"Might as well be its own city": Carmel High School TikTok leaves internet astonished as 'all-white' video goes viral

Carmel High School, a public high school in Indiana, is the new hot topic after videos of the school’s endless area and amenities were uploaded on TikTok and eventually went viral. Netizens have thronged Twitter and other platforms to share their reactions.

The school’s DECA club took the TikTok audience on a tour of their school, where it was shown that Carmel offers a lot more than a typical public high school. They have more than one gym and cafeteria, which is unusual for any other school in Indianapolis to provide for their students. The school also has its own natatorium, i.g., an indoor swimming center and a wrestling room.

Alongside these rooms, the school also features a modern library, a planetarium, a cafe, its own live radio room, a TV studio, and a spacious auditorium, among other facilities.

The tour was covered in two separate TikTok videos. Viewers got a peek into Carmel’s bookstore, wood shop, and auto shop. The school also has more than one cooking room. There are also multiple symphony rooms, jewelry and e-sports rooms, a room dedicated to fashion, and many more.

One commenter sarcastically jabbed at the extravagance and lavishness and said that the school might as well be a whole city.

Internet reacts to Carmel High School's videos (Image via TikTok/@bennymac68)

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Several netizens call Carmel High School out for representing class disparities and being "all-white"

The video was first uploaded to TikTok last week, sometime around February 11, and gained more than six million views. It later circulated on Twitter and garnered over 24 million views. Carmel High School is ranked among Indiana’s top high schools and currently has an enrollment of 5,414 students.

In the second video, the students introduced viewers to the school’s orchestras, more cafes, one of their two ceramic rooms, and a football stadium with 10,000 seats.

After watching the videos, some people on Twitter said they could fit three Indianapolis schools in Carmel’s area. However, what most people pointed out was that the school is racist, prideful, and most of its students are white.

One Twitter user, James Ray, wrote that Carmel High School demonstrated the problem with how public schools in the U.S. are being funded.

He said that Carmel’s community is hyper-wealthy, which is why they were able to build a school that is the size of a college. In contrast, many other Indianapolis schools struggle even to obtain updated classrooms and textbooks.

James Ray added that the gigantic size of Carmel High School is not the main thing that makes it astounding. Rather, it is the real-life representation of the disparities between socioeconomic classes still prevalent in their society.

Another user, O'Rion, chimed in and shared that they went to a lower socioeconomic high school before attending a large university where most of their peers went to rich schools like Carmel. O'Rion said that it does not matter how hard one works since kids from rich families were born with an unbeatable headstart.

User @morganyoung ridiculed the fact that Frankfort High School did not have the amenities of air conditioners until 2016/2017, whereas this high school in Carmel had an app to order iced coffee in class.

One person wrote that Carmel should have some more high schools, but instead, all the kids in the town are put in one high school with over 5300 student capacity.

Some also shed light on how the school gets most of its funding from its sports teams and rich, white parents. They called out Carmel High School for being blatantly racist and blamed white people’s funding for the school’s abundance of resources, which is absent in other high schools in Indiana.