Equality for All

Week 3

Qimin Li

Section 2

Races of similar backgrounds, culture and traditions tend to aggregate towards one another, whether it’s in cliques or schools. From my personal experience, the statistics provided by the infographic helps to reinforce this idea that Caucasians, African Americans, Latinos…etc, stay within their race. My high school consisted of mostly minorities ranging from African American to Hmong students, and although there were some white students that attended, our school was labeled as “ghetto.” This was due to its reputation and population of students. However, it’s never crossed my mind that schools are also divided by race. When I took up tennis my freshman year, our team consisted of mostly minorities and, perhaps, two Caucasian students. I didn’t put too much thought into how different we were from each other until we played against a “white” school. Immediately, I could tell how different our schools were. A majority of the tennis players at this school was Caucasian. I also learned that most of the players had personal trainers before joining the team, so they’ve had a lot more experience in playing than most of my team members, who started their freshman year as well. It was also evident that they had more money to spend on their team when they pulled out a table set with food. This huge difference in funds for extracurricular activities between white vs minority schools greatly affects the probability of a student from one school to get into college compared to another. My question is, how can school districts help increase the chances of getting into college for students in minority schools when they don’t have the same resources?