Shades of Difference

By NANCY GIBBS

To travel the streets of Los Angeles is to glimpse America's ethnic future. At the bustling playground at McDonald's in Koreatown, a dozen shades of kids squirt down the slides and burrow through tunnels and race down the catwalks, not much minding that no two of them speak the same language. Parents of grade-school children say they rarely know the color of their youngsters' best friends until they meet them; it never seems to occur to the children to say, since they have not yet been taught to care.

By high school, ethnic diversity has become an issue, but it still competes with the distractions of hormones and grades and social status and sports. Most schools are teaching students to celebrate diversity and search for common ground. Inglewood High School, 90% white 20 years ago and 90% black 10 years ago, is 48% Latino today. "We have the same challenges, and I've learned to see that if everybody united, we could be a big force," says Efrain Nava, a 16-year-old Mexican American. "We are all minorities, but together we are a majority."

At the University of California, Berkeley, most entering freshmen say they were attracted to the school because of its cultural variety: there is no ethnic majority. But very soon, university officials note, the students tumble into groups that celebrate division, not diversity. There is a Korean Catholics group, a Korean Baptists group, black engineers, Hispanic engineers, Chinese business students. Asian students may be divided among some 30 groups, including Thais, Cambodians, Filipinos and three Chinese organizations representing students from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.

There, in a nutshell, is the story of California's ethnic landscape. As recently as 1980, California was 76% white. During the past 10 years, the Hispanic community grew nearly 70%, the Asian community 127%, so that by last year's census, California was only 57% white. It is clear that early in the next century there will be no racial majority at all. The children may have no trouble adjusting, but their parents still have much to learn. Metaphors of conciliation don't seem to apply: no one talks of a melting pot anymore, or even of a rainbow coalition. "I could not imagine anyone running for mayor on a platform of greater diversity and winning," says Leo Estrada, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. To be anti-immigrant and antiminority, he says, is a more promising platform. "If you are for diversity, you hide it."

California is, by any measure, America's most colorful state. The richness of its culture, the liveliness of its fashions, the nuttiness of its fads and the ruthlessness of its politics all reflect the mix of races and cultures that blend and clash throughout the state. This is the land where Asian dragons dance at Cinco de Mayo parades, where viewers can tune in the evening news spoken in Tagalog, where suburban developers study the ancient Chinese concept of feng shui to ensure harmonious building design and smooth cosmic energy flow. It is not the Beach Boys or the Eagles or the Grateful Dead who provide the voice of California today; it is Los Lobos, a Mexican-American rock band. Amy Tan novels and Boyz N the Hood are the artifacts of the new United States of California. And when it comes to the latest groups of immigrants -- as with the settlers in Steinbeck country -- few of the stereotypes apply: most of the state's Hispanics and Asians, not notably self- indulgent, are a long way from hydrotherapy classes or from sleeping with their therapists. The Filipino punk joint may be a symbol of the latest form of California strangeness -- polyglot multiculturalism -- but it hardly seems out of place in a state where tire stores are built in the shape of Mayan temples and movies are screened in a replica of a palace at Thebes.

If California represents the future of America, then Los Angeles may be the future of California. Already there is no racial majority in either Los Angeles city or county, "a situation encountered by few large urban areas anywhere in the world," says Eugene Mornell, executive director of the Los Angeles County commission on human relations. "All our stereotypes are obsolete. Many immigrants are conservative, many poor people are patriotic, and vice versa. All groups include those who desire to maintain their original culture, reinterpret it or leave it behind."

The most visible fights are occurring on the political battleground of local and statewide elections. Though the state's economy has expanded over the years to provide opportunity to new waves of immigrant workers and entrepreneurs, the political arena is less spacious. Any gain by one ethnic group represents a loss to another, so the fight over drawing new electoral- district lines based on the 1990 census has been fierce. The only point of agreement is that by 1992 the political map is likely to look very different than it has in the past.

On the basis of numbers alone, the redistribution of political power is long overdue -- and it may be hastened by a new law that will force state representatives to leave office after two or three terms, creating openings for minority candidates. Despite the phenomenal growth of California's minority populations in the past 20 years, just two blacks and one Asian have been elected to statewide office. Of the 120 members of the state legislature, only 10 are black, six Latino and none Asian. The 45 members of Congress from California include only four blacks, three Latinos and two Asians.

Los Angeles was the arena for the first bitter round of fighting, when Hispanics campaigned for a seat on the county's powerful five-member board of supervisors. While Los Angeles County's 3 million Hispanics are fully one- third of the region's total population and represent the largest concentration of Latinos in the nation, it was only this year that newly drawn districts enabled them to win a seat. "We have the numbers, but the numbers are not reflected in the political and economic power structures," says Antonia Hernandez, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which led the redistricting battle.

And although 35% of the nation's 7.2 million Asians live in California, they too remain almost invisible in California politics. "While we've made progress educationally and economically, we still have some major challenges," says Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California. "Our main problem is that we are locked out of the political process."

Given the concrete challenges that California faces in trying to absorb and appease so many diverse groups -- challenges to the school system, the housing market, the job market, the infrastructure -- it is ironic that some of the fiercest battles revolve around largely symbolic issues. Much of the tension arises from misunderstandings rooted in the clash of cultures. These days it is impossible even to formulate stereotypes about Asians or Hispanics, because those categories conceal much more than they reveal. Koreans and Japanese continue to deride one another; Peruvians resent being mistaken for Mexicans. The largest Asian group is not the Japanese or the Chinese but the Filipinos, who have different traditions.

