La Jolla Students Take Short Course on Racism

Herb Cawthorne is not one to avoid confrontation or to permit others to do so. So from the moment he took the stage at La Jolla High School’s auditorium to talk to students Thursday morning, he made it clear that he wouldn’t shrink from putting people on the spot.

The president of the San Diego Urban League had spent the five minutes before starting his presentation shaking hands with all of the students seated in the first row. One girl had refused to introduce herself and Cawthorne decided to make an example of her.

“Where’s the young woman who wouldn’t tell me her name?” Cawthorne asked, his eyes searching the front row.

His question was greeted with laughter, but no one stepped forward.

Cawthorne crouched down at the edge of the stage, with the look of someone who was planning to make himself comfortable for the duration.

“This assembly will be 40 minutes of silence until that young woman comes forward and tells me her name,” he said.

The girl walked up to the stage.

For the next 50 minutes, Cawthorne continued to push his audience to speak to him in an open and honest way about subjects

much more controversial than the names of students.

In recognition of Black History Month, Cawthorne had been invited to the school to discuss racism and inequality with a cross-section of the school’s student body, which is 72% white, 21% Latino, 4% black and 3% Asian. Virtually all of the school’s minority population is bused in as part of the San Diego Unified School District’s voluntary integration effort.

Cawthorne began by teasing the students about La Jolla’s reputation.

“They say that all of you are rich, they say that all of you are snobbish, they say that all of you are uppity, they say that even when you play football, your parents pay the referees to make sure you win,” he told them.

When the students stopped laughing, Hawthorne turned serious.

“I’m not excited about black history month because . . . we do these activities for a month and then for the rest of the year we ignore the problem,” Cawthorne said. “We go back to thinking that the world is made up of people with blond hair and blue eyes when, in fact, most of the people in the world are black and brown . . . . You have a responsibility which relates to black history month but it’s a year-round process. You have a responsibility to eradicate racism in this society.”

But, Cawthorne told them, before they could fight racism, they had to acknowledge that it exists.

Defining Prejudice

He asked several students to define what racism and prejudice meant. When one girl said, “It’s having feelings against a person for being different than you are and acting on those feelings,” Cawthorne asked how many of the students had experienced those kinds of feelings. About half of the students raised their hands.

“Well,” Cawthorne said, “now your principal knows how many of you are honest . . . You have to identify what prejudices you have. If you think you don’t have any, you’re crazy, you’re deluded.”

Cawthorne asked the white students to think about whether they’d ever been uncomfortable about bringing a black friend home for dinner because of what their parents might think, or had avoided going to a black friend’s neighborhood because they feared they would encounter drugs or crime.

“I don’t think you can confuse discomfort with racism,” one boy called from the audience. “People are naturally uncomfortable with people different than they are, no matter how unprejudiced you may be or may think you are.”

Cawthorne told him he had made a good point, but that it was important to look closely at the cause of the discomfort before saying it had nothing to do with prejudice.

“When you are uncomfortable about certain things that have to do with color, that have to do with religion, that have to do with whether women can be leaders--don’t dismiss it, don’t say everyone feels that way,” he said. “Think about why.”

Another student said that Cawthorne was only seeing one side of the problem.

“You’ve been talking as if the whites are the only ones who are racist,” she said, “but it works the other way as well. As we don’t like them, they don’t like us.”

“You can say that black people are racist too,” Cawthorne responded. “Yes, they are. But the racism doesn’t begin with black people. We were brought here on slave ships. We didn’t want to come.”

The handful of black students in the audience applauded.

“If you remove the racism from the larger society, over a short period of time, the racism in reverse you get from black people will dissipate,” Cawthorne said.

Although his tone was often confrontational, Cawthorne frequently interrupted his serious remarks to tease one of the students or to poke fun at himself.

“Are you prejudiced?” Cawthorne asked one boy he had invited on stage to discuss racism one-to-one. “You feel funny being up here with a black man?”

The boy responded by grinning and putting his arm around Cawthorne’s shoulders.

The audience laughed and applauded, and Cawthorne shook his head.

“Just my luck to call on the one guy here who’s a bigger joker than I am,” he said.

Although he spent a lot of time talking about race relations, the main theme of Cawthorne’s talk was something a bit different--the responsibility the students, black and white, have to make the most of their advantages and use them to help the less fortunate.

“You don’t really appreciate the fact that 90% of the children in the world don’t have one iota of what you have,” Cawthorne told them. “They would be grateful, they would be pleased to have one year of the education you throw away.”

A junior named Javier Ruiz said he thought Cawthorne was wrong.

“We have no reason to feel guilty,” Javier said. “You were trying to point the finger at people who have it, trying to make us feel bad for having what we have.”

“I’m trying to make you appreciate the fact that you have so much,” Cawthorne said. “I’m not saying feel guilty. I’m saying feel honored, feel blessed that by some stroke of luck you were born here and not in India or Southeast Asia.”

When Javier argued that people have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Cawthorne shot back, “What did you do to get where you are and have what you have? You were born into it. It was given to you.”

As Cawthorne prepared to conclude his remarks, he said, “If anything I’ve said offends you personally, don’t take it personally . . . If something I said moved you, do yourself the courtesy of thinking about it some more, or talking it over with a friend.”

When Cawthorne was told that his time was up, a number of students were still waving their hands in the air to catch his attention and they seemed frustrated that they hadn’t gotten a chance to make a comment. A group of about 20 students waylaid him at the door to continue the discussion.

Some students, like Javier, did take Cawthorne’s remarks personally.

“His presentation made me feel as if he were prejudiced toward me,” Javier said.

But others said they had been very moved by Cawthorne’s speech.