Aspiring opera singer finds racial harmony at Suitland High

Back when Joey Baker was a freshman trying to find his way at Suitland High School, it was not uncommon for the aspiring opera singer to hear catcalls as he walked between classes.

Students at the overwhelmingly black school in Prince George's County would teasingly call their white classmate "Justin Timberlake" or "Robin Thicke." Or, in the ultimate indignity, they'd liken Baker to hip-hop punch line Vanilla Ice, chanting, "Ice, ice, baby," as he tried to slip into math class.

After four years, he can finally laugh about it. He still walks those same halls, but the song does not remain the same.

The catcalls faded and the social hierarchy shifted -- maybe simply because time passed and people adapted, or maybe because everyone got to hear Baker, who has blossomed into one of the country's most promising young opera singers. At 17, he has already sung for the president, with Mary J. Blige and at the Kennedy Center.

These days, the charismatic Suitland senior with the outsize baritone -- one of the stars at the school's selective, high-achieving Center for the Visual and Performing Arts -- gets fist-bumps from the guys and hugs from the girls, and is repeatedly acknowledged by name. His name.

"When we walk to class, all I hear is 'Hey, Joey! Hey, Joey!' " says Baker's best friend, Tre'Von Bray. "I'm like, wow, he's really popular."

How popular? "Joey's just as popular as the quarterback," says Maria Saldaña, coordinator of the arts program.

That's no small feat given that opera "is not cool music," as Baker allows -- and also that he's at a school of 2,436 students where roughly 96 of every 100 are African American and only one out of every 100 is white. Baker, who jokingly calls himself Suitland's "cool white boy," stands out with his soft blue eyes, leonine mane and scruffy goatee, not to mention his penchant for singing Tosti (in Italian) and Shakespeare sonnets (in Elizabethan English) at school functions.

But if he's a fish out of water, then Baker is something of a mudskipper, a fish that also walks on land.

"That's just kind of how it's always been for me," he says.

Most of his friends are black. His girlfriend, Evelyn Kenner, a fellow arts program student, is black. Before his family moved to Greenbelt at the end of 2008, many of his neighbors were black. He doesn't give it much thought; his best friend, Bray, who is black, says that aside from exchanging a few NASCAR jokes, he's never had a conversation with Baker about race.