Divisions that reemerge when the lunch bell rings

Students at the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts are talented, smart and racially diverse, seemingly a model of integration and a tribute to Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared school segregation unconstitutional.

It takes only a glance at this school’s lunchroom, however, to see that 50 years after that landmark decision, racial polarization in schools, as in the nation as a whole, is still a complex fact of life: Outside the classroom, the majority of these teenagers segregate themselves into racial and ethnic groups.

At times painful, tonight’s new documentary, “I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education,” on cable TV’s N, Noggin’s nighttime network for young adults, shows how difficult it is to overcome that polarization, as a group of teenagers -- black, white and Latino -- at the Buffalo school attempt to desegregate the lunchroom.

It’s a real struggle. There are no glib, feel-good conversions to melting-pot harmony here. Idealism gives way to dogged determination for most, as the challenges the students face in involving their reluctant peers in the project become apparent.

They must cope with their own internal and external conflicts, too, as they pair off in biracial twosomes to spend time with each other outside of school, something that none has done before.

Hanging with a like group is “comfortable”; trying to make someone of a different race understand you is “work.”

They meet resistance, not only with the lunchroom crowd but within their families and with each other in what are mostly uneasy visits to each other’s homes.

One edgy white teen who says his father’s side of the family is “racist,” and who seems unable to acknowledge his own very evident prejudices, has his black counterpart meet him at an all-white pool hall hangout, where the atmosphere is uncomfortably charged.

One black teen is surprised that his white counterpart is “ghetto like me,” not rich; stereotypical thinking is rife on all sides, and, as observed by filmmakers Whitney Dow and Marco Williams, it is the students’ faces -- hopeful, earnest, disappointed, watchful, sullen, uneasy -- not their words that make the most eloquent statement about the complexities of society’s deep racial divide.

Dow, who is white, and Williams, who is black, have looked at issues of race before: They filmed the critically acclaimed 2002 documentary “Two Towns of Jasper,” a disturbing, revelatory look at the starkly contrasting perspectives of Jasper, Texas’ black and white residents on the brutal 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr.

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‘I Sit Where I Want’

What: “I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education”

Where: The N

When: 6 to 7 tonight; repeated 9 to 10

Rating: The network has rated the documentary TV-PGL (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for coarse language).

Directed and produced by Whitney Dow and Marco Williams. Executive producer Tonya Lewis Lee.

What else: Other television and radio programs today dealing with the legacy of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision include:

* “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” (7-8 p.m., CNN): The news anchor bases tonight’s show in Topeka, Kan.

* “Thurgood Marshall: Before the Court” (7-8 p.m., KPCC-FM [89.3]): American Radio Works airs a documentary on the NAACP attorney who went on to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

* “Beyond Brown: Pursuing the Promise” (9-10 p.m., repeated at midnight, KLCS): A discussion of the decision features students, teachers, parents and lawyers.