High School Racism Rocks a Rural Town

When senior Anna Phelps came out to the high school parking lot one recent afternoon, she found scrawled in the dust on her pickup truck a collection of graffiti. There was the satanic: “Demon” and “666.” There was the unprintably obscene. Worst of all was the racial epithet: “Hippy Chink.”

With those words, Phelps reached her breaking point. She ended her student career at Etna High School, leaving behind friends she grew up with and classmates who selected her a homecoming princess.

Two days later, the 17-year-old who moved here from Laos as a baby revealed to local reporters that for most of her years in the high school in this quiet Northern California valley, she had suffered periodic verbal insults. She had heard students making crude racial jokes in front of her. She found a swastika carved in her desk in geometry class two years ago.

With her parents’ consent, Phelps finally did what she had begged to do since her sophomore year--she officially withdrew from classes. She will finish her senior year at home via an independent study program set up through the school.

“It makes me feel like I’m being degraded,” said Phelps of the incidents. “I didn’t want to be there.”

Since her withdrawal, tiny Etna has had an unpleasant taste of big city problems and statewide publicity. Now, Anna’s classmates insist that it is they who feel harassed. When the track team attended a meet at a local community college, students from other schools taunted the Etna students, yelling that they were racists and bigots.

“I’ve got ‘hate crimes’ in the headlines,” said Jeff Hamilton, superintendent of the Etna Union High School District. “I don’t like those people in other counties thinking our kids are terrible. Our school has been besmirched.”

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Phelps and her parents have always said that it’s only a small group of students, all male, who have caused her anguish. And since the incident with Anna’s truck, Principal Mark Geyer has lectured every class on racism and used a staff day to discuss with teachers how the issues of race might be dealt with in classes.

But Anna’s revelations have exposed some uglier aspects of teenage life--and jolted this Siskiyou County cattle-ranching town into realizing that it’s not quite as insulated from big city problems as it thought.

Just 800 people live in Etna, which has a main street two blocks long and a police force one man strong. Surrounded by forested mountains and closer in atmosphere to nearby Oregon than the palm-studded cities of California, Etna prides itself on being a cozy little refuge from the brutalities of the city. Here, when they say “down south” they mean San Francisco--and the rest of crime-ridden California.

Until now, school officials thought that their biggest problems were chewing tobacco and cutting classes. Eight years ago, rumors spread that a virgin would be sacrificed in a satanic ritual, but no one was harmed.

That isolated Etna would find itself at the center of a racial furor surprises many residents. Anna Phelps’ family runs a popular Thai restaurant on Main Street, and townsfolk seem unfailingly polite even to the few outsiders who wander through.

“I think it’s making a big balloon out of a little bit of air,” said Ray Arellano, who works at Game Zone, the new game arcade in town. “There’s been nothing like this up here before.”

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Still, no one says they doubt Anna’s stories. The truck with its scrawls was seen by a close friend of hers as well as by the police chief, who filed a report of a hate crime. In fact, he said, two other trucks were scrawled with satanic slogans--though no racial epithets.

Four days after Anna reported the truck incident, a racially offensive drawing was mysteriously slipped into the school’s display case of sports trophies. The 11-by-17-inch drawing depicted a hooded Ku Klux Klansman in the foreground with a lynched black man hanging by a rope in the background, his legs severed at the knees.

Paul Buchter, who made the drawing in art class, said it wasn’t directed at Phelps and that he had thrown it away. Someone else put it in the trophy case.

“We were just messing around,” said Buchter, who was suspended for a week. “We weren’t intending for it to be racial. I’ve got black friends at school. I just went camping with my cousin and his friends who are black.”

Afterward, Geyer told the student body that racism would not be tolerated--whether it was an epithet on a car or a drawing tacked on a wall. “Items of this nature,” he said he told them, “were not to be viewed as a prank. They’re not at all funny. . . . This was viewed as racist in nature and wouldn’t be tolerated.”

Buchter’s father agreed, saying that he was appalled and mystified by his son’s drawing. “I think the principal did the right thing,” Albert Buchter said. “Personally, I would have expelled him.”

But 59 students protested Buchter’s suspension with a sit-in, saying that they didn’t condone the drawing, just the artist’s right to draw it. For Anna Phelps, the irony in the student support of Buchter is clear. “Nobody can stand up for me,” she said, tears welling in her eyes, “but everybody can stand up for him.”

The Phelps are not outsiders here. Sengthong Phelps left a Thai refugee camp 16 years ago for this valley, bringing along her three small children. She met her husband, Don Phelps, a disabled logger, at a local college where he was studying pottery and she was taking English lessons. Together they run the restaurant, Sengthong’s.

The town has watched the children grow, and when Sengthong’s eldest son was killed in a car accident six years ago, they helped mourn his death.

