Hartford Courant (Sunday)

THE PATH FORWARD

We are students at East Catholic High. The debate over allegation­s of racism during the Montville football game has missed a broader point.

- By Katherine Green and Jonathan Green Katherine and Jonathan Green are seniors at East Catholic High School.

After a recent football game between East Catholic and Montville high schools, a Montville cheerleade­r reported that she was subjected to racial slurs by several East Catholic students. The pain and fear this student must have felt are unacceptab­le. What happened that night runs deeper than the media are reporting, however. We all should pay attention.

News coverage depicted what occurred at the game as a stand-alone episode of hate speech. An opinion piece in The Day of

New London branded East Catholic as the problem. That simplistic assessment belies the deeper reality that bigotry can rear up anywhere, to poison any and every school and community. If we want to stop it, we should start by examining our misconcept­ions.

Race is often considered a fixed, biological dividing line, but it turns out that ideas about race have changed over time. Professor Erika Lee wrote in “America for Americans” that during the 19th century, Irish immigrants were branded a separate race by Americans of English and Dutch descent. Hardly anyone today would consider those groups different races.

In fact, research has shown that what we consider “race” is not based on meaningful biological difference­s. Researcher Vivian Chou explained in “How Science and Genetics are Reshaping the Race Debate of the 21st Century” that “if separate racial or ethnic groups actually existed, we would expect to find ‘trademark’ genetic features that are characteri­stic of a single group but not present in any others.” However, “there is no evidence

that the groups we commonly call ‘races’ have distinct, unifying genetic identities.”

Though race is ultimately a societal constructi­on rather than a biological determinan­t, its impact remains profound. Many Americans continue to feel safer only in the company of others deemed “like” themselves. Paired with America’s ideologica­l polarizati­on, this urge to self-segregate could damage our society permanentl­y. According to a University of Virginia poll, 41% of Biden voters and 52% of Trump voters said they felt that red and blue states should split into separate countries. The Atlantic just published an article titled “The Conservati­ves Dreading — And Preparing For — Civil War.” America is at risk of fracturing, and we should consider carefully where this might lead.

Safety in division is an illusion. Americans must pull back from this abyss.

School communitie­s can play an important role in fostering unity. It might surprise some that we are children of a same-sex couple, yet we attend East Catholic, despite official church opposition to same-sex marriage. Why? Because self-segregatio­n with only likeminded people just pushes all of us further apart. We have encountere­d discrimina­tory

attitudes during our years in Catholic schools, but far more often we’ve met open-mindedness and support. That alone was worth discoverin­g.

It’s also worth discoverin­g ways that schools such as Montville and East Catholic can rise above the forces of division. Rather than pretending that the problem is “just in that place,” we should ask ourselves why, when science has shown that racism has no basis, and when the past has shown its colossal destructiv­eness, do any Americans still harbor racism?

Maybe it’s because we don’t really know each other. We don’t understand our shared history.

The Stowe Center in Hartford recently held an educationa­l program “demonstrat­ing how to face history in order to make change possible.” Uproar over the 1619 Project and Forget the Alamo suggests that some Americans don’t want to face history. We think that’s a mistake.

Facing the past expands our frame of reference so that we can understand and empathize with others’ experience­s. Books such as “Devil in the Grove,” “America for Americans” and “Separate” teach us how, through the centuries, ideas about race have been wedges to artificial­ly divide Americans; this knowledge can help all of us avoid repeating the same errors.

Civil rights icon John Lewis said, “We all may have come here in different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” Our great-great-grandfathe­r Joseph Holda, who fought against the Klan in New Jersey in the 1920s, told our mother that “this country belongs to all of us.”

When any of us resort to bigotry, whether as a casual joke or in the heat of rage, we dishonor the sacrifices of those who fought for inclusion, and we desecrate the memory of those lost to that struggle. The terrible headlines from the East Catholic-Montville incident remind us that there is much more work to do, but they fail to capture the larger truth that most young people today want to jettison bigotry and divisivene­ss, to build a world rooted in mutual respect.

Reexaminin­g our misconcept­ions and facing our shared past give us ways to start.

 ?? JESSICA HILL/SPECIAL TO THE COURANT ?? PowerUp CT members protest near the entrance to East Catholic High School on Sept. 30. A 16-year-old Black cheerleade­r from Montville High School has said she was called a racial slur by students at East Catholic after a football game in Manchester.
JESSICA HILL/SPECIAL TO THE COURANT PowerUp CT members protest near the entrance to East Catholic High School on Sept. 30. A 16-year-old Black cheerleade­r from Montville High School has said she was called a racial slur by students at East Catholic after a football game in Manchester.

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