2-Day Rustic Mixer Helps Students to Break Down Racial Stereotypes

There were sing-alongs by the fire, a barbecue lunch and bunking in cabins overnight, but the real reason more than 100 Gardena High School students boarded buses for Camp Max Straus in Glendale last week was far more serious than the usual camp fare.

Instead of scary ghost stories by firelight, the dialogue was about reality--about race, about prejudice, about cultural problems not normally aired in the classroom.

A frank and often emotional discussion about the differences among them brought students, faculty and parents to the rustic retreat at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. Their goal was a start toward understanding among the school’s many races and cultures.

During their stay, the students were challenged, provoked, angered and prodded to the brink of tears.

A few saw the experience as the beginning of a metamorphosis.

“It’s so emotional it could change your whole life, your whole outlook, in two days,” said junior Connie Alvarez. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

Hesitant when first confronted with the hard issues they had come to discuss, some students fidgeted; a few others joked and whispered among themselves. But by the end of the two-day Project Brotherhood/Sisterhood conference, much of the evasiveness and restlessness had faded, replaced by a new willingness among students and faculty to talk.

“The reason I came here is I wanted to find out if I’m a racist, if I’m a bigot,” said 10th-grader Felicia Allen, challenging her classmates to ask themselves the same question.

“I feel close to blacks, but I don’t really speak to them,” said Alvarez, adding that she wanted to cross that barrier.

“Racism is a big issue, it really is,” said senior Melinda Frank. “Prejudice is at Gardena High School--it’s at every school; it’s everywhere. It’s not really talked about, but it’s there.”

There were cultural as well as racial issues, including assimilation.

Korean-born junior Yong Kim, whose family moved to the United States after he finished the first grade, mentioned the conflict teen-agers can face in holding onto their cultural heritage while maintaining an American point of view. “In our house the Korean culture is totally intact,” said Kim, “but I feel more American.”

Said Carilyn King-Gorman, one of two parents who attended the camp: “It’s good to get the kids together in a setting like this. Usually, they mostly socialize in their own (racial) group.”

The plethora of cultural issues is not surprising among a student population as ethnically diverse and shifting as Gardena’s. According to Principal Tamotsu Ikeda, about 35% of the students are black, 35% Latino, 24% Asian-American and 6% Anglo. The Latino and black populations have been increasing gradually while the number of Asian-American students is slowly declining, he said.

The camp is sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a nonprofit organization seeking to promote racial and cultural understanding. The project is supported by a $173,000 grant from the Herb Alpert Foundation.

The first Project Brotherhood/Sisterhood camp was held in 1986 for students from San Gabriel High School, at the request of a school dean who approached the Christian-Jewish conference with the idea after ethnic confrontations took place at that school. This year, in addition to Gardena High School, Santa Monica High and Alhambra High were added to the program.

Because Gardena administrators had expressed an interest in beginning a human relations program dealing with cultural issues, Los Angeles Unified School District officials nominated the school for the program last year, said Dick Browning, support services administrator for the senior high school district. A second district school, Manual Arts High in Los Angeles, was added this year, he said.

Ethnically diverse Gardena High was a good selection for the program, according to National Conference of Christians and Jews program director Glen Poling, because the school has “the racial mix, and there is some level of tension among those populations on campus.”

At Gardena, and at other high schools where changes in the racial composition have been even greater, there have been tense relations between ethnic groups--and even within ethnic groups--in recent years. In 1987, for example, there were fights between Japanese-American and Korean-American students, and other groups have had minor clashes, though administrators say those problems are no longer in evidence.

The first phase of Gardena’s program began last year when faculty members were given lesson plans on various cultures and encouraged to incorporate the plans into their teaching curricula, said Assistant Principal Patricia Ashby.

In addition, monthly educational themes were chosen on subjects such as the Holocaust, Black History Month, women, Japanese, American Indians, Chinese and other cultures, she said. Counselors from the Christian-Jewish conference began visiting the school last year, meeting with teachers and a 14-member steering committee of faculty and staff members, Ashby said. And earlier this year, administrators began recruiting students to attend the camp retreat.

Some students volunteered for the camp and others were selected, Principal Ikeda said, but no one was required to go, and no student who wanted to go was turned away.

“Not everybody jumped up and down with joy to go at the beginning,” Ikeda said. Administrators sought to recruit students in the same proportion as their ethnic representation in the student body.

There was evidence of students staying within racial cliques. During a midday break, a group of black students socialized together in a grassy clearing, while nearby an Asian-American group relaxed on the porch of the lodge. Elsewhere, Latino students talked together in small groups.

But at Camp Max Straus, counselors encourage the melding of different cultures and races--in group sessions, at meals, at social events, in the choice of bunkmates to share overnight quarters.

The first full day began with an imagery session, dubbed a “race reversal fantasy.”

“Relax, close your eyes, get comfortable,” facilitator Kathryn Seiffert-Jones said in slow, measured tones to the students assembled in the wood-beamed Main Lodge. “Think of the racial group you are least comfortable with. . . . Make a mental picture of that group. What do their faces look like, what do their bodies look like? . . . Now, imagine you’re a part of that race. What does it feel like?”

