The New Minority : White students are vastly outnumbered in many L.A. schools--and they’re feeling the sting of discrimination. But some say they wouldn’t give up the pluses of diversity.

One small word, uttered half in jest, reminds these students that they are different.

They squirm when history teachers bring up the contributions of their forebears.

They fear they will be stereotyped by skin color instead of treated as individuals.

They are white students, a minority in many public schools throughout Los Angeles County.

Look at the majority of high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District: Fewer than 10% of students are white. The same is true in many suburbs. Alhambra Unified, for instance, is also less than 10% white.

“They’re the ones who are left behind,” says Gerda Steele, a Pasadena-based diversity consultant who is African American. “Nobody thinks about them because they’re white. It’s assumed they’re going to survive, but they are dealing with the same things that minority kids deal with.”

On many local campuses today, it is the white students who stick out, who get razzed because of their funny names and hair, who have assumptions made about their personalities or lifestyles.

As the demographic tables turn, white students are just beginning to experience a small taste of what traditional minority groups have undergone for years in white society.

White students realize that their stories might sound petty compared with the discrimination directed for years against African Americans, Asians, Latinos and other minorities. Still, these children live each day amid issues of race and prejudice that even adults find difficult to discuss.

Mavis Hildson, 15, a recent graduate of Roosevelt Middle School in Glendale, which is 95% minority and immigrant, says she once asked a black classmate about Martin Luther King Jr. and was told icily: “It’s a black thing--you wouldn’t know about it.”

“Here I am trying to reach out and they don’t want me,” she says sadly. “People automatically assume I’m prejudiced because I’m white.

“We’d be talking about slavery, and all of a sudden, all the black people in class would turn around and stare at me,” she recalls.

“Well, I didn’t do it to them, it was my ancestors doing it to their ancestors, and it seems unfair that I have to pay. I am not my great-grandfather.”

Iris Ring, 15, remembers clearly the pivotal day, at age 6, when she became aware of race. She was playing at her neighborhood park in La Puente, which is heavily Latino.

“Several girls came up to me and they said, ‘This is a Mexican park, no white girls allowed.’ I got angry and we started fighting. When I got home, I cried. I remember asking my mom, ‘Why can’t we be Mexican?’ ”

Some students attend mainly minority schools because of their family’s progressive social beliefs. Others say their working-class parents can’t afford private schools. For most of them, the issue is not race. They merely want the safest, cleanest and best education for their kids.

This demographic situation could not have been imagined a generation ago, when the dominant culture in Southern California was white. Textbooks praised George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Now, the California schools curriculum tries to impart a more ethnically diverse and less Eurocentric view of history and literature, bringing a new set of discomforts to the classroom: California textbooks teach how white settlers killed and took land belonging to Native Americans, exploited Latino farm workers, denied rights to Chinese and Japanese laborers, and enslaved blacks.

Elsie Cross, a diversity consultant based in Philadelphia, calls white students in mainly minority schools “little heroes.” But while they may bear the brunt of individual discrimination, she says, they will graduate into a white-dominated society. Students of color still grow up into the more insidious world of institutional racism.

“Teachers will still treat white children better than black or Latino kids,” says Cross, who is African American. “That white child is already armored by what society thinks of white people.”

The plus side, educators hope, is that these students will be at the beginning of a truly diverse society, able to understand, work and play with different types of people.

“If we were raised with a lot of white people, we’d be more narrow-minded,” says Jeremy Cutler, a 1993 graduate of La Puente High School, which is 97% minority.

His sister Mindy, 17, a senior at La Puente High, agrees. After years in mainly Latino schools, she is uncomfortable in all-white settings. It feels, well, foreign.

“Here, you’re exposed to different cultures and backgrounds and it makes you a more well-rounded person,” she says. “I don’t really see any cultural tradition that white people have. But I envy Latin culture, it’s so enriched with tradition.”

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In extreme cases, however, such an environment can become a breeding ground for racism, especially if students feel threatened or excluded. In one incident, teen-age members of the Fourth Reich Skinheads from heavily minority schools in Long Beach and Orange County allegedly plotted to kill Rodney King and bomb the First AME Church in South Los Angeles last year. Some of the youths told authorities that they had adopted neo-Nazi beliefs because they were tired of being racially harassed and wanted to feel pride in white culture.

