Students Work Out Racial Rifts

As major school activities go, picking up litter in the East San Diego neighborhoods surrounding Crawford High School last month was fairly low-profile.

But, for the 25 or so students with their green trash bags, the mid-morning exercise was an important, albeit small, step in both rebuilding the school’s tarnished image and improving racial tolerance.

After an hour of cleaning up lawns and curb gutters, the students adjourned for a hot-dog barbecue to continue informal conversations that administrators hope will break down stereotypes among the whites, blacks, Latinos and Indochinese who people the campus in large numbers.

The push toward getting students to get along better with each other--if not necessarily to always like each other--has been given a higher priority at Crawford since incidents last fall when racial fighting broke out between Indochinese and other ethnic groups, in particular blacks. The fighting was touched off by an off-campus shooting in which one student was slightly wounded.

The media attention caught Crawford students and faculty off guard, and, although they protested that such tension is not unique to their campus, they also acknowledged that Crawford was not doing enough to minimize it.

After the immediate furor calmed and administrators put a damper on the rumor network that usually follows school conflicts, Principal

Nancy Shelburne convened a student leadership group, with members chosen for their leadership ability and influence with peers.

The group now meets regularly to discuss racial issues, plan campus activities, improve student-police relations, all within the context of avoiding situations similar to what happened in October. Counselors from the Urban League and from the Indochinese Mutual Assistance Assn. have worked with black and Indochinese students to explore ways to lessen ethnic animosity.

There have been signs of progress, many measured in small increments such as persuading students to let a fight, if one breaks out, to take place one-on-one, without friends and supporters of the two antagonists choosing up sides and turning an incident into a racial free-for-all.

“I think we’ve made some sort of change with our group,” Crawford student Tony Pordullo said while picking up litter with a couple of friends he invited along for the activity. “Sure, not everyone likes others, and the hardest thing is to get everyone together and realize that we’re all equal, even if you think some people are better.”

The group scheduled the litter pickup after some students suggested that, if they could show more pride in their school and neighborhood, perhaps that might rub off on student attitudes about each other as well.

Talking About Things

“We are students who have a lot of friends, and who talk about things to other friends,” said student Anthony Wise. “We talk about gangs, about graffiti, about stereotypes, about all sorts of things.”

While bending down for a beer can, Wise pointed to the “SWP” painted on a manhole cover a block away from Crawford. The phrase stands for “student white power.”

“Something like that, that’s how fights get started,” Wise said. “And it gives the entire student body here a bad name, it ruins things for the rest of us.”

Many students stressed the “code of honor” that they are trying to establish when fights do break out.

“Fights should be one-on-one,” Andrew (A. J.) Hinton said. “If we can limit to two rather than a whole group or gang, I think that really helps.”

But Hinton, a senior, has also tried to get his friends to understand that feelings do not have to be carried out in physical challenges, especially between blacks and Indochinese.

“There is a language problem,” Hinton said, referring to the large numbers of Indochinese, mainly Cambodian students, who are not yet fluent in English. School district human relations counselors found that some of the animosity last fall stemmed from a basic lack of communication.

“If I drop my pencil and a (Indochinese) tries to tell me I did so, it’s sometimes hard for me to figure out what he’s saying . . . it all depends on how you handle the situation. It can be laughter--an ice-breaker-- or tension.

‘I May Not Understand’

“If someone steps on my foot accidentally in the hall, he may apologize but I may not understand so you have to smile, use your hands maybe, to show that everything is OK, just say ‘excuse me.’ Otherwise, there’s immediate tension, and then there’s a fight.”

Added senior class president Charma Hendricks: “It’s hard for us at first to understand the life style of the Indochinese.” The Indochinese students, especially those not yet comfortable with English, are less likely to take part in non-academic programs and are sometimes seen as working too hard in school. Many non-Asian students have little knowledge of the harrowing experiences that these refugees went through in escaping to the United States.

Although Crawford students are making an effort at better interpersonal relations, some of their younger peers at neighboring Mann Middle School are in the midst of some of that school’s worst racial antagonism in several years.

Principal Maruta Gardner said that, during the past two weeks, about 15 Asian and 15 black males have been involved in periodic fighting, casting a pall over the school’s atmosphere. Although the students have been placed in counseling--and some have been expelled or transferred to other schools--name-calling and stare-downs have continued at lunch time and during passing periods, and some confrontations have taken place after school. Gardner called in parents of the students on Friday to impress upon them the volatility of the situation.

Gardner traced the latest problems to an incident in which several black students beat up a Vietnamese student in retaliation for what they said was a black student being harmed by Indochinese in nearby Colina del Sol park after school.

‘Never-Ending Problem’

“And these kids are going to be going to Crawford from here,” Gardner said. “It’s just a never-ending problem we have to work on.” Mann has been praised in past years for positive effects of its race/human-relations program--which all schools are required to take--but the teacher responsible for coordinating multi-ethnic activities was promoted to another district position last fall.

“So a lot of the program just died,” Gardner said, referring to “lunch bunch” groups in which teachers volunteered to sit down over lunch with students and talk about any and all problems that they had with classes or with one another.

“The fact is that we don’t have them this year, because you can’t force teachers to do it, and I think it has made a (negative) difference in the tone at the school,” Gardner said.

Gardner has called in black and Indochinese counselors from the school district to sit down with the most active combatants, in a manner similar to what Urban League and Indochinese Mutual Assistance counselors began doing at Crawford last fall.

“Counseling cannot guarantee that things will get better, but at least Cambodian students will come to understand the situation better,” said Senyint Chim, a district counselor who has been talking with Crawford students.

“You try to explain that fighting, responding with force, is not going to solve the problem of attacks and that they should instead come to the counseling office and try and get help that way,” Chim said.

Anti-Black Conditioning

Chim believes many Cambodian students are conditioned to see blacks unfavorably, in part simply because the Khmer Rouge, who killed up to 1 million Cambodians in the late 1970s when they ruled the country, wore black.

“Also, they do not see many blacks in positive roles in America, and they also believe that most of the robberies in their East San Diego neighborhoods are committed by blacks,” Chim said. “They don’t see many bad white guys robbing them, so stereotypes get established real quick.

“I think solutions will come only slowly.”

By the same token, Urban League program specialist Charles Howard said some black students do not understand the background of Asian students and the reasons they are reluctant to involve themselves in after-school programs such as dances and sports rallies.

Many of those black students have had attendance and minor behavioral problems as well, leading to jealousies toward other students and a lack of self-esteem, which Howard’s program is trying to address by arranging counseling and part-time employment.

“Quite a few kids, 20 or so, have taken advantage of our offer to get them some work experience after school,” Howard said, pointing to jobs offered by business like Pizza Hut and nonprofit organizations such as the YMCA. The Urban League is planning a larger Youth Employment Partnership Program, in coordination with other social-service organizations, to try to turn more youths away from gangs and drugs.

Howard said students at Crawford and other schools are “not foreordained to clash” over ethnic differences, despite the continuing tension and misunderstandings. “They’ve got 1,600 kids at Crawford, and I see both a lot of kids mixing together and ethnic kids also hanging with their own, and all of that is normal behavior,” he said.