As students relaxed, they were asked to create a life around their imagined persona--school, family, friends, neighborhood. They were then asked to respond, in writing but anonymously, to a series of questions, including what race they chose, how their parents earned a living, how they spent a typical day, what they were proud of--and not proud of--about their imagined race.

The hard part of the exercise came later that afternoon. A few at a time, students were shepherded back into the meeting lodge to read the lists of stereotypes, culled from the anonymous responses and posted on the walls.

Told to examine the four lists silently, some students appeared startled and uncomfortable as they read what others imagined was good or bad about their race. After they were seated, there was more silence, even as camp co-director Audrey Gilliam and facilitator Neil Van Steenbergen urged the students to respond.

Finally, emotional reactions began to bubble to the surface.

Felicia Allen, a black student, stood. “The question that struck me about the black list,” she said, her voice trembling, “is (the comment) that we are not pure. You cannot tell me we are not as pure as you are. It makes me mad. . . . When you wrote something about ‘not pure’ I wanted to break down and cry. It’s unfair.”

“Who wants to own up to that?” said facilitator Van Steenbergen, who urged students to take responsibility for the remarks they had written.

Again, an uncomfortable silence. No one responded. Soon, however, other reactions began to emerge.

“I like dark skin,” said Connie Alvarez, indicating her own brown skin, “but there’s such a thing as being too dark.” When asked to point out someone in the room who was too dark, however, she declined. But Alvarez, who had traveled alone to Senegal and Gambia for her 15th birthday, said some people in those countries were “dark to the point of being blue-black.”

Later, however, Allen said she had problems with the other end of the color spectrum. “I wrote down pale skin (as unattractive),” she admitted. “I’ll own up to it.”

One black student mentioned that she felt uncomfortable around Asian-Americans who owned businesses in Gardena, including some merchants who she said owned booths at local swap meets.

“They’re rude,” she said. “When I come in there, they’re (following) right on my heels like I’m trying to steal something.”

But Japanese-born Anna Yaguchi, a junior, said some Asian-Americans, particularly newly arrived immigrants, have never met a black person. Yaguchi added that all Asian-Americans should not be faulted for isolated incidents.

In another exercise, students were dispatched into small “racially separate” groups of Latinos, Anglos, African-Americans and Asian-Americans to compose lists of stereotypes about their own racial groups and discuss how those stereotypes originated.

Other activities included an exercise in which tags were placed on students’ backs, identifying them as athletes or intellectuals or student leaders. The tagged students had to guess from the reactions of others the category into which they fit. Another exercise was an extemporaneous play in which each student took on the role of a student in a racial group other than his own. In another exercise, students had to describe to other students who they were, defining themselves beyond their roles as students.

For some, self-identification was the most challenging assignment.

“You had to think about who you are,” said senior Tonya Nowlin. “I mean, you know who you are, but it’s hard to explain. It made you think about judging people (based) on how a person looks or dresses.”

This week, flush with good intentions from their camp experience, students talked about the steps they had taken to get along better.

“When I came back I was a totally different person in thought,” said junior Yoon Choi. “I got closer to people who went to the camp. I have a more open mind; it was really helpful to me. I think everybody should have gone.”

Anna Yaguchi, who also attended a Brotherhood/Sisterhood camp last summer, called her experience “an emotional roller coaster. It was Utopia in a way. I could go out and say things I normally can’t. We could be totally open and honest. This program is very important to me.”

Abdoulauye Williams, a native of Panama who is black, spent much of his time at the camp with the Latino group, with whom he said he has a shared cultural heritage. “I am Latin American,” he said. “Some people didn’t understand and said I should go to the African-American group . . . but we started talking and solved the problem. They realized it’s not always color that defines people.”

Connie Alvarez offered some criticism of the program, which she said was a particularly potent experience for impressionable high school students.

“I kind of thought it was like a tiny brainwashing session for two days,” Alvarez said. “They cram this information into your head and make you emotional. They bring out things and leave them just sort of hanging out there. They pound all these stereotypes out of you.”

But Alvarez too had praise for the program. “It did open my mind,” she said. “I got rid of a lot of stereotypes.”

In a meeting Wednesday, about half the students who attended the camp met to discuss their “action plan” for spreading their new-found cultural idealism to the rest of the student body. In the works are plans for a multicultural dance and a play written and performed by students. Also discussed were plans to form a local Brotherhood/Sisterhood chapter and initiate regular school-wide assemblies to discuss race and culture.

The National Conference of Christians and Jews will provide about $2,000 to Gardena High School to help fund the activities, said Daniel Loera, the organization’s liaison with the Gardena campus. Loera, who has worked with the faculty and students since last school year, said he will continue his visits to help the school implement its action plan.

Said student Enrique Benitez: “I would recommend it to all my friends. If you have the patience, you’ll see what a person really is like--on the inside.”