Race Is Important--Just Not the Only Important Factor
One problem with institutional reforms is that they quickly become institutionalized and thus in need of reforming. In few areas is this more evident than in race-relations management. The official response to a recent racial clash at a Southern California high school only underscores how little the current institutional approach to race actually does help us all get along.
Diversity guidelines sprang from the obvious need for institutions to nurture and promote healthy interaction among Americans of different backgrounds. Their goal, in general, has been to foster greater intergroup understanding by acknowledging each group’s distinct needs and perspectives. Their emphasis on group identity stems from a belief that race must first be taken into account before racism can be dealt with effectively. The guidelines are also a byproduct of the popular notion, particularly among educators, that positive group self-image encourages respect for others.
As part of their diversity guidelines, many school districts highlight group identification. The Los Angeles Unified School District officially encourages students to join ethnic organizations to gain “positive affiliation, a sense of peoplehood and pride in [their] own identity and heritage.” The district’s multicultural guidelines, titled “Educating for Diversity,” states that groups like the Latino student organization, MEChA, the Black Student Union and the Korean Culture Club “empower young people to demonstrate leadership and responsibility for achieving the group’s goals.”
This approach to race and ethnicity automatically assumes that an individual’s primary identity is his ethnicity. It favors involuntary over voluntary affiliations. For example, the LAUSD has no similar written policy to encourage students to play sports or join the chess team. These activities are certainly as capable of promoting cooperation among students of different backgrounds as are ethnic-based clubs. The approach also presupposes that racial or ethnic distinctions are so primordial that people from one background must be treated fundamentally differently from those from another. Accordingly, this approach to race serves to further codify group differences.
But ethnic identification and cultural practice are highly idiosyncratic and fluid. A 17-year-old Korean immigrant who arrived in the United States as a teenager does not view his “Koreanness” in the same way as a U.S.-born Korean of the same age. Institutional approaches to ethnicity also tend to reduce cultures to quaint musical or historical moments from the Old World that may or may not serve to illuminate students’ understanding of themselves. It is improbable that school celebrations of Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican army’s victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862, sheds any light on what it means to be Mexican American in 1998.
Encouraging the codification of ethnic consciousness is all the more problematic when practiced on children and adolescents whose identities, ethnic or otherwise, are not fully developed. In May, two Inglewood High School students, one Latino, the other African American, started a fight that escalated into a two-day, racially charged shouting and bottle-throwing match. Up to 200 teenagers were involved. The presumed cause? Some Latino students were reportedly upset that the school sanctions one day of Latino recognition--Cinco de Mayo--compared with 30 days for Black History Month.
The task force set up to “identify and resolve” the crisis at the high school seemed surprised to learn that students didn’t view ethnic recognition days as an opportunity to celebrate diversity. “In these situations,” reads the task force report, “ethnic events were not perceived as school activities for sharing and learning about each other’s cultures and contributions, but rather a separate activity that invited detrimental comparisons.”
Second only to student apathy and lack of school pride, the Inglewood Conflict Resolution Task Force pinpointed the school’s failure to “meet the needs of Latino students” as a cause of the racial skirmish. Among the committee’s more concrete recommendations was that the school district hire more Latino staff members to better serve its Latino students. But the committee also pointed to a more pernicious problem: “teacher indifference to students.”
While hiring more Latino teachers may be a valid goal, the presumption that it will necessarily improve Latino-student instruction is quixotic. It assumes that ethnicity is the primary level at which humans understand each other. “You can hire 20 Latinos, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to connect with kids,” says Rudy Carrasco, assistant director of the Harambee Center in Pasadena. “Ethnicity is only a step to understanding someone’s deeper humanity,” he adds. “But sometimes it can also be a distraction.”
Carrasco, who works with black and Latino youngsters, believes that teachers connecting well with students is the best way to teach students to connect with each other. But he insists that such personal connections are really a matter of the heart. In short, an effective teacher is someone who relates not only to students of his or her ethnicity, but to students in general.
By contrast, the Inglewood task force’s logic was the same kind of ethnic score-keeping that caused teenagers to fight over ethnic celebrations. Its insistence on thinking ethnically obscured the more profound needs of students. Perhaps the report would have been wiser to recommend that the district hire more teachers capable of nurturing the social and intellectual potential of young people of any background.
Gail Burke, a retired teacher who taught black, Latino and Anglo students for 40 years in the Los Angeles area, believes that with so much focus on race, educators have forgotten “what people respond to.” “The teacher has to believe in the miracle of the individual,” she says. “They need to generate a respect for the individual child that enables the student to respect others and not to compartmentalize people into groups.”
None of this means we should return to the days of denying that race and ethnicity matter. But our current obsession with group identification takes us away from more basic issues of education. By a stunning 80% to 9%, according to a recent poll by the research organization Public Agenda, African American parents nationwide say the higher priority for the nation’s schools should be to raise academic standards and achievement rather than to focus on attaining greater diversity or even integration. Indeed, though most black and white parents believe integration can improve race relations, more than seven out of 10 of the survey’s respondents of both races agreed that “too often, the schools work so hard to achieve integration that they end up neglecting the most important goal--teaching kids.”
But perhaps the most fundamental flaw in contemporary race management is its steady focus on the diversity of groups and not on the everyday convergence of people and cultures that is truly creating a multiethnic America. Paradoxically, diversity guidelines impose provincialism on an increasingly cosmopolitan society. Tensions inevitably arise when people of different backgrounds live side by side, but the practice of constantly highlighting their differences can only serve to perpetuate them. America’s culture of individualism has always been the greatest weapon against tribalism. The individual can choose to broaden his boundaries and discover new and different perspectives on life. Come to think of it, isn’t that the goal of education?
Rather than promote the misguided notion that we are members of an exclusive ethnic “community,” we should be encouraging the ability of individuals to see themselves as participating in a myriad of “communities” simultaneously. A healthy democracy needs individuals to stand up and defy collectivism. Healthy race relations requires no less.
