friends at a corner table, then moves to another area of the room where his girlfriend sits with her white friends. "I move from group to group," he says. White students "understand me."

And two white girls, including freshman Amanda Stone, sit with a half-dozen Asian students at Countryside.

Segregation and other racial issues are seldom discussed among white students, said Roy Kaplan, executive director of the National Conference for Community and Justice, Tampa Bay chapter.

"It's a very tough subject for people to deal with," Kaplan said.

Osceola juniors Adam Canon, Andrew Yagecic, Jessica Lowe and Ryan Weber, who are white, say that sitting together is just not something they talk about.

"We live by each other, we see each other every day," says Canon, sitting with his pal Yagecic and a group of other white students at Osceola. "Most of them (African-Americans) live by each other and see each other on the buses."

On a few occasions, the group says, one or two black students have come and sat at their table. But none of them has ever gone to sit at a majority black table, they said.

Not that they don't want to sit around black people, Jessica Lowe says. If there was a table in the lunchroom with all black students whom she actually knew, then sure, she'd sit there.

She scans the cafeteria, but sees no table where she knows every black person there. It would be uncomfortable -- having to go and introduce herself and get acquainted and so on. It's just easier, she says, to sit with her friends who just happen to be all white.

"It hasn't seemed like that big of a deal," Yagecic says. "I hadn't really thought about it really. It just seems natural."

Canon said he suspects the black students sitting in pockets around the cafeteria are talking about the same things his group does: relationships, partying, sometimes homework.

Weber said he knows many of the black students from playing football. In fact, he says, he had walked into the cafeteria earlier with one of his football buddies.

"He's a big black guy," Weber says, pointing out his teammate. "We just happened to see each other in the hallway."

But once inside the lunchroom, the black player went his way, sitting with a group of other African-Americans. And Weber went his.

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