Page 373 - The Social Animal

Prejudice 355

grated school—far from it. What I saw were several clusters of self-
segregated groups: Black youngsters clustered together in one group;
Latino youngsters clustered together in another group; white young-
sters clustered together in still another group. Needless to say, it is
not surprising to find that people of the same race and ethnicity
might prefer one another’s company. And, by itself, there is certainly
nothing wrong with that—unless such preferences become rigidified
into exclusionary behavior. A few months after initiating the jigsaw
technique in that same school, when I happened to walk through the
schoolyard, I was suddenly (and quite unexpectedly) struck by the re-
alization that virtually all of these clusters of students were fully in-
tegrated. No one “forced” the youngsters to like one another; they
were actually choosing to relate to one another across racial and eth-
nic boundaries. The jigsaw experience was clearly easing some of the
earlier distrust and suspicion. I recall thinking, “This is how it’s sup-
posed to be!”
Two centuries of de facto segregation may have turned most of
our nation’s adults into “a country of strangers,” but those tens of
thousands of children who have experienced learning together coop-
eratively give us hope for the future—a hope that they will eventu-
ally grow into adults who have learned to enjoy and benefit from
diversity, who have learned to like and respect one another and who
will continue to learn from one another.