L.A. Shares Its Experiences With Race Relations Panel

Los Angeles has a message for President Clinton about race: It’s more complicated than black and white.

In an effort to broaden the president’s initiative on race from a discussion of black-white relations to a debate about a multiracial society, Los Angeles community leaders have produced a video examining the county’s shifting racial makeup.

Consider it a primer on diversity, L.A.-style.

The 28-minute video summarizes some of the economic, social and political implications of race in a region that will be populated by more Latinos than whites and more Asian Americans than blacks by the turn of the century.

“The way the relationships between ethnic and racial groups are solved or not solved here will give an indication of what might lie ahead for the rest of America,” Cal State Northridge geography professor James Allen says in the video’s opening.

“Race in America: A Message From Los Angeles,” which will premiere tonight at a community forum downtown, was distributed to the president’s advisory board on race relations last month.

A wide cross-section of local leaders decided they needed to send a message about the complexity of the area’s diversity in order to expand the discussion by the board members.

Los Angeles attorney Angela Oh created a stir on the panel in July when she suggested that it move beyond the “black-white paradigm” when discussing race.

Oh, the only Asian American board member, was accused of dismissing the dimensions of black-white relations. Many commentators said her remarks and the ensuing fallout exposed the chasm separating East Coast and West Coast perceptions of race.

Several weeks later, an array of Los Angeles leaders assembled to offer Oh their support and discuss how to get their message across to the president’s panel.

“We are already living in a multiracial, multiethnic society,” Oh said. “We have a level of intelligence about race relations here that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Mistakes that have been made here don’t need to be made in the rest of the country. We thought that if we had a video of us having this conversation, the people on the East Coast would get it.”

In the video, commentators from Los Angeles’ business, academic and ethnic communities offer their perspectives on how diversity has affected such issues as law enforcement, ethnic coalitions and hate crimes.

Some panel members said the short film has helped fulfill Clinton’s mandate to expand the national discussion about race.

“This has been a great learning experience for me, because I have not had the opportunity to see race relations in the multiracial complexity that this video demonstrates,” said William Winter, former governor of Mississippi and a member of the president’s panel. “Nowhere are the nuances of that process more dramatically presented than in the Los Angeles community.”

Along with the panel members, Southern California middle and high school students will have a chance to view the video, which will be distributed with discussion materials. It will also be available to community groups through the city’s Human Relations Commission.

A second video about projects that have had a positive impact on local race relations will be completed by the summer, and then both will be sent to Clinton, Oh said.

Narrated by Warren Olney, host of “Which Way, L.A.?” on KCRW-FM (89.9), the video explains how changing demographics played a role in the 1992 riots and exacerbated tensions between African Americans and Korean Americans.

In a region with 34 distinct ethnic groups, Los Angeles’ changing fault lines of race map the future for many parts of the country, commentators on the video say.

“The East Coast view of race spins around a black-white axis and seems to dominate academia,” said Joe Hicks, executive director of the city’s Human Relations Commission. “We want to crack that view. And what we’re learning here is that [race relations] has to be a priority. You can’t just leave it alone, unattended.”

Student filmmakers who interviewed Hollywood High School students for the project said they were surprised to discover that racial tensions have already permeated relationships between Armenian Americans and Latinos.

One Hollywood High student offered a way for her generation to overcome the prejudice and suspicion she saw on campus.

“If we all just sit back and learn about each other’s culture, then we have nothing to worry about,” she said. “Because if I learn about you, you learn about me, then you have no reason to fear me.”