500 Students Mix It Up at Diversity Conference : Education: At seventh-annual ‘Walk in My Shoes’ workshops, teens trade their ideas--and opinions--on multiculturalism.

After about 30 bat-wielding skinheads attacked Malik Jones and four of his African American friends last year at a Taco Bell, the Cypress High School senior said it took him a long time before he could look at white people without resentment.

As the only Mexican American in her honors English class, Sharan Nieto saidshe’s sick and tired of people saying such things to her as “You’re in honors class? Wow, you’re smart enough?”

And Jessica Callow, a white senior at Arcadia High, said she was offended--and speechless--when a Latino classmate said to her, “You act like such a white girl.”

“What was I supposed to say? ‘You act like such a Hispanic?’ ” Callow said. “I knew he meant it in a negative way.”

A diversity conference Thursday at Cal State Fullerton allowed Jones, Nieto, Callow and about 500 other high school students to vent their frustrations. But they also sought common ground as they discussed controversial issues that are dividing students of different backgrounds.

“Orange County has changed dramatically. It’s gone from being basically an all-white suburban community to a multiethnic urban area with 2.5 million people,” said Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, which organized the event.

“With that comes lots of challenges. Kids are being challenged, threatened, and nasty things are being said to them. A lot of them are angry and also afraid.”

The seventh-annual “Walk in My Shoes” conference attracted students from 53 high schools--the vast majority of them in Orange County. The teen-agers had their choice of 26 workshops, covering such topics as “Affirmative Action: Deprivation or Advancement,” “Ethnic Clubs on Campus,” “Hate Crimes” and “White Culture Awareness.”

At the White Culture Awareness discussion, about 20 students, most of them white, talked about how unpopular they’ve become at many local schools with large numbers of minorities.

Nikki Belcore, a senior at Foothill High in Tustin, said she was upset after a white classmate’s desire to start a “Eurocentric” club was rebuffed by the school staff.

“Our adviser said it would start problems,” Belcore said. “That kind of bothered me because we have all these diverse clubs on campus. I just wanted to know why it was wrong to have a Eurocentric club.”

UC Irvine administrator James Craig, who led the discussion, said whites are feeling increasingly out of place because they don’t believe they have a culture. But he encouraged students to take pride in their own heritage, so they can learn to respect other people’s backgrounds.

“Diversity is a goal that should be strived for,” he said. “It shouldn’t be seen as a negative, to be feared.”

Although diversity has long been a contentious issue on many school campuses, Carlos Cortes, a retired UC Riverside professor who served as the keynote speaker, said this year’s conference is particularly timely because of all the racially divisive events that have occurred.

“This is the era of the Million Man March, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Mark Fuhrman tapes, the affirmative action debates and the English-only debates,” he said. “We need conferences like this all over the country. I don’t think there’s any substitute for kids talking to each other.”

Jones, the Cypress High student, spoke on a panel about hate crimes. He said he learned to “let go” of his anger toward white people, because it wasn’t worth harboring all that hate.

“You can’t hold grudges forever,” he said. “I was angry, but I felt better after they kicked some of the white students who attacked us out of my school.”

The attack at the Taco Bell occurred while Jones and his friends were dining. After the skinheads swung baseball bats and sicced dogs on them, they ran to a back room of the restaurant and hid. When police came, officers initially pulled out guns and handcuffed the black youths before they realized who was attacking whom.

“The parents of the kids who were attacked were very upset about the way the police handled the incident,” said Swinder Jheeta Cooper of the Human Relations Commission. “I was sent out to work with students at the school because of this incident.”

Nieto, a senior at Cypress High, said she came to the conference angry about the University of California Board of Regents’ decision to overturn affirmative action at all campuses. But she said she walked away with a better understanding of the issue after attending a panel discussion on the topic.

“One white girl got upset and said the policies weren’t fair to white, middle-class students,” Nieto said. “I’ve been so angry about affirmative action, but it was eye-opening to hear what she had to say, because I realized if I were a white, middle-class girl, I would probably feel the same way. Today, I saw both sides of the issue.”

Nieto said she believes more multiethnic conferences are needed to foster better understanding among diverse groups.

“It gets everything out in the open,” she said.