Panel of 45 Young People Bridges the Racial Divide in Schools

Paint us a mental picture--make us a movie with words--of your school lunchroom, the actress / playwright urged the 45 young people seated behind her Saturday.

And the images produced by many of them were achingly similar: the black students sit here, the Latinos over there, the Asians and whites in their own knots someplace else.

“I can relate to many other groups,” said Nieves Garcia, 15, a student at Birmingham High School in the San Fernando Valley. She added that she usually spends lunchtime in a classroom rather than adding to the segregation. She would like to mingle with friends in various groups but is intimidated: “I’d be seen as weird.”

Karl Gyden, 17, a black student at St. Bernard’s High in Playa del Rey, said, “It should be no big deal to go over to another group,” but added that many students are afraid that they will be seen as disloyal to members of their own race if they reach out to others.

Guided by moderator Anna Deavere Smith, who explores issues of race and ethnicity in her plays, the panel of young people, ages 12 to 22, was brought together by the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group, and the board convened last year by President Clinton to advise him on finding solutions to the nation’s deep racial divisions.

On the final day of the Children’s Defense Fund’s annual conference--which also marked its 25th anniversary--youths from a range of racial and cultural backgrounds throughout the region came to the Los Angeles Convention Center. Seated on purple bleachers on a stage in a vast conference hall, they took a crack at coming to grips with one of America’s most complex and compelling issues.

“Blacks are such a minority at my school that . . . if you don’t mingle with other races during lunchtime, you’re just sittin’ chillin’ by yourself,” said Gia Scott-Heron of Harvard-Westlake, who has learned firsthand about life as a minority at one of Los Angeles’ most exclusive private schools. “So you have to go with other groups.

“You’re basically accepted. . . . But I do feel I have an obligation, a responsibility to my race, to my family,” she added, touching on a theme that kept cropping up during the one-hour session: how to learn about and respect others’ backgrounds while feeling pride about your own culture.

Cat Pedrosa, a 21-year-old Filipino American student at Cal State Long Beach, said she wants television, movies and other popular media to present “an authentic picture of our community.”

“America is not only white people,” Pedrosa continued. “In Southern California we are very fortunate to be immersed in a multicultural community.”

In 1992, two girls at Jefferson High School in South-Central Los Angeles made a video they called “The Missing Latina.” It was a sendup of TV commercials, newscasts and popular programs in which minorities were noticeably absent, and when it was shown at the start of Saturday’s program, it drew an overwhelmingly positive response.

But the video’s final segment was troubling for at least one panelist. It showed the familiar vignette of the white stars of television’s “Beverly Hills 90210.” Then the Latina video makers appeared on screen, re-creating the scene with minorities as they made cracks about the picture being “too white” and the need to “get some color in here.”

“That hurts a lot,” said Megan Rank, 16, of Orange County, who said she and other whites often feel unfairly blamed for past injustices and are wrongly labeled racists, but “we’re too scared and too guilty to speak up.”

Rank and many other panelists said they want to be part of a future in which people are recognized as individuals first.

“People have [racial or ethnic] boundaries because they are afraid to step out of the group. They want to stick together,” said Carlos Vargas of Van Nuys High.

What, asked moderator Smith, would it take for more students to gain the courage to “cross the lunchroom” and reach out to others?

“It takes a sense of self-identity,” said Jenny Huang, a Vietnamese American who lives in Fountain Valley, “to know, no matter what happens, that I am still who I am.”