Problem or progress? White student leads black club at N. Virginia high school - The Washington Post

Problem or progress? White student leads black club at N. Virginia high school - The Washington Post: Michael Wattendorf, a senior at Northern Virginia’s super-selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, stood before prospective members of its Black Student Union in the fall and introduced himself as the club’s president. The freshmen, Wattendorf recalled, looked a little confused.

“Yes,” Wattendorf remembers saying with a cheerful smile, “I am white.”

TJ, as the prestigious magnet school is known, has long struggled to boost its African American and Hispanic enrollment. Of the 1,800 students who attended TJ last year, only 34 were black and 42 were Hispanic, school figures show. The overwhelming majority of their classmates were Asian (906) and white (787).

To some, a white student at the helm of a club for black kids is a symptom of the school’s lack of diversity.