Skate Fest Offers a Lesson in Bias

So, that skate festival that was held in Burbank on Saturday? The one that boasted free burgers and gear giveaways? And where two burly security guards decided where teenagers could skate based on their eye color?

It was all a ruse.

The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission and Rock the Vote took over Valley Park to film an anti-discrimination public service announcement that will run on television and the Internet.

Unsuspecting skaters, lured to the free festival, were discriminated against and then captured on video.

The campaign, named Zero Hour, is designed to make young people aware of the various forms of discrimination, said Ara Khachatourian of Rock the Vote. The groups tried a similar experiment earlier in a San Fernando fast-food restaurant, where customers were charged according to their accents; their reactions were filmed for a quick-moving ad that has begun airing on KTLA-TV Channel 5.

Terri Villa-McDowell, assistant executive director of the county Human Relations Commission, said the project was prompted by a study finding that 50% of hate-crime felony prosecutions in the county between 1998 and 2000 involved youths. Villa-McDowell admitted that the campaign might be considered controversial, but said it was necessary to rouse area youths out of their complacency. “It had to be a kick-in-the-butt marketing message,” she said.

At one rim of the park, two actors posed as security guards, each with a distinctive personality. James Vicker, 26, was the nerdier guard; he wore oversized glasses and a baseball cap and tightly clutched a clipboard (really a camera).

As a skater approached the edge of the concrete skate bowl, Vicker stopped him. “You’ve got blue eyes,” he told the boy. “I need everyone with blue eyes to skate over there,” he said, pointing to the opposite end of the park.

The scene was captured by hidden cameras in the guards’ gear and clothing and by inconspicuous cameramen posing as documentarians. In a nearby motor home, Mike Franzini, the ad’s director, and other staff members watched the cameras’ feeds on a bank of monitors.

Most of the teenagers simply obeyed the guards’ instructions and moved to the other edge of the park. Only a few expressed outrage at the seemingly arbitrary rules.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said one 15-year-old skater who was stopped. “This black security guard said I can’t skate here because I have blue eyes. That white dude told me straight up. I don’t even understand it.”

Skaters were not told the real reason behind the discrimination until the end of the day, when they went to claim goodie bags and were given a release form and an explanation for the guards’ actions.

“What we did here was an experiment, to get people to realize that discrimination does exist,” Robin Fitzgerald, a copy writer for the ad campaign, told a group of five skaters. Two of them -- both brown-eyed -- told her they had not noticed the bias. Two others, also brown-eyed, said they thought it was a joke.

But David Hua, 11, said he had been troubled by the experience. “My friend -- he has blue eyes,” David said. “He had to stay where the bowl is. I stayed over where he was.”

Jehmu Greene, president of Rock the Vote, said she wasn’t surprised by the apathy of many of the skaters toward the guards’ discrimination.

Greene said she hoped the campaign would help: “If we can empower one person to speak out the next time they are in this situation, then we have a real chance of winning this fight.”