A couple of white tables are at the side. Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn has no single racial or ethnic majority, but rather an array of groups as extensive as at any school in the country. A kosher Chinese restaurant named Shalom Hunan stands a couple of blocks away on M Street. By all accounts, relationships among the students are fairly congenial, with markedly less friction than elsewhere. Yet the clustering is finely tuned, and the boundaries are clear enough that, one day, students in the Council of Unity, representing every ethnic organization at Murrow, wanted to draw me a map on the board to show where various kinds of people congregated before school, after school, and during free periods.
Brown lockers is the Italian world.
On the stairs, the Irish. Cafeteria, black people mostly, and Russians right here. And then you have people who don't speak English. Then a mixture, by the windows. As she continued, she got a lot of help and argument from other students, who called out instructions on filling in the pieces of their ethnic geography.