Blacks and Hispanics are fighting over jobs at Martin Luther King hospital in Watts, where nearly 9 out of 10 babies born are Hispanic. As the hospital comes to serve a more diverse community, Hispanic leaders have demanded more of the health-care jobs. But blacks view the facility, built after the Watts riots in 1965, as a symbol of their hard-fought struggle for civil rights. Says Eugene Grigsby III, acting director of UCLA's Center for Afro-American Studies: "The feeling is we've been left out so long, now these new kids on the block who haven't paid their dues, who haven't fought in the streets, who haven't put up with racism and discrimination, all of a sudden, because they have only 3% of county hospital jobs, they should have that grievance redressed at our expense."

In June blacks began a boycott of a Korean-owned store in South Central Los Angeles after the owner shot a black man he thought was a robber. Korean storekeepers have become a highly visible economic presence in what were traditionally black neighborhoods; blacks charge that the owners treat black customers like criminal suspects and fail to hire local workers. In the past six months alone, three blacks -- and two Koreans -- have been killed in Korean-owned stores. Though police concluded that the fatal shooting in South Central Los Angeles was justified, the boycott lasted four months, ending only after the Korean owner agreed to close the store and give blacks the opportunity to buy it.

Other Korean shopkeepers donated more than $20,000 to help keep the boycotted owner's business going during the protest. "We don't make trouble first," says Do Hyun Chung, who owns a liquor store in Compton. "We try to make money first." The 31-year-old merchant came to America nearly seven years ago with scarcely a penny in his pocket, in the hope of finding what he refers to, without irony or embarrassment, as "the American Dream." The previous owner of his store was shot dead by a robber. For Chung and his wife Sue Hee, it is a constant struggle to maintain peace with their customers. Every morning they provide free coffee and breakfast to poor people in the neighborhood, and they donate sodas and snacks to community groups organizing picnics for local kids.

But it is still difficult for the Chungs to understand the resentment of his patrons, some of whom he sees as too lazy to go to work for themselves. "In America you get what you work for," says Sue Hee. "If you don't get it, then you didn't work for it." The rage that African Americans direct at Korean merchants, says Wayne Gibson, a black barber in Compton, stems from a feeling of exploitation and lack of respect. "It seems everybody's just trying to get over on the residents of Compton without giving anything back," he says. "That's where the hostility comes in. So the people out here resent these immigrants getting a leg up on them."

One appalling tendency is for the newcomers to adopt historic American racism. UCLA's Estrada says he is "amazed" at how quickly immigrants move "from never having seen a black person to becoming racist against them." Their view, he argues, is shaped by the media, the movies, the countless subtle and obvious expressions of hostility to blacks and "black issues" that immigrants encounter. "It's all part of a process of arriving," adds Estrada.

In the coming decades, while California's population grows ever more diverse, it will also become less black. As immigrants flood into formerly black neighborhoods, many black families are deciding that it is time to leave. During the past decade, the black populations in both Los Angeles and San Francisco declined. Many African Americans fled to suburban cities in search of space and safety and jobs. But a great many African Americans are leaving the state, some to return to the Deep South that their parents and grandparents fled years ago.

Some white Californians, meanwhile, welcome the new arrivals. In their 49 years on Clinton Avenue in Richmond, a blue-collar refinery center on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay, Gladys Parks, 76, and her husband Bruce, 81, have seen the city go from white to black, then to Hispanic and Asian, and finally to mixed-white again on the gentrifying edge of the city. Bruce, a Stockton-born "prune picker," as native Californians are called, recalls having real misgivings when the "coloreds" first came to town during World War II. Today he and Gladys call the black family next door the best neighbors they've ever had. They've become such friends with their Chicano gardener that they go to Las Vegas with him and his family. And they admire the brilliant 15-year-old Vietnamese girl who baby-sits around the corner and plans to attend Harvard or Stanford. They are persuaded that Californians are, in fact, more tolerant than most Americans. It's probably because, as Bruce says, "almost everybody here is new."

But in a time of such heady change, no single reaction speaks for the majority. In a sense, the entire state is going through a process of re- education about just what diversity means and what the future holds. "People's idea of being culturally aware is going to a Chinese restaurant," says Marcia Choo, program director for the Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center in Los Angeles. Some whites are running away from neighborhoods that have been rapidly integrated in the past 10 years or so. Typical of their sentiment is the bumper sticker that used to be common in one formerly all-white community: WILL THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE MONTEREY PARK PLEASE BRING THE AMERICAN FLAG? During the past decade, the "Orange Curtain" has descended south of Santa Ana, as whites migrate to the protected enclaves of Orange County. "The city won't be abandoned," predicts UCLA's Eugene Grigsby. "But if the white corporate power structure stays as it is, you'd be hard pressed to distinguish this area from South Africa relative to who controls, who's employed and who's impoverished."

California's student population has the advantage of working through the issues that divide neighborhoods, institutions and governmental bodies within the protected framework of the campus. Declares Francisco Hernandez, dean of student life at Berkeley: "The real story is actually how well students get along. That's not to say there aren't problems and issues. But students aren't shooting each other. They aren't killing each other. They're trying to understand each other in an academic setting. The picture that's been drawn of Berkeley is that there is a great deal of racial tension. What there is, is a great amount of racial awareness on campus. Students are aware of who they are and what they are, and so are we. Instead of ignoring it or pretending that students don't have differences, we acknowledge the differences with the intent of having students understand them, tolerate them and eventually enjoy them."

As an objective for the rest of the state, that is both an unavoidable choice and a tall order.

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CAPTION: Perceptions of the increasing numbers of HISPANICS and ASIANS in California

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With reporting by Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles