Tensions Rise At Digital Harbor High Between African-American & Latino Students

CBS Baltimore ^ | 6/3/14

[Altura Ct.]

Racial tensions erupt inside both inside and outside Digital Harbor High School in Federal Hill over the past week. Now school officials and the police are coming together to try to put an end to the violence. Students say the feud is between African Americans and Latinos.

Meghan McCorkell has more on the actions being taken.

Tuesday night, parents were called to a meeting with police and school officials to try and curb fears. Police increased patrols outside Digital Harbor High School after tensions between students boil over.

“There were some problems between students, and that’s what started everything,” said Jose Dominguez, student.

Dominguez says his fellow classmates are scared to walk the halls after two students were attacked last week after school.

“You could feel something bad was going on,” he said

The strain has now moved inside the school.

“It’s like segregation. Hispanic kids stay on one side. The African Americans stay on the other,” said Sevi Chaplin, a student at the school. “They’ve been breaking out into fights, riots, everything else.”

Some parents are so fearful they’ve kept their kids home. “I didn’t send mine back Monday or Tuesday, yesterday or today. No, I didn’t,” said concerned mother Kisha Jackson.

Frightened for his life, 10th grader Ali Majeki is on edge. He says he has to constantly watch is back in school. He said the diversity divide is the talk of the halls.

“Every teacher is walking and talking about this situation,” Majeki said.

A few students say it escalated between African Americans and Latinos after the murder of a former Mexican student, 15-year-old Oscar Torres.

Even though Majeki is not Latino, his older brother has been holding him out of school.

“He didn’t go to school today and yesterday for safety concerns,” his brother said.

Anabel Dominguez says she wants the school to come up with solutions for the issue before it gets even bigger.

Tuesday night, school leaders, security officers and city police came together to discuss their response to the violence.

It’s a move the mayor says is a step in the right direction.

“You have to confront it. You can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

Parents say some of the subjects discussed in the meeting have calmed some of their fears.

“They are going to work with more cultural diversity in the classroom with the students, more community involvement with the community with the school,” said Michelle Smalls, parent.

Students were also asked to take a pledge called “Stop Hatin, No Mas”— vowing to put an end to the violence.

Police say they will continue to beef up patrols around the school until the end of the school year.

School officials released a statement saying, in part, they are “working proactively with students, parents, police and community partners to reinforce the expectation that students treat each other with respect.”

[thejokker]

I think you are missing my point.

Multiculturism implies separate but equal cultures and is nothing more than segregation reinvented. Integration implies monoculturism. What better way to frame the argument that blacks need to assimilate to the larger mainstream culture, as has every other minority (i.e. hispanics), by using the terminology used by MLK.

Unless the left wants to believe that MLK was just some foolish negro who did not really understand the word intergrate than multiculturalism must be rejected.

[GOPJ]

Your post requires more thought than I usually like to give things... That said I see the American black culture differently. It’s like believing in the separation of Church and State - and attempting to use that highfalutin, stance to deal with the Jim Jones Peoples Temple Cult. The black culture of MLK’s time and the black ‘victimology cult’ of today are different enough that the latter doesn’t qualify under the rules of multiculturalism.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Maryland “Freak State” PING!

[Albion Wilde]

And whose culture is the mono (only) one?

I think MLK had in mind the JudeoChristian culture. And back then, culturally, blacks and whites did act a lot more like one another than now. At that point, blacks in this country had been living in Western civilization for 350 years. All people dressed more or less the same way, according to what they could afford. People who were small-time farmers and mom'n'pop businesses could live roughly similar lives, if separate by territory. People who attended religious services gave a more or less similar appearance -- dresses and suits, hats and gloves. Racism and socioeconomic restrictions revolved around territorial, microcultural and reproductive instincts below the surface. MLK wanted Christian men and women to be treated with respect and equal opportunity economically. To my knowledge, he did not get into the topic of cross-reproduction openly; however, this was an expressed fear by white separationists, who then as now, were horrified by the behavior of the transgressive behaviors of those most different from themselves, while tolerating it from those most like themselves.

Black Jews in New York City, early 1900s

Baptist church dinner, Annapolis MD 1943

Asbury Methodist Church, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 1950s

[thejokker]

Diversity is our strength is an attempt to maintain segregation by maintaining a separate but equal society (sic). The monoculture is (of course) traditional mainstream culture.

[thejokker]

The solution to civil rights and our racial divide is for Black Americans to assimilate (integrate) into mainstream culture like every other minority who has immigrated to America.

It should be easy if the radicals on the left are discredited by demonstrating their opposition to the teachings of MLK.

[Albion Wilde]

I agree -- the multiculturalism movement started in the 1950s in universities, which called on every minority ethnic group to embrace their history instead of their future, by finding fault with white European cultures because northwestern European descendents held most positions of power in the society. Led by atheists and secular Jews, Marxists have been pushing for "authenticity" ever since, calling our entire emerging America phony because people, including many ethnicities of whites, had been consciously shedding much of their Old World cultural baggage in order to create E Pluribus Unum in a Bible-based Christianity that held people as equals under the law. It had been Christianity that had led the Abolition and Civil Rights movements the prior two centuries. But. then as now, Marxist "progressivism" is actually regressive.

[Albion Wilde]

Nothing is ever easy.