Dear Teacher.

• Author: Buchsbaum, Herbert
• Position: Brief Article

Dear Teacher:

You've seen it before--in the cafeteria, the gym, in the clumps of students socializing between classes. Given the chance, high school students often separate themselves by race. No matter how integrated the community or school, no matter that black and white students may have been friends since childhood, when they get to high school, race becomes the great divide. "It just happens," say the students in this issue.

But it doesn't just happen--and our cover story by New York Times national correspondent Tamar Lewin tells you why.

That article and several others in this issue are part of "How Race Is Lived in America," a series of reports based on a yearlong examination by The New York Times. This series goes beyond the legal and political struggles that characterized race relations in the past to look at how race affects everyday life--in...