Learning to Look Past Race

If you want to time-travel to a future American suburb, turn off your television and walk through this year’s Walnut High School prom.

Thai American junior Sara Vichit, luminous in a shimmering gown, is slow-dancing with a black senior, Chris Matthews, whose tuxedoed elegance hints at the adult world he is graduating into. There’s Jesse Waites, who is white, moving in sync to a hip-hop beat with his African American date, Tiffany Palmer, and a Latino friend, Steven Casado.

Forget the increasingly anomalous all-white world on prime-time TV. This is MTV International. Here, diversity is commonplace, comfortable--and cool.

“Nobody’s going to turn their head if an Asian girl comes with an African American boy,” Principal Ken Gunn said. “That’s not the source of any tension.” Or, as a young woman at the prom asked: “Isn’t it like this everywhere now?”

No, it’s not. In fact, this affluent, eastern San Gabriel Valley suburb of 32,000--which went from predominantly white to two-thirds Asian, black or Latino in a generation--is among the most diverse in America. Yet instead of undergoing white flight, it is one of a handful of diversifying communities nationwide that actually gained white residents as it grew.

Today, members of Walnut’s white old guard find themselves proud grandparents of children of partly Asian, Latino and black heritage. High school students stray from the usual borders of ethnic identity into a common youth culture that makes some of their elders a little uncomfortable. And diversity has become an integral element of civic identity.

In ethnically fragmented, sometimes fractious Southern California, here is a place that--however imperfectly--quietly works.

Could this prosaic outpost of suburbia--with its bland strip malls, prefab Old West kitsch and Norman Rockwell hypernormality--be hosting the kind of social transformation that still eludes older, more glamorous communities in Southern California?

Some believe that Walnut is, indeed, a glimpse into a plausible future California--a state in which half of all residents are expected to be nonwhite by 2001.

“There are only a few places in America like this,” said James Allen, a Cal State Northridge professor and co-author of “The Ethnic Quilt,” a book on Los Angeles County’s changing demography.

“If a multiethnic society is worked out in America, I would think it is worked out in places like Walnut. The future of America is in the suburbs,” he said.

And nowhere more than in California is suburbanization--that long-ridiculed chariot of conservative American white flight--being reinvented as an agent of social change.

And in few states does it have more far-reaching consequences. In Los Angeles County, for example, two of three people live somewhere in the suburban sprawl.

Many Southern Californians already know that the stereotype of the American suburb as a “Brady Bunch,” white-bread enclave no longer applies. From western Ventura County to San Diego, middle-class diversity is a suburban phenomenon--sometimes in suburbs that owe their very existence to white flight.

But even by Southern California standards, cities in the eastern San Gabriel Valley--such as Walnut and Diamond Bar--are far more integrated than most places, according to William Clark, a UCLA expert in residential segregation.

Researchers say that here, race is less likely to determine socioeconomic status. Interracial marriage, they contend, is common. And teenagers appear less likely to polarize into the kinds of rivalry that sparked a two-day student melee over Cinco de Mayo vs. Black History Month at Inglewood High School last year.

“We’re talking about only a handful of communities, but the fact that they exist is important,” Clark said. “It’s an indication of this greater tolerance.”

Jonis Moreno, a Walnut student of Filipino and Latino heritage, said that at other schools she attended kids withdrew into ethnic groupings. When she visits relatives in Carson, “they’re like, ‘She’s Filipino and she’s not hanging around with Filipinos. How weird.’ ” In Walnut, “everybody’s mixed together.”

Change Leads to Backlash

But whenever change occurs, there is some backlash, and Walnut was no exception. There was the real estate agent who tried (unsuccessfully) to steer black families away from the best neighborhoods. And there was the proposal by a former white resident, Nadine Brown, to create the so-called Anglo-American Club. When she pitched it to the City Council in May 1993, she touched off an uproar.

At the time, some white residents were grumbling that newcomers were eroding their close-knit community. They worried that diversity meant crime and lower property values, that whites would become minorities amid a united nonwhite majority.

One woman who eventually left Walnut said God did not mix animal species, so it was “unnatural” to mix races. “Caucasian people have been forced out,” she said. “I want to be with people I have something in common with.”

Brown introduced the 50-member Anglo-American Club not long after Walnut’s first black mayor, Dr. William Choctaw, took office. Minority ethnic clubs were proliferating at the time, but the Anglo-American Club was perceived as “bordering on prejudicial,” said Father Dennis Vellucci, who opened Walnut’s Catholic church in 1990.

One black woman, convinced the club was a cover for a racist, whites-only group, not a bastion of ethnic pride, tried to force the issue by asking if she would be eligible to join. An Anglo member replied that she “didn’t see why on Earth” the woman would want to--and word of the exchange spread all over town.

