Not Always a Rosy View for S. County’s African-Americans

Pam Lathan is talking about what she and her husband have “done” to their children by moving them from Massachusetts to South County five years ago. The implication in her tone is that they had somehow done them wrong.

Pam is saying this in her formal living room with the outrageously high ceilings, which is next to the formal dining room with the wrap-around windows through which a drop-dead ocean view pretty nearly takes one’s breath away.

This is no mere slice of blue.

Fact is, from these very windows, and all the others on the west side of this Laguna Niguel hilltop mansion, Pam and her family could see the calamity consuming Los Angeles six months ago.

This is a view that gives perspective.

“I could see the fires outside my window,” Pam says. “And I thought, ‘I don’t want my kids to have to do that.’ ”

About having done her children wrong: The Lathans are black. Orange County is largely white. At times, it can be a very uneasy mix.

Debbie Myers, too, is black, as is her husband, Donald, sitting beside her now, and their two boys, 11 and 15 years old. The Myers don’t live too far from the Lathans.

Brenda Mason and her 16-year-old son are here, too. They’re African-Americans as well. They also live in Laguna Niguel.

Race is the issue here tonight, for the purposes of discussion that is, although race as an everyday issue is something that the Lathans, Myers and Masons understand much better than I.

Neither I nor my children have ever been frisked by a policeman who was just checking to make sure we weren’t lying about having drugs or a gun.

We’ve never been assumed to be the hired help. Nobody’s questioned my address or the ownership of my car. Teachers don’t ask my kids if they’ve cheated when they do their schoolwork well.

These black families, and others, have many stories such as these.

And, still, this is hardly news. Attitudes can be slow to change. Racism, the monster, is still thriving and sending off spores, insidiously, mutating into ever more subtle forms.

Mostly those on the receiving end just shrug off the slights. Constant anger takes its toll. Hey, it’s frustrating, but it’s life.

But that’s not good enough.

“Like every immigrant learns, if you are not involved, you can’t complain about democracy,” says Pam Lathan, an entrepreneur who has founded two companies.

Debbie Myers, assistant principal at an elementary school, says she’d been carrying an idea around in her heart. She wanted to give her children a sense of identity, as African-Americans and contributing citizens to the world at large.

She wanted to make sure they weren’t given any less of a chance. She knew she couldn’t depend on the school system for that. So she and her friends started a movement, for their children and themselves, and they wrote their mission down.

“We are African-American Parents and Concerned Citizens in South Orange County,” their statement says.

“We strive to have a positive impact on the social, educational, spiritual and political systems which impact our children and families. We will use our resources, community services, and collective skill sets to accomplish our objective of family life enrichment.”

On the Los Angeles riots, Debbie says this: “It confirmed that we were on the right track. I believe in God. I believe this entire movement was put on my heart.”

The group’s first meeting was a small brainstorming session in February of this year; now 50 middle- and upper-income black families belong. Some even drive down from L.A. for the monthly meetings and other gatherings, such as this summer’s picnic where every kid took home an “I am somebody special award.”

Members have met with the local superintendent of schools (two black teachers were hired after that), and plans are in the works for a Saturday school, where children can be mentored by black role models in a formal way.

Moreover, after sheriff’s deputies held the teen-age sons of two members at gunpoint last month while searching their car at a Mission Viejo Taco Bell, some 15 members silently picketed the Sheriff’s Department. “Stop Harassing Our Youth,” one sign read.

The department, while conceding that it stopped the wrong guys, called the incident nothing at all.

The group started after Debbie, Pam, Brenda and a few other women who had met while out walking found themselves talking about what was going on with their kids. It was more than idle chatter; there were common themes. These mothers were worried, anxious and angry too.

And they’ve never been the type to just go home and stew.

“We were all politically active,” Pam says. “We shut down universities! And the fact that in the 1990s, this environment still exists, that our own kids still have to fight these issues. . . .”

Pam is cut off by Brenda, who relays a story of a black friend mistaken for a maid in her own home. But then Debbie jumps in. “We can sit in the back and complain, but we chose to do something,” she says.

Truth is, there is a lot of jumping in and cutting off going on. I was figuring to be here an hour and I finally leave after three, with everybody still carrying on.

That’s because these are issues that are close to all of our hearts, regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of skin.

“A while ago, I had a phone call from a mother of one of my son’s friends,” says Brenda, a corporate human resources manager. “And she said, ‘You know, my son has told me so much about Phillip, but he never told me that he was black.’ To me, that’s the ideal.”

“We want them to live in a colorless society, but we know all the barriers that are there,” says Pam. “We want to protect them.”

Just as I’m about to leave, Pam declares that “learning has gone on here tonight. But it doesn’t happen often enough.”

She is talking about the give-and-take, the trampling of preconceptions from across a barrier of race. Once people start really talking, you can forget that it exists.