I’ve never loved any liquid more than I love chocolate milk. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a strong undeniable love for Nesquik and the final product that comes from my mom’s fancy chocolate milk making machine (Iliana’s Chocolate Milk is legendary, just ask my friends).  It wasn’t until this point in my life, the end of my first semester of my junior year in highschool, that I looked at chocolate milk as something more than my first liquid love. You’re probably wondering what chocolate milk has to do with anything so at this point I ask you the same question I asked myself: 

Why is it that we base our opinion on food, in this case our milk preference, based on what actually matters, the taste, and yet when it comes to people we base our opinions not on their flavor, also known as personality, but on their skin tone?

If we're going to be honest I was at a bit of a stand still at this point in my Chocolate Milk Journey. So far I had identified the issue of racial prejudice among high school teens and was preparing a survey to collect a bunch of random data, so now what? Naturally, as most teens my age do when they don't know how to proceed, I consulted my lunch table. By doing so I learned the following about myself: I, Daphne Carrillo a 17 year old girl from small town Kansas of Hispanic descent, am the whitest brown kid my friends have ever met. I'm not going to lie I was a bit surprised by this statement but as they began to explain I realized that they were right, all my years of being surrounded by white kids turned me into one (well, as white as a brown kid can be).  After this discussion it became clear to me, that despite being a glass of Chocolate Milk in a world full of White Milk, at the end of the day my friends like my flavor.

Now at this point I had collected data from 35 students, who will remain anonymous, all with various ethnicities. I asked five questions in hopes to gain an understanding of student preferences when it comes to potential significant others and their food choices. The first four questions were multiple choice. When it came to the results of the perfect boyfriend question 60% of those surveyed chose the Male Model over the Mexican Man and Muslim Man. The same results could be seen on the perfect girlfriend question where 45.7% chose the White Female over the Mexican Woman and the Muslim Woman. I'd be lying if I said that these results surprised me. Next came the question over Chocolate vs. White Milk. Chocolate Milk beat White Milk with 74.3% . Similarly, Regular Peanut Butter Cups gained 85.7% of votes over the White Peanut Butter Cups. Having looked at these numbers, I scrolled to the bottom of my survey results and began reading the results of the final question. I knew that asking students to tell me their ideal race could potentially be inviting ridiculous answers, which I did receive as one student responded "Mongolian, that beef though” which I have to admit, after reading that first response I was slightly discouraged and did not have high hopes for the rest of the answers I had yet to read, but I continued to scroll anyways. As I scrolled I found that, 19 out of 35 students responded white; this means that 54% of the surveyed students wish they were white. The other 46% of students had answers that varied including Hawaiian, Asian, and African American. As if these statistics weren't already surprising to me, the why answer to the question blew my mind a little more. Now, going into this I knew that most people believe in white privilege but it wasn't  until this survey question that I realized what exactly this meant to high school students. A majority of the responses that stated they would chose to be white also answered that this is ideal to them because it means escaping discrimination, but overall it means fitting in.

To high school students being white means fitting in and fitting in means everything. Fitting in in high school is already so hard when eyes are constantly judging every aspect of your existence, add racial prejudice and discrimination into the mix and I can only imagine how many students are drowning, and I don’t mean in homework. 

After examining these numbers I began to discuss the answers of those students who responded to my survey with them to have a better understanding of why they chose what they chose. After talking to about half of the respondents I learned that a majority based their male and/or female answers based on their prior knowledge of terrorist attacks (Muslims) and involvement in the drug cartel (Mexicans). The white answer was the safe answer. By the end of it I had learned that high school students like crisp, clean, and safe flavors. We aren't into controversial flavors, so if we have to question whether it's safe to like it we probably won't even bother with tasting it again. High schoolers are known for being hungry, but if eating or drinking means tipping the scale we’d rather go hungry. There are so many problems with the way this works, because even high school students are conditioned to believe in the stereotypes and the racial prejudice that we allow society to impose upon us. As high school students we live in our own little worlds full of things that are SO important (lol as if). Until we base who we are attracted to by looking at a person’s flavor instead of their color we will never achieve the status of equality, and your love for chocolate milk will never be as innocent as it once was. 

At the end of the day high schoolers, like any human, have flavor preferences but that doesn’t mean that we have to be so picky and discriminatory against everything that could go bad just because you heard something bad about one encounter with it. Have you ever thought about how many foods you might like if you were more open to tasting them? Maybe you’d have a whole new favorite food if you weren’t so afraid of what could be and focused on what was right in front of you. Despite my best efforts I’ll never be able to change every single opinion when it comes to flavor preference and racial prejudice but hopefully through reading this I’ve opened your eyes to a world we often ignore. Racial Prejudice is as real as my love for Chocolate Milk but my love for Chocolate Milk never would have existed had I not gotten past its color. So now, I ask you, the reader, 

What’s your favorite flavor? And how will you find it?