For the next few days, many white people sought out Choctaw “to express their outrage,” the former mayor said. “It brought out the good in the city instead of polarizing it.”

The club fizzled. Brown moved, and recently declined to talk about the debacle.

Many suburban communities are expected to undergo public soul-searching as their populations become more ethnically diverse. By 2050, the Census Bureau expects whites to drop to 53% of the U.S. population, and sociologists anticipate more “white anxiety.”

So why do some places work when others don’t? Most successful diverse communities have even ethnic balances, UCLA professor Clark said. Reluctance to be the neighborhood minority is shared by all ethnicities.

Experts say money helps. Walnut is united by high household incomes (median $64,000). Its high education levels mean many residents read the same books, see the same movies, have similar aspirations. With home values middling at $320,000, everyone is likely to be fussy about their lawn.

Unlike low-income areas in South Los Angeles--where hate crimes committed by blacks and Latinos against each other are clustered--people live side-by-side in Walnut out of choice, not economic necessity. They don’t compete for scarce jobs and housing, or feel the economic anxiety that seems to play a role in places like Antelope Valley, Sunland-Tujunga and the northwest San Fernando Valley, where suspected white supremacists have committed hate crimes against minorities.

“If you’re poor and struggling and you feel you have to compete with members of a different ethnic group, you’ll find them threatening,” said Pepperdine University researcher Gregory Rodriguez.

Schools Help Foster Tolerance

Walnut may also benefit from a lack of historical baggage. Though it is a onetime Western ranching community, most of its housing was built in the 1980s, long after the demise of real estate covenants restricting suburbs to whites.

Another factor may be a self-selected will to get along. After all, says Allen, the geographer, “if people move to places like Walnut, they want to be part of a multiethnic community.”

If there is any single engine of diversity in the city, it is the school system, which has learned to begin promoting tolerance in grade school. In Los Angeles, many affluent parents pull their kids out of public schools, and only one in 10 remaining students is white. Not in Walnut. Walnut High, a blue-ribbon school with a dropout rate of less than 1% and a vigorous college prep program, does not inspire private-school runoff. PTA meetings are standing-room-only affairs.

Ethnic social clubs proliferate at Walnut High, but in an era of contentious ethnic-identity politics, the groups seem to stretch the definition of inclusiveness.

Asian students nominated the black president of the Black Students Union to be president of an Asian club in September. The Black Students Union chose a white faculty advisor. A Chinese American boy whose mild autism helped him learn Spanish virtually overnight is one of the most popular children in the Latin Alliance--which has male and female co-presidents. Even the Girls Club has a male officer.

Students like Filipino Egyptian American Jennifer Soliman, 16, reject categorization. Her friends are “all of the above.” Some like alternative rock. Others are into Mexican banda. But everybody dances to hip-hop and studies Spanish. Ethnic typecasting is, like, so over for them.

Like other Walnut students, Soliman evinces a smug superiority. The same mix that has Balkanized many suburban schools gives Walnut--way out in the San Gabriel Valley--a certain cosmopolitan cachet.

“We’re going to be better people when we graduate because we already learned how to get along,” Soliman said. “We have an advantage.”

Residents Absorb Other Cultures

What these youths are learning, says civil rights attorney Constance Rice, is “cultural fluency”--a byproduct of successful integration.

“They’re not just sharing; they’re creating entirely new intercultural mixes,” Rice said. “They’re not denying who they are, or trying to be something they’re not. They’re genuinely and authentically adopting something from another culture, not based on a sense of inferiority, but because hey, I like that; that’s cool.”

For the future of America, “it’s not just an advantage, it’s essential,” Rice said. “Without intercultural fluency, we’re never going to reach that dream of pluralism, that ‘e pluribus unum’--out of many, one.”

Among those who tested the waters early on were Asian immigrants--like nursery owner Kazuko Higashi--who moved from Japan to Walnut in 1963. Higashi’s daughter was the first Japanese child enrolled at her Walnut elementary school, and “they were so nice to her,” Higashi recalled.

Then came a stampede of home buyers from the swelling minority middle class. By the early 1990s, Walnut had changed from a predominantly white city to the mix it is today: 36% Asian or Pacific Islander, 34% white, 24% Latino, 7% black. It was around that time that Mayor Choctaw popularized a hopeful civic mantra: “Diversity is our strength.”

Ashmi Doshi, 15, whose parents are from India, said Walnut is less a melting pot than an ethnic stew. Lunch tables can become magnets for self-segregation. But classes and school activities create multiethnic tables. The many children of mixed parentage are social wild cards. Doshi’s two best friends are Indian and Korean American, and friends of all ethnicities came to her birthday party.

