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Maybe in your generation. But the impression i get nowadays is young people are generally areligious, and as long as you aren’t a muslim zealot waging jihad, people don’t care what religion you are.</p>
<p>In any case, unless you are sporting sidelocks and a yarmulke, or u volunteer the info that u are Jewish, it’s not like anyone notices.</p>
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<p>Ouch. That kind of sounds like “stay in the closet” or “pass for white” and you’ll be fine. Don’t act too Jewish?</p>
<p>Nobody is immune</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local-education/emory-investigating-bias-incident-involving-jewish/nhqqD/”>http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local-education/emory-investigating-bias-incident-involving-jewish/nhqqD/</a></p>
<p>@ClassicRockerDad </p>
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<p>Some of my best friends are southerners.</p>
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<p>Yes, it was a cute response. I was just making the clarification because some folks think that Jim-Bob who moonlights at the Bait-n-Tackle shop, will be your prof. </p>
<p>…and I hope that you consider us southerners your friends, as well. ;)</p>
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<p>Of course mom2collegekids, always. The south supplies us with many great football players. </p>
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<p>Oy vey GMTplus7! Would I have to sport a jewfro to hide my horns?</p>
<p>It’s true! It’s far easier to blend in when you are gay or of a maligned religious group. Being black is quite apparent in most cases. My own mother is mistaken for white all the time! You would be aghast at the comments she hears about blacks because people think she is white! </p>
<p>Many an awkward moment when she challenges them! Hysterical! </p>
<p>Unfortunately, there are some ignorant and prejudiced people in all parts of the country. Increasingly, these people are the exception rather than the rule. I have honestly not found the South to be any more or less prejudiced than the NE. </p>
<p>@ClassicRockerDad - I’m an anomaly in these parts - a fast talker with a Southern accent - lol! </p>
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I think most people don’t care what religion you are, as long as you aren’t spouting out about waging jihad.</p>
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<p>Wow, how utterly ignorant. Oh well, your loss.</p>
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<p><a href=“Explaining the Boom | New Voices”>http://newvoices.org/2008/11/24/0003-2/</a> </p>
<p>Thank you all for your thoughts. My child is applying to college this year. We live in a very integrated community and are a racially blended family. l grew up the same way. Going to a college that has diversity but no true integration would be very harsh. During my own college hunt, I visited Williams and Amherst and was shocked by the segregation. (Before everyone pounces, Amherst back then was not the colorful place it is now.) To continue to live as I wanted I felt I had two choices: Stanford and Brown. When looking at colleges now I can’t help but look for groupings in the pictures and on campus. I was disappointed to see solid color groupings still at Williams, Colgate, Northwestern, and Wash U. There seems to be more than the usual level of unhappiness at Carleton and Duke. What does “more than usual” mean? It means that people in the community feel that the campus racial relationships are more negative than they expect, thus I used the term " notable". I asked this question to guage the racial reputations of schools - because I don’t believe the situation is the same everywhere. For those of us seeking to flee the sadness of exclusion and diminishment, environment matters and every uptick in pleasantness is worth its weight in gold. Again, thank you for responding.</p>
<p>My kids have grown up in a similar environment. Their K-12 schools have been incredibly diverse. We have visited a lot of colleges and I have also been acutely aware of how some schools seemed more segregated than others. A few thoughts, though:</p>
<p>*Sometimes people self-segregate because of shared interests, not because of their skin color. Athletes are a good example of this. Football players train and hang out together. So do swimmers,lacrosse players, and other groups. If they all have similar racial backgrounds, they will appear to be segregating by race, when in fact their primary “selection” into a group is their athletic interest. Race is just incidental.</p>
<p>*Sometimes it’s not the majority excluding minority groups, but the minority groups wanting to stay together because of a perception of shared understanding.</p>
<p>*I have observed more integration at small LACs (not the ones you mention) than at larger U’s. When there is not a critical mass of “like” people, they end up in the mix with everyone else. At bigger universities, it’s easier to find a lot of people with your same background. At my son’s small southern LAC, there are kids from Africa, China, South America, etc. (along with American minorities) and they are integrated into campus life (although the international students have their own bond, in part created by often being stuck on campus for holiday breaks). </p>
<p>At the state flagship where I used to work, there were not only large social groups of Asians (subdivided into Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Indian, etc.) but also smaller groups from other places (including a small group of Italians I used to see every day in the cafe in my building). They would travel in packs speaking their own language. I can’t say whether they ever “mingled” but it would have been easy for them not to. </p>
<p>*If you want diversity, join the arts. At least in our experience, dance and theater tend to attract a wide range of students of many different backgrounds.</p>
<p>*In general, liberal campus environments seem to encourage inclusion. Some of the Catholic schools we have visited also seem fairly integrated. A lot of colleges have a more friendly vibe than others overall.</p>
<p>I think it’s important to have your child visit colleges she is interested in for an overnight to see whether she feels accepted. It’s easy to make superficial observations but oftentimes they don’t tell the whole story.</p>
