The Melting Pot Myth : Even in Multi-Ethnic L.A., Ignorance of Other Cultures Is a Growing Problem, Experts Say

I could tell you, if I wanted to, what makes me what I am.

But I don’t really want to -- and you don’t give a damn .

--From “Impasse,” by Langston Hughes

It was a chain reaction.

The Anglo in the rear hit the Italian in the truck. The Italian in the truck hit the Japanese-African-Blackfoot Indian woman and her baby in the champagne-colored Honda sedan. Then two black policemen came on the scene.

It happened in Los Angeles, of course. Perhaps some Armenians, Koreans and Latinos should have been there to make that point self-evident. But enough of the city’s diverse population was involved, and what happened when they met on narrow turf--though the accounts are in dispute--suggests much about the weakness of Los Angeles as the perfect-melting-pot metaphor.

‘I’m So Glad You’re Here’

Velina Hasu Houston rushed to the officers, appreciation clearly in her eyes, in her voice, she recalls: “I’m so glad you’re here.”

Her 20-month-old son, Kiyoshi, was crying and bleeding from the mouth after he hit his car seat in the June 4 mishap.

But the officers “did not care to speak to me from moment one,” says Hasu Houston, whose angular face suggests her Native American, as well as Japanese, ancestry. “They looked at me and they looked at my son,” whose father is Caucasian and is fairer than she, then ignored her and walked away with the “Italian man.”

He spoke with “an Italian accent” and wore a shirt bearing a tag with an Italian name, explains Hasu Houston, 31, an award-winning playwright whose works dealing with issues of ethnic identity and interracial and intercultural conflict have been staged at the Mark Taper Forum and by the Negro Ensemble Company. She pursued them.

Finally, she claims, officer Nathaniel Hampton began “writing down my license plate and car (description). I was trying to explain to him what had happened . . . that my son was hurt and that I wanted to get out of there. . . . He wasn’t even listening. And then he started to walk away, shook his head and said, ‘half-breed bitch.’ ”

Incensed, she followed him. They argued over his order to her to stand in one spot away from him. She protested she had done nothing wrong. But the discussion grew so heated Hampton started to handcuff her before his partner, Preston Banks, interceded, she claims.

Banks, who has since left the LAPD to work for the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department, could not be reached for comment. Hampton, 35, an LAPD officer for seven years, denies he used profanity, noting it would have been “unprofessional.” He says he may have told Hasu Houston to “stand in a certain spot” to get her out of the way because she was “out of control” but that he never tried to handcuff her.

Tensions Are Significant

Still, the all-too-common tensions that were displayed are indicative of “just the type of powder keg we’re sitting on,” in Los Angeles, in California and, indeed, across the nation, says Alex Norman, an associate professor at UCLA’s School of Social Welfare and a consultant to government and industry on interethnic relations.

He laments that such incidents are proliferating in a city that has become a microcosm of the world, with virtually every racial and ethnic group on the planet represented.

“We know very little about each other and we care very little to learn about each other,” says Norman, who spoke recently at the second annual conference of the Multiracial Americans of Southern California.

MASC is a cultural and educational support group for racially and culturally mixed families and those interested in promoting multicultural understanding. Norman--who is married to a Jewish-American woman and has organized dialogues in Los Angeles between Arabs and Jews, Latinos and blacks and blacks and Jews--praised it for providing one of the few forums locally or nationally for such issues to be discussed.

Not Much Information

With the “possible exception of Afro-Americans and Jews who have had some close relationships,” there is scant information on America’s interminority relations, though much has been written about majority vs. minority relations, he told about 200 people at the MASC conference in Culver City. Most at the daylong event were people of mixed race, individuals in mixed marriages or parents of multiracial children.

There is little contemporary literature about even a conflict as old and familiar as that between Arabs and Jews, “much less on Asians and blacks (and) nothing on Latinos and Asians,” Norman says.

That information void, he argues, is a growing danger, given the present and approaching demographics of Los Angeles and California--a sociological weather vane for the nation, futurists have said.

“Six of the 10 most ethnically diverse counties in the country (are) in California,” with Los Angeles “ranked sixth,” Norman says. By the year 2000, “there will be 38 million in this state. There are about 28 million now.” Over half of those 38 million are expected to be ethnic minorities and immigrants.

Many Jobs Will Be Lost

This demographic explosion “does not bode well for Los Angeles,” he says. While California’s economy is expected to expand, “many jobs are going to be lost and the . . . newer jobs are going to be in the managerial and technical areas where people of color are underrepresented.”