Doshi says this galaxy of ethnic hubs prevents the kind of cruel social hierarchies that kids in Littleton, Colo., complained about after the high school killings there. At Walnut, no single group casts its competitive shadow over school social life or makes others feel like outcasts, she said.

Parents like Carmen Hill moved here precisely because children from different backgrounds seem to have so much in common.

“I thought, boy, why can’t the whole world be like this?” said Hill, whose family is black.

Yet relatives have remarked that Hill’s daughter, Tara, “sounds like a little white girl,” Hill said. “It doesn’t bother me. She sounds just like the rest of her friends. If you were to go to the South, you would take on a Southern accent.”

But some Walnut parents do worry that their children’s heritage will be lost. A black mother sent her daughter to college in Kentucky to be closer to the family’s Southern black roots. Asian parents enroll their kids in after-school Japanese- and Chinese-language classes.

Parents in the white old guard, like Bert Ashley, have also lived through change.

Ashley, a poker-faced Southern steel magnolia, settled in Walnut in 1963, when its 1,600 people shared a rural paradise with blankets of wildflowers and canyon bridle trails. She has gone to the Walnut Fair since the days of greased pig contests.

But times change. Developers built tract homes and Walnut became a magnet for upscale families of all ethnicities. Soon Ashley, a city commissioner and four-time mayor, was invited to a “Juneteenth” barbecue, an African American celebration of the day--two years after emancipation--that U.S. troops showed up in Galveston, Texas, to tell slaves they were free. She recently handed over the mayorship to a Chinese American, Joaquin Lim, and now she’s off to tour China with Walnut’s Chinese-American Assn.

“If people invite me, I go,” Ashley said in the husky growl that frames her deep twang. “Walnut was always a nice place, and now it’s even better. America’s always been diverse.”

But America has not always been integrated. And as a framed photograph on her wall attests, true integration is changing the shape of human relationships. There in the photo are her two blond sons and their wives. One Ashley daughter-in-law is a brown-eyed Latina of Native American heritage. The other is the African Asian daughter of an American GI and his Korean war bride.

“So I’ve got some great-looking grandchildren,” Ashley declared gruffly. Young people today “keep marrying everybody and everyone. It’s no big deal.”

As elsewhere in America, race still colors life in Walnut. Black families in particular fear that lingering prejudice is behind a teacher’s inattentiveness, a store attendant’s brusqueness--or official transgressions by police. One black mother, Judy Swayne, said her husband had to prove to L.A. County sheriff’s deputies that he lived in Walnut. Deputies mistook her son for a burglar--in the family driveway.

Nevertheless, “I believe [Walnut] works. I love my community,” Swayne said. “My only regret is not moving here sooner.”

Teenagers Forge Lasting Bonds

Many youths in Walnut share coming-of-age experiences that transcend ethnicity--and the bonds they forge may be what most holds young Walnut together.

But stepping across ethnic lines can also be a reminder of the still-immutable boundaries of race.

Elisa Gutierrez, 16, said some relatives joked that she was “a coconut: brown on the outside, white on the inside.” Her best friend is white, but her prom date, senior Lamont Jones, is black. She wants to learn Spanish but prefers alternative rock to Latin music.

“I don’t think I should be under pressure to ‘act Mexican,’ ” said Gutierrez, a junior. “My friends are a little bit of everything. We all breathe the same air.”

Some residents wonder whether Walnut--clinging to a benign self-image in an ethnically divided world--is engaging in a sort of collective denial. They question whether a place like Walnut adequately prepares kids for the real world.

“My son’s generation will look past race, and when I go to a [school board meeting], the first thing that registers with people is that I’m a black woman,” said one parent, Gayle Watkins.

“It’s hard to forget what you were taught for 50 years. It’s the older generation that has not desensitized.”

But for the younger generation, remaining within the safe confines of ethnicity seems as dated as their parents’ old prom photos.

“You have old-fashioned relatives with the old thoughts, like whites are still the prejudiced ones,” said Artie Delgado, 23, a Mexican American Walnut High graduate whose rap duo was just signed by a Christian recording label.

“I don’t look at it that way. They’re still hurt from past days, and I’m past that,” he said. “I don’t see it as I have this African American friend. I just see my buddy. I’ve grown up with them. I can relate to it.”

THE CHANGING SUBURBS

This series will explore new aspects of the Southern California suburban experience on occasion through the year. Earlier articles can be viewed on The Times’ Web site at

https://www.latimes.com/suburbs

PREVIOUSLY:

* Evolution from orchard to subdivision in Ventura County.

* Fear of gangs disrupts an Orange County community.