“I will live here, I will die here, I will be buried here,” Sengthong Phelps said.

Even one of the boys who once harassed Anna comes regularly into the restaurant. Until all this came out in the open, Don Phelps never mentioned the incidents to him. (The boy’s explanation was that it was all a joke.)

Anna flourished in Etna’s high school--the first girl to play junior varsity football, an academic record of mostly A’s that has gotten her accepted to UC Santa Cruz.

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She seems unbothered by the fact that some of her eccentricities set her apart from her classmates. With her multi-pierced ear lobes and trendy bell-bottoms, she stands out in a school where most dress in jeans and cowboy boots. She’s a liberal in a conservative community, a vegetarian in a cattle town. Her Greenpeace sticker was ripped off her car bumper.

“Anna, to me, has been very strong,” said her good friend, Serena Wilson. “She’s never cared what anyone thought of her. Maybe this did put her over the limit.”

“I think there is prejudice in this town,” said Karen Wilson, Serena’s mother and a manicurist. “Indians don’t like whites. Personally my husband doesn’t care for black people--but I haven’t minded them. But I don’t think this particular incident was meant against her racially.”

Anna Phelps vividly remembers the first incident.

“It was a definite shock. I had never heard that language before,” she said. “People would come up to me and tell me ‘Go home to China, you chink.’ ”

The friend she was with at the time “just kind of blew it off,” she recalled. “We were all intimidated. Maybe this was just high school.”

But Anna kept up a tough front in the face of racial taunts that she says she heard one to four times a month. “You pretend it doesn’t really faze you,” she said. “You don’t want people to see you’re weak. I would go home and break down and cry.”

By the end of her freshman year, she was pleading with her parents to let her leave the school. By her junior year, she withdrew from extracurricular activities and simply did her schoolwork.

Her father says he reported the first incidents to the principal, who seemed stymied. When that principal was replaced a year and a half ago by Geyer, Phelps again sought help--which he said never materialized.

“I was so furious for so long,” Phelps said. “No one was listening to me. For me, the whole situation was obvious from the beginning. To me, a swastika really means something.”

Actually, some in the community argue practically the opposite--that these teenagers are oblivious to the brutality of the very symbols and racist words they use.

“They are stupid things a few people do without thinking,” wrote Etna High student body officers Melissa Friden and Stephanie Madole, in a letter to the local Pioneer Press. “Many people in our school do not realize the power behind a swastika or the offense people take in it.”

Among the few minority students in the school, none has reported incidents like Anna’s--and some have risen to the defense of the school.

“Any sort of racism is definitely something to be concerned about,” said Eva Wu, a student of Asian and Latino background who moved to Etna from Alhambra in 1994. “But personally I haven’t had anyone make racist statements to me.”

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But other incidents have come to light in the wake of Anna’s revelations. A current foreign exchange student from China reported being harassed by some students--though he never heard a specific slur directed at him. The sponsor of the foreign exchange program in the area reports another exchange student from China had such a difficult time with students who harassed her that she transferred. Neither student’s troubles were reported to the school.

And according to several students--including Anna Phelps--a teacher has mocked Asian accents in class several times. “That issue has been brought up, and we have taken action to investigate,” Geyer said.

School officials insist that they have tried to deal with the Phelps’ complaints.

“I feel badly this thing happened and I haven’t been able to take care of everyone as fast as they wanted, but it’s not out of lack of effort and it’s not out of lack of desire,” Geyer said.

There is some disagreement over how many times Phelps went to school officials to complain. Geyer says Don Phelps came to him only once to complain that Anna was being harassed and he neither named people nor confided the nature of the harassment. Phelps disagrees. “Every time I went to see him, I gave him names,” Phelps said.

Now, Geyer and the superintendent say they will work on making students more aware of cultural diversity. But Hamilton is still angry at the way the Phelpses discussed their problems so publicly in the media.

“Anna’s parents have chosen to sully the reputation of all the students in the school,” said Hamilton, who speculates that the Phelps made their complaints public to reap some benefit from the publicity. “There’s been talk of a second restaurant opening in Mount Shasta.”

“That’s amazing,” Don Phelps said. “I suspect this will hurt our business in the short term.”

As the town sorts through this episode, Anna Phelps tries to get on with her life. She’s planning a graduation vacation to Hawaii with her friend, Serena. But the prom is out. So is the graduation ceremony.

“I want to go, but I’m not welcome,” she said. “It would just be an awkward situation.”

Her brother, a UC Berkeley undergraduate, offers the consolation of the future. “College is a lot different,” Anna said.

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Ethnic Slurs

An Asian American girl blames racial harassment from other students in the small town of Etna for her decision to spend the final months of high school studying at home.