The Disproportionate Overrepresentation of Minority Youth in ...

183
I don’t know. I just look how it is here. Two parts of town separated, I
don’t know. If a black person comes over to ... Avenue or whatever it
looks awkward because it’s all whites there.
Yeah, I do. I only think that it is because I just think it’s a fad, like sexism,
because of other people. Because I’ve met a lot of nice black people. But
then they have a different attitude when they’re like around their black
friends. There’s not that many black people in ..., so they try and stick
together, and when they’re not together, they got different attitudes. Well,
some of them do. And when they’re around their black friends, they do
talk different and they walk different. It does get to me.
A: Yeah. I think it’s going to get worse. I think it’ll get worse before it
gets better.
Q: Do you think it’s going to get worse just for blacks or do you think, as
a young Hispanic you might feel some of that
A: I think, more or less, against blacks. Just the groups that they hang
around in.
A positive response from one Hispanic youth on the issue of racial discrimination is
centered on that s/he gets along with everybody. “I don’t think there’s any
discrimination.”
White youth interviewed in Woodbury county have varied perceptions of racial
discrimination. These perceptions have developed due to various factors in the youths’
lives. The most obvious of these is that many of the white youth have never experienced
discrimination to a significant degree. They either live in all white neighborhoods or go
to a school with an overwhelming majority of white students. One youth stated that there
were only three blacks in the entire high school. These situations do not offer enough
exposure to observe racial differences in order for the youth to formulate opinions on the
issue.
Keeping this in mind, half of the white youth felt discrimination was worse. The
other half were split between there not being any discrimination at all to discrimination is