More Funds Urged to Boost Race Relations

Despite simmering ethnic tensions, neither the government nor private industry in Los Angeles is spending enough money to improve race relations, according to a report released Tuesday.

Unless more public and private resources are allocated--and human relations are made a top priority--the nation’s most ethnically diverse city can only look forward to further deterioration in the state of race relations, warned the 18-month study by the MultiCultural Collaborative--a coalition of 11 community-based groups formed after the 1992 riots to seek solutions to inter-ethnic conflict and build alliances among the diverse communities in Los Angeles.

“Today we are sounding the alarm that it can no longer be business as usual regarding race relations in this city,” said Constance L. Rice of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund. “Unless we begin to take race relations and human relations seriously, Los Angeles could become nearly unfit for inhabitance.”

The report, issued at a downtown news conference Tuesday, is the first comprehensive assessment of human relations programs throughout Los Angeles County.

And in a show of unity, more than a dozen key members of the coalition, as well as the heads of the city and county human relations commissions, stood together to unveil the report. “The fact that we’re standing here is very important,” said Frank Acosta of the California Wellness Foundation. The study found that the city and county human relations commissions are poorly funded and have a combined staff of 15 to cover 1,100 square miles, compared with New York’s 300 staffers and San Francisco’s 40. And the city and county human relations commissions were never set up to have the clout their counterparts in New York and San Francisco have.

Only seven or eight of the city and county’s human relations commission staffers are qualified for trouble-shooting, according to Ron Wakabayashi, executive director of the county Human Relations Commission.

“We can’t even get a subpoena without the approval of the City Council,” said Christopher McCauley, executive director of the city Human Relations Commission.

The report also criticized the old black/white paradigm in discussing race relations because that format does not apply to a region as racially, culturally and ethnically diverse as Los Angeles.

In the 1990 census, Los Angeles County was 40.8% white, 37.8% Hispanic, 10.5% black and 10.2% Asian.

“Conventional political wisdom in predominantly white suburban communities seems to hold to the view that intergroup conflict between African Americans, Asians and Latinos is the problem of people who live there,” said Joe R. Hicks, executive director of the MultiCultural Collaborative.

“In fact, deteriorating human relations affects the quality of life in the entire Greater Los Angeles area,” he said. “No population gets to sit on the sidelines of this issue.”

The report said that diversity training is popular in Los Angeles but that the emphasis is on appreciating cultural differences rather than grappling with root causes of prejudice and racial conflicts.

“We’ve got to move beyond holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya,’ ” Wakabayashi said.

“Few of the diversity training programs surveyed challenge participants to examine how racial prejudice and discrimination may play a role in determining who has access to positions of leadership and authority in their own organizations,” the report said.

Furthermore, there are no standards for independent consultants who do the bulk of diversity and cross-cultural training for corporations and educational institutions in Los Angeles, according to the 100-page study.

The report also found that 85% of the 636,416 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District have no access to human relations programs.

The report described the school district’s commitment in this area as “nonexistent” even though it is 66.6% Latino, 14.4% black, 11.6% white and 6.7% Asian. The district employs one multicultural curriculum specialist for 50,000 teachers and counselors, the report said.

As a result, what is taught depends mostly on individual teachers and their motivation to prepare supplemental teaching material for their predominantly nonwhite students.

For example, the Asian studies outline is a mere 10 pages and refers only to Asians in Asia, not here, the report said.

The outline for Native American studies is longer, but concentrates mostly on the time before Europeans came to the continent. The experiences of contemporary Native Americans are largely ignored.

“As a consequence, students fortunate enough to gain some exposure to Native Americans in school may in fact receive a distorted image emphasizing the destruction of indigenous social institutions and ignoring the contemporary lives, traditions, needs and contributions of these diverse peoples,” the report said.

And, even though Mexican Americans constitute the largest group in the district, they are not presented with much material about their history and culture, the report said, adding that the study material covers only up to the 1960s and isn’t used much. There is no attempt to teach the experiences of other Latino groups, such as Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans, the report said.

The district’s poor social science curriculum translates into “lost opportunities” for students of color as well as whites.

The study recommends that the district implement a comprehensive ethnic studies program from kindergarten through high school.

And, it urges the news media collectively to cover positive happenings in Los Angeles.

“The media industry is far more than just an impartial observer,” the report said. “It must take greater responsibility for its power to improve and incite racial conflict.”