If you want to teach tolerance and respect, it’s best to start young.
That’s exactly what students from Baldwinsville and Syracuse are doing. Through InterFaith Works of CNY’s “Community Wide Dialogue to End Racism” program, a group of Baker High School and Corcoran High School students spend a few days a year “shadowing” each other at school. The goal is to start a dialogue about race and create connections with each other.
A group of Corcoran students spent the day immersing themselves in Baker life Oct. 29.
Jennifer Cambareri, assistant principal of 11th grade at Baker, helped 10th grade Assistant Principal Thomas Fraher with the program this year, the second for the exchange.
“The students’ connection is very powerful,” Cambareri said. “The dialogue is relevant.”
Cambareri said the program allows students to learn how to engage in “respectful dialogue” about tough issues, a skill they can carry into their adult lives.
After spending the day sharing classes and lunch, Corcoran students gathered with their B’ville counterparts in the library to “debrief” on their day. The teens then broke up into groups, each moderated by student facilitators, to compare their schools and discuss whether the stereotypes they’d heard about each other held true.
While the Corcoran students said they enjoyed a mostly welcoming atmosphere, interesting classes and a delicious lunch, not all of their encounters were positive.
One Corcoran student told the group that a Baker student joked to him about a “ghetto dress-down day” at B’ville, featuring baggy jeans and Timberland boots.
“What do you mean by that?” the Corcoran student asked, noting that he and many of his classmates were dressed the same way. “They got really quiet,” he said of the Baker student and his friends.
Katheryn Terasaka, an 11th-grader at Baker, said when she heard that Baker students had treated the Corcoran student that way, she felt “horrible” that people in her school could say such things.
“I have been affected by racial slurs because I am 50 percent Japanese,” Terasaka said. She said people have told her she must be good at math or eat cats and dogs because she is Asian.
“You can laugh it off the first time, [but] it’s repetitive and it really hits home,” she said. “It’s not acceptable.”
Despite that example, Cambareri said the program has helped students to think twice about what they say to other people.
“[They say,] ‘I never really thought about that,’” she noted.
She said she has observed students who have been through the program making an effort to “diminish the boundaries” in their social lives at school. They might choose a different seat at lunch or talk to someone with whom they might not normally interact.
Jasmine Lightburn, an 11th-grader from Corcoran, said spending time at Baker made her realize how racially diverse Corcoran is compared to the Baldwinsville school. Lightburn is African-American and said she felt like Baker students were staring at her and making judgments based on her race and her clothing.
“It made me feel like we were seen as outsiders,” she said. “People have ideas in their head about Corcoran that are not true.”
“The majority of students at Corcoran are African-American,” said Isabel Goss, a 12th-grader at Corcoran and a veteran of the program. She is white. “It’s easy for me to blend in, but how hard is it to stick out like a sore thumb?”
Goss said listening to others’ perspectives helped her correct her own “wrongdoings.”
“It’s something I want to fix in my community, in the world,” she said.
After their frank but friendly breakdown of the day, Baker students bid their Corcoran counterparts goodbye.
“I learned a lot and made new friends,” said Madison Wolfanger, an 11th-grader who participated in last year’s program. He said the dialogue has helped him to become more open-minded and comfortable with communicating with others.
Cambareri said the Baker students who have been through InterFaith Works’ program are “ambassadors” to their classmates and must work to broaden the message of acceptance and respect.
“They have the power to make small changes, but it has to filter to the whole student body,” she said.
“I wish more people could do it,” Lightburn said. “I think it could help a lot more people that don’t realize what they’re doing.”
