High school was weird and frustrating at times. I'm Mexican and Irish. I grew up identifying with my Mexican family, but spoke no Spanish and most people assumed I was Italian (based on my last name and what I look like.) So I'm a mutt but basically white, I guess.
In 7th grade I moved to a new neighborhood in my hometown that was still being developed... Two black kids moved into my neighborhood and we all hit it off right away (different kids from different towns, Oakland and Pittsburg, CA.) The area was booming and there were families of all races coming into the neighborhood from all over the Bay Area, and a lot of them were black (there weren't many black families around up to that point.) As it turned out, most of the black kids kind of hung out together, and I fell in with them once we all started going to high school.
The high school we went to was in the next town over and mainly known for agriculture. It was an old school and I don't think there were ever more than a few black students there at a time until the year I started high school (1993.) I was both singled out for and excluded from harassment by police, gangs & other cliques because I was white but was one of "the homies" (the nicest of the names we were called.)
Until high school I never really thought much about race, everybody just fell into two categories to me, English-speaking or Spanish-speaking. There wasn't any animosity between the groups, everyone sort of stuck with one group or the other because a lot of kids weren't fluent in both languages... But once I was in high school and hanging out with mostly black kids (there were about 30 in our school of 2,000+,) I saw tons of animosity and racism, even from some of the teachers and faculty. It was pretty unbelievable, I had never seen anything like it before. It was frustrating to see and hear about the things my friends had to put up with for being different when they weren't any different from anybody else.
Anyway, I don't know that this answers your question, but it came to mind when I saw the topic.