Race Issue Heats Up at School : Youth: At Canyon High, deputies have been brought in after clashes that may be related to white supremacy. Events lead to introspection.

The petite girl raised her hand. She had decided to speak out about racism at her school, Canyon High in Santa Clarita, where sheriff’s deputies were summoned this week to calm tensions between white and Latino students.

“I don’t know,” she said, biting her upper lip. “I don’t see any racism here, I just don’t. Am I really that naive, or what?”

Fifty junior and senior students--black, white, Latino and Asian--who had packed into Gary Mast’s second-period sociology class to talk about the subject gave the full-throated answer in no uncertain terms:

“Yes!”

Canyon High is a school like most other Los Angeles schools: Its student parking lot is chock full of speed bumps. On any weekday, the sound of badly played wind instruments wafts from the orchestra’s practice room.

But there’s something else here that catches the eye and the ear: The occasional Confederate flag displayed on student-owned pickup trucks, a misguided symbol of white supremacy. And racial slurs uttered in the classroom.

In a muted suburban throwback to the unrest of the 1960s, the area surrounding this placid, tree-lined campus became the scene Wednesday of uniformed deputies called in by frustrated school officials to keep the peace.

And on Friday morning, two white students were suspended after they began fighting on school grounds in a racially motivated incident that officials said began when one accused the other of consorting with white supremacists.

This predominantly white bedroom community has recently witnessed tense standoffs between minority students and a small group of young white supremacists, creating a distinct racial fault line that has caused students to question their own attitudes toward racism.

Many students have chosen to ignore off-campus scuffles Tuesday in which car windshields were broken. The violence precipitated a move by sheriff’s deputies Wednesday to comb streets surrounding the school for groups of students they say could signal yet more trouble ahead.

In a community with a place called Friendly Valley and a street named Shangri-La, students say the recent ethnic fireworks have been blown out of proportion, representing a decided minority in the way locals look at race.

Others say the tensions at school mirror the outside community, composed of numerous “white-flight” families who have fled the urban and racial hassles of the big city.

Racism bred at home, they say, is brought to campus--along with skateboards and schoolbooks.

“Santa Clarita is bigoted, conservative and homophobic,” one female student told the sociology class. “It’s not a nice place to live.”

Amid the backdrop of posters lambasting censorship, abortion and suicide, some students complained that ethnic slurs were too frequently allowed to go unquestioned by teachers at 2,225-student Canyon High School, which is 75% white, 20% Latino and 2% black.

Outside the classroom, they say students fall into clearly defined cliques of blacks, whites and Latinos. While not entirely exclusive, the blacks hang out near a big tree on campus and the Latinos near the entrance to the library--leaving the rest of the campus to the whites.

“In other schools, kids hang out together because of the clothes they wear, or their hobbies, like skateboarding,” one student observed. “But here at Canyon, they hang out because of people’s skin color.”

Added another: “All the time, in conversations, you hear ‘this white guy’ or ‘that Mexican girl.’ Why can’t it just be that guy or that girl?”

Like many other high schools across the region, and even the country, racial tensions are not new to Canyon. Three years ago, a student was stabbed near school grounds in what was termed a racial incident. In the past, concerned parents have besieged school officials, demanding that steps be taken to ease racial tensions.

Now the school requires incoming freshman to attend tolerance training seminars in which they discuss issues of racism and discrimination, classes taught by teacher Gary Mast.

Mast said Friday that the recent disturbances were not isolated incidents and that the entire community needs to deal with the problem through tolerance and education.

With a sigh, he added that Santa Clarita was becoming a target for white supremacists. “It seems that the white supremacist movement sees this community as a place to recruit sympathy,” he said. “You see it in the flyers and leaflets on campus. They weren’t made here. They came from someplace else.”

Mast and students this week fought that propaganda with some of their own, creating a large poster they hung at school denouncing racism. Mast said there were plans to bring the banner to an upcoming City Council meeting.

Still, the school ground has become a tense place. Michael Onori, a white student with blue-dyed hair, said he was recently beaten by a white football player who accused him of circulating anti-white supremacy literature on campus.

A 16-year-old sophomore named Bill agreed that students bring to school lessons learned at the dinner table. His stepfather, he said, often angers him with racist comments thinly veiled as jokes. But he says he doesn’t listen to a word of it.

“Still,” he added, “there’s some things that bug me. Black people think that we whites owe them something. Like, we can create an all-black college but not an all-white one, because that would be considered racist.

“And blacks can come to our neighborhood any time they want. But we can’t go to South-Central or we’d get killed. It’s a double standard.”

School Principal Michael Allmandinger said officials there were troubled by the recent violence, but he defended the decision to bring in sheriff’s deputies as an extra security measure.

“To me, this is a terrible thing,” he said of the violence. “It comes out of ignorance and intolerance of other people’s differences. Kids have to learn that they have to get along without fighting.

“You would hope they learn that lesson by the time they’re in high school. But, apparently, that’s not the case.”

Allmandinger said the campus, like others, has seen a growing presence of security to keep the peace. “It used to be that we teachers and administrators could play security guard,” he said.

“But that’s not possible anymore. We now have seven people who work solely as security guards, and that’s mostly to keep people off campus.”

Allmandinger said that with discussions of racism taking place in every corner of the campus, perhaps the message will get through.

“But like the drug problem, it comes from home,” he said. “Here at school, we don’t sell drugs and we don’t spread racial hatred. We inherit it.”

Outside, as she hurried to a first-period class, a white student in blue jeans insisted that her school was completely free of racial tension.

But when asked if she had any black, Asian or Latino friends, she silently shook her head.

Why, she was asked.

“Because they don’t like me. They don’t like me because I’m white.”

Then the bell sounded and, running late, she scurried off toward her class.