The White Minority

After nearly 20 years of court-ordered integrated education, most Americans are aware of the problems of black students brought into a predominantly white school. But what happens when it is the other way around--when a few whites attend a black school? To find out, Gretchen Schafft, an anthropologist at Catholic University of America, conducted a year-long study of "Green-trees," the fictional name of a Washington, D.C., elementary school that has an enrollment of about 400 blacks and 50 whites. Recently, at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, she presented her conclusion: the whites--most of them children of parents who moved into the neighborhood because they believed in integration--were usually anxious, fearful and isolated.

Although black and white pupils are together in the classrooms, Schafft found they are rarely together anywhere else. In fact, she says, white pupils, fearful of abuse from their black schoolmates, are reluctant to leave their classrooms. They seldom go into poorly supervised parts of the buildings, and the older they get, the closer they stay to their own rooms.

"While black children are vying for the privilege of carrying the teachers' messages," Schafft notes, "white children do not ordinarily raise their hands." As a result of the general reticence of the whites, at least one white Greentrees teacher considers them to be "uncooperative."

White children particularly shy away from the school bathrooms. Schafft says there are no records of physical attacks there, but "the verbal assaults are frightening enough to cause many children to avoid the bathrooms for the entire school year." Several whites admitted they went home for lunch solely to avoid using the school lavatory; one fifth-grade child wet his pants rather than venture into the toilet.

Separate Groups. The racial separation extends to two school organizations. The courtesy patrol, which monitors halls and classrooms during lunch, is all black. The safety patrol, which supervises street crossings, is 60% white, and most of its officers are white; whites feel more secure outside.

After school black children play in the organized recreation program at the school, while whites tend to play at home. Whites avoid school sports. Says Schafft: "Not one white child belongs to or plays with neighborhood athletic groups. One senses an underlying anxiety on the part of white parents and children about competing with blacks in arenas where competence might be questioned." In other words, they are afraid that the blacks will outperform them. Yet Greentrees whites often imitate black mannerisms when playing with other whites. Reports Schafft: "Finger snapping and bottom twisting accompany a 'Hey, man, you're goin' get it!' or, looking at the floor, head tilted, a white child will do a short dance, just before the punch line of a joke."

During the year that she studied the school, Schafft asked one class to draw maps of the community, showing their homes, the school, and where their friends lived. Not a single black drew a white child on his map, and only one white drew a black. Concluded Schafft: "For this entire group of children, Greentrees is either black or white."

Schafft reports that many parents are not aware of the separation of blacks and whites in Greentrees. Thus while white parents hope for integration, the school experiences of their children point out what Schafft, in academic but accurate jargon, calls "the imperfect mesh between ideology and behavior."

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