“There will be a lot of growth in the service sector and in some low-skilled job areas,” he says. “But compared to the growth in the technical area and managerial area, it will be relatively small. And people of color are particularly overrepresented in the service sector and low-skilled jobs.”

At the same time, it is projected “the number of white males in . . . the work force is going to decrease from 45%-50% now” to 25% by 2000, he says, noting that white executives who have lived in a nation dominated by a monocultural, monoracial ethos now must learn to “manage diversity.” The increasingly minority-populated educational system also has serious problems, he adds.

What then will the face of America look like in 2000 and beyond? Increasingly brown, demographers tells us, and possibly more divided by class and color, Norman suggests:

“The competition for employment and scarce resources and the perceived inability--real for some people--to improve their condition can really result in despair . . . alienation . . . destructive behavior. My fear is that the same kind of social unrest that we experienced in our cities in the ‘60s could very easily explode across the country . . . “

More Mixed Marriages

The source of this racial and ethnic change, social scientists predict, won’t be from immigration alone or expansion of the existing nonwhite population; there will, instead, be more marriages across racial and ethnic lines, creating a new group of multiracial Americans. There will be more Hasu Houstons.

Large numbers of mixed-race Americans have existed for centuries--notably African-Americans, socially defined as black but most of whom have Native American or European ancestry, social scientists say.

The number of multiracial Americans has skyrocketed since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws in 1967. In 1970, there were 65,000 marriages between blacks and whites in America; in 1986, there were 181,000, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reports. In 1970, there were 310,000 interracial marriages beyond those involving blacks and whites. In 1986, there were 827,000 of these marriages.

As a result there are an estimated 1 million mixed-race American children, says Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on mixed-race children. It’s probable there are twice that many mixed-race children, she says. But exact numbers are hard to determine because census categories compel people to choose the racial or ethnic group they identify with most.

Many mixed-race people lobbied the government to add a new “multiracial” category for the 1990 census. But that will not happen, says Barbara Clay, spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget, which sets census criteria for racial classifications. She says the “mixed-race (term) was not inclusive enough, too limiting.” The “other” category remains.

Though it’s too late for 1990, many mixed-race people who want official acknowledgement have their eyes on the year 2000. A mixed-race woman--speaking at a MASC workshop where participants were guaranteed anonymity--discussed recognition. Surrounded by a sea of faces representing America’s cherished melting-pot theory, she sums up the sentiments of many mixed-race conference participants.

“We exist. (But) the parent races and the government still want to continue the process of pretense,” she says with a rush of emotion in her voice and pain registering across her face. “I want affirmation. We exist and we are going to define ourselves as, yes, mixed-race.”

But in response, Norman says that whether there ought to be a mixed-race category is “academic.” Race has been used in the U.S. “as a mechanism for division, a mechanism to achieve power, or as a mechanism for reducing power. It’s an arbitrary concept,” he says. “My mother was a Cherokee Indian. My father was an African.” But “we grew up black in Georgia because blacks were treated better than Indians.”

No Denial of Ancestry

That kind of pragmatism, however, is not the balm many mixed-raced people say they want and need. They don’t want to deny any part of their ancestry but often are rejected by what many of them call “parent” races. They want a category of their own.

In her life, she has been “oppressed by whites, by blacks, by Japanese,” says Hasu Houston, whose mother is Japanese and whose late father was half Native American and half black. Her run-in with the police was just the latest indignity. Growing up in Junction, Kansas, “was awful,” she recalls. Her most “violent” childhood episode occurred in the seventh-grade when she was jumped after school by five black girls, who taunted her by telling her: “You flip your hair like a white girl.” One of them grabbed her pony tail, pulled out a knife and “cut off my hair,” before the group beat her up.

Of her LAPD encounter, she says: “I still feel the psychological reverberations.” She filed an official complaint; the department told her the officers had behaved appropriately. She was also told the LAPD offers sensitivity training to help officers deal with minorities.

“It was so disappointing for me,” says Hasu Houston, who intends to use the episode in a screenplay she’s writing. “There’s a lot of majority vs. minority racism. . . . “ But “I always have this hopeful-ness that minorities will be able to get along.” She shakes her head. “That certainly hasn’t been true in my life.”

She has tried to analyze why. “I wonder sometimes if it’s because groups that are greatly oppressed, when they rechannel that oppression and begin to oppress others,” does it become “darker and more violent?”

Based on his knowledge, Norman cautions that no one should think there is greater hostility toward mixed-race people or other minorities in the black community “than exists in the white community.” The problem is universal, he says: “People have a lot of misinformation about each other because we just don’t know each other.”