We called ourselves "The Nubian Sisters," Nubes for short. There were maybe seven of us, basically the entire eighth-grade population of black female students at my small private school. The "club" wasn't much more than us hanging out by a particular bench during lunch, dressing for gym at the same time and wasting study halls scribbling the names of cute boys in cursive.
Unlike the members of Franklin High School's "White Girls Club," the Nubes didn't have a "sign." We didn't sport T-shirts announcing our exclusive affiliation down the halls or fire off wildly offensive missives on the Internet. But we did feel the need to unite for no other reason than to flaunt our budding self-confidence. For us it wasn't so much about exclusion as it was about declaring ourselves, if only loud enough for those closest to hear.
The thing was, my school was extremely diverse, racially and socioeconomically. I was a scholarship kid, but so was one of my best friends, who was half Chinese and half German. We captained the cheerleading squad together, which was made up of equal parts Asian and black girls. Our coach was Latina. We didn't just tolerate one another; we actually saw one another.
What's most troubling about the recent news out of New Jersey — that a group of white female students decided to not only form a White Girls Club but also tweet racist comments about black students — is that these kids seemed to think themselves clever.
One girl retweeted a fellow student who had tweeted, "the hallways in the high school" along with a "photo of a large group of monkeys or chimpanzees," according to the Home News Tribune, the newspaper that broke the story last month when a concerned student sent in screenshots of the offensive tweets. Other Twitpics show the "#wgc" members "holding up three fingers creating the letter 'W' apparently as a symbol for white." Genius.
More than 100 concerned parents and neighbors attended the Franklin Township Board of Education meeting at the end of April to address the issue of the club, which had been written about in several local papers, sparking debates online and off about how the community addressed race.
Superintendent Edward Q. Seto said that the school board instructed him to continue to investigate the club, which was not officially sanctioned by Franklin High School, and that one student had already been disciplined.
