Color Scheme Is a Bit Distorted

Classes began at UCLA on Thursday, and you could go through a whole box of Crayolas trying to match the various skin tones parading down Bruin Walk, the school’s main pedestrian thoroughfare/hangout.

There’s one piece of this mosaic that’s slowly disappearing: the African American male.

This is the first freshman class after Proposition 209 banned affirmative action in California institutions, and the results are bleak.

The number of African Americans admitted to UCLA dropped from 518 in 1997 to 304 this year. The percentage of those accepted who actually enrolled increased slightly, from 42.3% to 43.1%, and yet that still resulted in only 131 African Americans who had notified the university of their intent to register as of May. (Final statistics on the number who made it to campus won’t be available until November).

Estimate that the African American entrants were divided about evenly among the genders--and this is being generous, because 52% of the UCLA student body is female--and that means about 65 black male freshmen.

Out of an incoming class of 4,200 students. No shortage on the football practice field, though. That’s where you can find 12 black male freshmen. Add the four black members of the basketball recruiting class and you’ve accounted for about 25% of the black male freshman class.

One of every four plays football or basketball.

That’s way, way out of proportion.

You know the old stereotypical assumption that a black man walking around campus has to be an athlete? It’s starting to become true.

Our community leaders keep trying to tell black children that the best tools for success are books, not balls. But it will be difficult for them to be taken seriously with these numbers out there.

And it should be even more difficult for Gov. Pete Wilson and all of those University of California regents who argued in favor of Prop. 209 (and the similarly structured UC legislation SP-1) to defend themselves.

Because affirmative action hasn’t gone away. It has only been pushed to the extremes. There are still exceptions and selections that have nothing to do with academic standing.

There will always be room for you at a UC school if you’re a skilled athlete.

DeShaun Foster concedes that his SAT score “wasn’t that high,” yet he might be the most celebrated member of the freshman class, the gem of a recruiting crop that some rated the best in the nation.

You didn’t hear anyone saying it was unfair when UCLA offered him a scholarship. But if he had been just an African American student with high scores instead of a top running back and UCLA held a space for him because it wanted to diversify its campus, there would be an uproar. And, after Prop.209, it would be illegal.

On the other end, UC regents have retained a provision that allows sons and daughters of big-money alumni to get special consideration when applying to UC schools. Even a hypocrite such as Ward Connerly, the African American UC regent who seems to oppose anything that remotely promotes diversity, saw the hypocrisy in allowing this exception to stick around after 209’s passage. And yet the regents still kept it. But being considered a lucky fat cat’s kid doesn’t carry the same stigma as being thought of as a dumb jock, and that’s the stereotype the incoming African American males will have to face.

“Nobody wants to be viewed as just a jock, an athlete that plays football,” Foster said. “We have to go to school just like everybody else. We have to pass our classes. If we don’t, there’s the same consequences as everybody else. If I don’t pass a class, I’m not going to be able to play football.”

UCLA didn’t have to sell its academic soul to acquire this talented group, either. The SAT scores of its incoming football freshmen ranked seventh in the country, according to a recent survey of Division I-A football programs by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But it shouldn’t be up to the athletic department to provide a disproportionate share of black students. And the courts and the fields shouldn’t be the most likely place to find them.

The players notice the dwindling numbers of African Americans on campus. And if the UC schools aren’t careful, it will come back and hurt them in the only area they really seem to care about African Americans: athletic recruiting.

“That’s something I’d look at,” Foster said. “You want to be comfortable, you know what I mean? You don’t want to just go somewhere where there’s not too many people of your race, no matter what you are.”

And when there’s a sizable minority population, it helps everyone else. There were virtually no Asian American students at sophomore wide receiver Brian Poli-Dixon’s high school in Tucson, so it’s been a new experience at UCLA, where a third of the student population is Asian.

“I have benefited from a diverse campus,” Poli-Dixon said. “I enjoy learning from other people’s cultures.

“That’s kind of fun, to learn about somebody new.”

On tap for Poli-Dixon this quarter is a women’s studies course. Talk to him and it’s apparent he’ll someday add to the ranks of UCLA’s well-rounded alumni.

He also happens to have three touchdown receptions for the nation’s No. 4 team.

Otherwise he probably wouldn’t even be here.

* FINDING HIS NICHE: To find his rightful spot on the UCLA football team, cornerback Ryan Roques had to move around a lot. C7