Understanding the Riots--Six Months Later :...

ROBIN DVORKIN, 17, is a senior at Taft High School in the San Fernando Valley. She lives in Tarzana with her father, who is in the mail-order business, and her mother, who works in a dental office, where Robin works part time. She is a cheerleader and a member of the swim team. She expects to attend college next fall.

I’m enrolled in honors and advanced placement courses and most all the people in my classes are white and from this neighborhood. About the only experience I have with people of other races is with cheerleading and the flag team and the drill team. Yet even they are segregated. The flag team is primarily black. There is only one black girl on JV cheerleading. Yet blacks are such good dancers; they are the best dancers in the school. I don’t get it.

There isn’t a lot of racial fighting, but there is tension. If, at school, a white girl bumps into me, I don’t get scared about it. But if I bump into a black girl or she bumps into me, I expect to be called a name or I expect for her to turn around and tell me to get out of her away or something. That’s really generalizing, but, still, that’s been some of my experience.

I don’t think I’m a prejudiced person, but at lunch I sit with friends who are mostly from my own neighborhood. Everyone does. The Hispanics are in their area, the blacks in their area. The whites are in their area. I don’t think it’s really conscious. It just happens that way, which means, I think, busing-in isn’t working. I think it’s good that minorities are seeing white neighborhoods. But the fact that everyone goes to their own corner isn’t such a good thing.

I think it’s possible--I hope it’s possible--for people of different races to get together. Instead of thinking of each race as a different color, a different race, we should think of people as people. I wish I knew where to start making people do that. I guess through education. What they are doing with busing is a start, because it opens people to different races and different cultures. But we need more programs to bring people of different cultures, of different races together so that they really talk.

We probably won’t do that until people live together in the same communities, not just sit by each other in the same classes. Yet people won’t live together in the same communities until there is more education and better jobs. I guess that requires more affirmative action, yet then you run into the problem of reverse discrimination. I don’t know. These are such hard problems. I don’t think anybody knows where to begin.