Justin Collins, a 1992 graduate of Polytechnic High School in Long Beach--which is 75% minority--says he became loosely affiliated with the group after numerous incidents he claims were racially motivated.

An African American girl once spit at him without provocation, he says; another time, a group of black students threw food at him as he walked by, then laughed. When he complained to school officials, they told him to forget about it, he says.

Instead, he turned to hate. “It pissed me off that there was Black History Month and Black Pride. There was no White History Month. It’s a double standard.”

One teacher at Hollywood High, worried that white students at the school--with a student population of 95% immigrant and minority--were losing track of their own culture, started an Anglophilia Club.

“I wanted people to appreciate the accomplishments of Anglo-Saxon English-speaking people,” says Jerry Patterson, the history teacher who ran the club from 1973 until his retirement in 1989. The club, which had about a dozen members, celebrated historic events such as the Boston Tea Party.

“Any time the school would recognize a holiday it would be something like Cinco de Mayo, which doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the United States. I’d say, why aren’t we having an assembly for Veteran’s Day, for Pearl Harbor Day?”

Dick Rippey, the assistant principal at Hollywood High, said the club provided white students with “a little bit of their heritage.” But more importantly, such clubs show how the multicultural curriculum may splinter students into racial camps instead of unifying them, he says.

“We have a (black student union) on campus, an Armenian club. . . . I think that gives them some identity and pride in their heritage, but it does not lead to integration,” Rippey says.

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Ronald Takaki, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, says that skinhead and white culture groups, while rare, reflect a resentment that some white people may feel but few act on.

Too often, diversity lessons focus on the accomplishments of one group in a way that makes other groups uncomfortable, says Takaki, who would prefer a focus on how “we’re all Americans.”

The schools also must take care to present history accurately, Takaki says, making it clear, for example, that only 6% of white Southerners owned slaves.

For a white youngster who has no racial ax to grind, navigating through charged racial encounters can be a bewildering burden. Some students chafe against what they see as a double standard that allows students of color to make white jokes but prohibits white students from joking about minorities.

Many say they have learned to shrug off terms like “whitey,” “honky” and “guera” --Spanish slang for a light-complexioned person. They know all the stereotypes about how white people can’t dance, eat hamburgers each night, are stuck up, racist and rich.

“If we were rich we wouldn’t be living in this community,” says one La Puente High School student dryly.

Some defuse racial tension by poking fun of it. Jessica Duran, 17, a Latina at La Puente High, uses racially loaded terms with her white friend Mindy Cutler in an ironic way to mock political correctness. But she knows that her friend sometimes faces real problems because of her ethnicity.

“I know I would feel intimidated, left out, if I went to a school that was all white people,” Jessica says. “I’d be afraid.”

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Thinh Luong, who just graduated from Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra, where whites make up only 2% of the school’s 2,000 students, says his eyes were opened when he was thrown into close contact with white students in a leadership class.

“Before I met white kids . . . I had stereotypes of surfers, skiers, racist supremacist types,” says Luong, 18.

One white student he befriended was Leandra Burke, 18, who concedes that classmates sometimes made assumptions about her based on race.

Her stepmother, Linda Tubach, recalls the day Leandra came home confused about how much she was responsible for racism in society and whether their ancestors had owned slaves. Tubach explained that her family emigrated from Ireland during the potato famine and became sharecroppers in the South. And no, they did not own slaves.

Race awareness has yet to hit Katie Coffey, 10, a fifth-grader at Cleveland Elementary in northwest Pasadena, where 95% of the children are African American or Latino.

Katie’s heroine is Harriet Tubman. She classifies her friends by their hobbies or interests, not their skin tone. She is hard-pressed to remember the race of one of her past teachers.

Her father, Richard Coffey, who grew up in a segregated Philadelphia neighborhood, hopes race never becomes a big issue in her life.

“Sometimes when they have multicultural day, she feels left out,” Coffey says. “But she gets a lot of white culture from books, and we do things with Irish culture at home.”

He takes pride in knowing that his daughter “doesn’t have the weird thing of going into a crowd of another race or another language and feeling out of place. She’ll be able to interact with anyone and not feel strange.”