TV REVIEWS : ‘School Colors’: Racism Gone Amok?

Forty years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision supposedly marked the death watch of segregation in America’s schools, race politics continues to run like an unbeatable virus through the campus. And if there’s a way to take “Frontline’s” season premiere, the 150-minute “School Colors,” as a mirror on today’s typical high school, the virus has produced racism’s evil twin: tribalism.

What makes matters worse is that Berkeley High, in California, is no typical campus. Eighty percent of the school’s graduates proceed to college. This is a public school that manages to recruit prospective students away from private prep schools, despite rumblings of increased on-campus violence. But underneath, it’s a chaotic tug-of-war between ethnic groups.

Some viewers will interpret what they’re shown at Berkeley High as PC run amok, while others will side with the black student in an African American studies class who insists that “integration was the second worse thing that ever happened to black men, next to slavery.” But his teacher, Hodari Davis, conducts his classes with a clearly black separatist slant that has Davis’ liberal colleagues wondering out loud if this studies program isn’t fostering precisely what desegregation values opposed.

* “School Colors” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and at 9:30 p.m. on KPBS-TV Channel 15.