<p>It is so incredibly ironic that people who purport to be against stereotyping relentless assert that all schools in the South are filled with racial animus in spite of the fact that there is ample evidence to the contrary. </p>
<p><a href=“Black First-Year Students at the Nation’s Leading Research Universities : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education”>http://www.jbhe.com/2013/11/jbhe-annual-survey-black-first-year-students-at-nations-leading-research-universities/</a></p>
<p>REGARDING THE MASON DIXON LINE…</p>
<p>I was born in New York, and moved to Alabama when I was 8 years old. Graduated from Auburn University, and then left Alabama for the Navy. Was there racism in Alabama? Yes, but I eventually learned that it was no worse than anywhere else in the country.</p>
<p>I have lived extensively in both Seattle, and in Ohio, and worked with people of all backgrounds.</p>
<p>There is far more “racial tension” in Ohio than anywhere else I have ever lived, including Alabama. I found it shocking (and still do). To repeat, having grown up in Alabama, I found racism in Ohio to be shocking.</p>
<p>For years, Boston had a reputation for being extremely racist. I have had numerous people tell me that Boston is the most racist city that they have ever been in. But even that might be changing… or at least I hope so.</p>
<p>I think you get the picture. Racial tension is not, in any way, limited to the South. In fact, my perception is that the South has made more racial progress than the rest of the country; probably because their problems were initially more obvious. However, the region seems to have learned more about race relations precisely because they could not afford to be smug. Undoubtedly the South still has racial problems, but I have seen no indication that it is any worse than the rest of the country.</p>
<p>In short, racial tensions now have nothing to do with the region in question. Los Angeles has racial problems, Texas has racial problems, Boston has racial problems, and boy does Ohio have racial problems.</p>
<p>Part of the question, I think, derives from high school incidents rather than the college themselves. Things that may not be picked up by mainstream media but are heard in specific groups, such as Jewish students being made to say a Christian prayer and causing an outrage when they refused (apparently the adult thought it honestly “eucumenical”), or international students being shot/at because their English/lack thereof made them seem threatening (happened in Montana and Florida), policies toward Latino students who may not be documented (NJ, AL, GA), towards latinos in general (AZ), sorority/fraternity segregation (esp. Black/white), religious insensitivity. Those often happen in smaller towns accross the country. Then, there are serious problems. For instance, the shootings (/incidents/murders) in Florida and Ferguson led some African American students to simply cross off the entire State, not just because of what happened in one town, but because of the population’s reaction to it. Colleges in all these states are likely to be welcoming and of course no state has a monopoy on friendliness, yet it’ll be hard to “make up” for these examples if families have heard them and then heard them echoed again.
Overall, I’d say OP is right to wonder about particular colleges rather than worrying about States or regions.
In addition, race relations may be good but on intensely political campuses such as UCB or Oberlin they may be just another contentious topic to hone debate skills/fight about, whereas things may be bad yet never talked about at other colleges.</p>
<p>I was surprised to see Black Students only made up 2.6% first year students at Berkeley according to te chart linked to in #51.</p>
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My own dd applied to 2 schools in the south, and tbh, I wondered about racial tolerance at those schools. Sorry, but as a mom of a minority student, I though about how she would have been recieved in those locations.
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<p>I believe your child is racially mixed or black. If so then a popular southern school will likely have a high number of black students. I don’t think all those students would be choosing to go there, if the environment was hostile.</p>
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I agree 100%. Plus, let us remember that colleges, their faculty and students, tend be more tolerant than society at large. For example, despite my horror at the amount of racism in Ohio, I never hesitate to recommend colleges in Ohio. The state is absolutely blessed with an abundance of outstanding colleges; both academically and socially.</p>
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<p>Isn’t it common for the marketing pictures on the college’s web site to be carefully selected to show multiethnic groups of students being happy together, so the pictures may not be a reliable guide if that is what you are looking for in real life?</p>
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<p>The state of California is only about 5.8% black. Black people in California, like in most other parts of the US, are, on average, less advantaged and more disadvantaged in the usual ways (lower SES, attend lower quality K-12 schools, etc.), so underrepresentation at selective state universities in California is not a big surprise.</p>
<p>Also the UC’s (in theory) does not practice affirmative action. Latinos and black population declined at UCLA/UCB/UCSD drastically after the passing of Proposition 209.</p>
<p><a href=“California Proposition 209: Minority Enrollments Down In UC Schools Despite Diversity Efforts | HuffPost San Francisco”>HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost;
<p><a href=“UC after Proposition 209: How minority student admissions changed – The Mercury News”>UC after Proposition 209: How minority student admissions changed – The Mercury News;
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I don’t know which flagship you’re talking about, sally, but this describes UCLA to a T. I think the city itself exacerbates the issue (i.e. people can self-segregate into Little Armenia, Tehrangeles, Sawtelle/Little Osaka, Pico-Robertson, etc.). </p>