A Situation That’s Nothing to Celebrate

It’s hard to imagine anyone could do anything to make your average high school experience any more traumatic and confusing, but Southern California is nothing if not a can-do kind of place. It’s not enough for adults here that their kids already are enduring the most stressful thing that can possibly happen to a person; namely, adolescence. No, we’ve got to amp up the pressure.

So let’s talk race.

Specifically, let’s talk about what has become a kind of annual high school hurt-fest stretching from Black History Month in February to Cinco de Mayo and beyond. Planned with the best intentions--of teaching kids, not just about history, but about the texture of human relations behind it--these ethnic observances have ended up being hijacked almost annually by, well, human relations. If it’s spring in Southern California, it must be fightin’ time.

This year’s fight comes early, and courtesy of Inglewood High School. What trauma it will inflict remains to be seen, but, as is typical with these things, confusion abounds. And, as is typical, the confusion starts with the grown-ups. In this case, the problem has to do with the Inglewood High principal, who got into a set-to with some teachers, ostensibly over what to do about Black History Month.

Basically, the teachers anticipated the usual observances. But the principal seemed inclined to tone it down this year, because of a racial brawl last year that briefly shut the school down. The brawl, between African American and Latino kids, was also typical for the season: The Latino kids’ feelings had been hurt because the black kids got a monthlong observance and they only got Cinco de Mayo, which lasted one day.

Clearly, some fine-tuning was in order. But by the beginning of February, some of the teachers were apparently grumbling that they were afraid that both holidays were going to be fine-tuned out of existence this year. So on Feb. 4, the principal, Lowell Winston, issued a “clarification.” Which would have been fine, if it hadn’t been so confusing it managed to make matters worse.

Written in your basic, defensive-school-bureaucrat mode, Winston’s memo rather patronizingly informed his staff that “this principal” had told them earlier in the year that “Inglewood High School will not celebrate Black History Month and Cinco de Mayo Month as in the past.” Instead, the faculty was to incorporate all cultures into the curriculum all year.

This apparently drew a resounding “Huh?” from the teachers, who said they’d been confused by the principal’s earlier statements. And so, in fine bureaucratic tradition, someone leaked the memo to the media. Which created an uproar. Which prompted the usual round of trauma--not over the failure of academics to communicate, but over the obligatory issue of the season: Race.

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One of these days, Southern California is going to learn the difference between garden-variety disagreements and the pernicious plague of bigotry. Not today, though. For one thing, that would require the courage to acknowledge that race relations here don’t fit the mold of other cities, that the swarm of races, creeds and colors is so blindingly massive that the notion of one group being butted and jostled more than another, on most days, approaches the level of comedy.

The pageant of human relations here is probably richer and more subtle than in any corner of the planet, but we cleave to this old ragged script in which dialogue can only come in kiddie Crayola colors, in black and brown and yellow and white. Thus, in the wink of a headline, a beef between a ticked-off black teacher and a defensive black principal is twisted into a conflict between blacks and Latinos over whose history is going to get short shrift.

Thus, by midweek, did everyone slip into their usual postures, from the talk radio deejays to the activists holding press conferences outside the school. Meanwhile, the kids were as unprepared and unwilling as ever to choose up ethnic sides prematurely. And the principal was papering the community with letters decrying “incorrect” headlines and “selfish” teachers and assuring parents that Black History Month would proceed as planned.

Which it will, I am sure, until the end of February. Then schools will launch their “international” observances for the non-black, non-brown kids. Then will come the Latino observance. And then the summer. And adolescents will continue to be as confused and traumatized as ever by the lessons we adults seem obliged to keep pushing: the tired, old curriculum of us-against-them.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].