The Challenge of Diversity : An L.A. Cultural Crucible : In Crenshaw Neighborhood, Japanese-Americans, Blacks Have Forged a History of Complex Relationships

“My attitude about this racial thing is this,” says Yuri Hosoi Fairchild, at once feisty and honey-voiced: “When Johnny came marching home from the war, everybody was out of step but Johnny. I am Johnny. And I considered everybody else was wrong except me.”

The war was World War II. The place was Hawaii. Her family was “dead set” against her marrying a black man.

“I bet he told you his father owns a plantation in California,” they chided her, she recalls. “But when you get there, you’ll find he has nothing. You’ll be living on Central Avenue,” then the social center of black Los Angeles.

She looks at her husband as he sips a soda in the living room of their spacious home near Crenshaw Avenue and Venice Boulevard. The incessant buzz of a gardener mowing the front lawn rattles the air.

“He hadn’t told me anything like that, just that he had a postman’s job. I just had faith in him, that’s all.”

Her family “eventually disowned me,” she says. “They had me sign papers that said I had nothing coming from the family. So I said, ‘Where’s the pen?’ I signed it and walked out.”

She could have been “devastated coming out here alone.” But, says the woman with animated eyes and the gentle expression of a young girl, “I wasn’t, because, as I told you, I was Johnny, the whole world was wrong. . . . Though no one supported me back home, black people have a big heart for all the strays that want to come in. So they accepted me. . . .”

The Fairchilds’ youngest son, Halford, is a social psychologist by training and an expert in race relations.

“It seems to me that the black community, in general, has been a lot more accepting of racial differences than other communities,” he says.

His assessment seems a combination of wishful thinking and fact. Recent conflicts between Korean immigrant merchants and African-American patrons in inner-city areas suggests that Korean-Americans in particular, and Asian-Americans in general, view blacks with unremitting hostility--and that the feeling is mutual.

But such sentiments often belie the complex interactions of those of Asian and African descent here and abroad.

In spots such as Los Angeles’ Crenshaw District, blacks and Japanese-Americans, in particular, have a long history of contact. Inevitably, their juxtaposed lives have led to decades of stories: the tenuous embrace of youths across ethnic lines, the bonds of lovers over generations.

Further, new scholarly research undermines fixed views about the perpetual hostility between Asians and blacks. Their relationships and perceptions of each other have been a mixed bag over time and space, social scientists say.

Michael Thornton, a University of Wisconsin sociologist, has engaged in pioneering research examining relationships between Asians and blacks and African-American perceptions of minority groups in the United States. In 1986, he began analyzing black perceptions of Asian-Americans recently and historically.

In the past, he says, blacks have felt a rapport with Asian-Americans “in terms of suffering racial discrimination, being denied access to the legal apparatus, and because of the kinds of discrimination Asians have faced” because of restrictive immigration laws.

Contemporary attitudes differ, says the scholar, who was born in Kobe, Japan, to an African-American serviceman and a Japanese mother.

Based on national data from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research covering the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Thornton found that “blacks don’t feel any specific rapport with Asian-American, generally. But there are specific groups of black Americans who feel very close to Asian-Americans,” he says. “Black men, for some reason, feel closer to Asian-Americans than (black) women do. Don’t know why. No one really has a handle on any of this stuff yet.”

Older black Americans also feel close to Asian-Americans, he says. “It may have something to do with the period in which they grew up,” a time when there was widespread, institutionalized discrimination against all people of color. But “younger black Americans are more distant from that kind of era. Perhaps it is less clear to them why they should feel they have anything in common with Asians.”

Flipper Fairchild, 78, met Yuri Hosoi, 81, at a USO dance in Honolulu. It was April 28, 1943. Flipper Fairchild remembers. It’s all in his diary.

“I was just a sergeant on a fling,” he says. “I didn’t think anything in particular when I first saw her, I was just dancing.”

“Very insincere,” his wife teases. But as soon as she saw him, “I was bowled over. He was very charming. I hadn’t met anyone like him before,” she says sweetly, breathlessly, as if 45 minutes, not 45 years, had passed since their wedding day.

How soon after they met did they marry?

“Well,” answers Fairchild matter-of-factly, “I couldn’t afford to ask her to marry me. I was already married.”

“Do you have to tell all that?” she asks.

“Well, it’s the truth,” he says.

What happened next?

He shrugs. “I decided to let nature take its course.”

They had a daughter in 1943. “So I said, ‘That’s it.’ ” He divorced his wife in Tulsa, Okla., and brought his new bride and daughter back to the States in 1946. Yuri Fairchild says she was cut off from all other Japanese-Americans, not just her family, when she moved to Los Angeles with her black husband.

Says her son Halford: “The adult Japanese people tended to be very racist” when he was growing up in Los Angeles. “They would look down on my family for being racially mixed. It seems the antipathy toward black people is a worldwide phenomenon, and very strong in Japan.”

But Thornton, of the University of Wisconsin, says that before 1945, perceptions of people of African descent in Japan were mixed: “Most people had argued that the Japanese were inherently racist toward blacks. But the evidence I found indicated that there were a lot of Japanese who felt very positive about blacks, while others held very stereotypical points of views about black Americans. Now, the pattern after 1945 is intriguing.”

After World War II, Japanese perceptions of blacks “very much mirror those of Americans,” explains Thornton, a professor in Wisconsin’s Afro-American Studies Department and a member of the advisory committee for the Asian-American studies program now being established there.

“After 1945, the U.S. came in and basically took over the educational system and revamped Japanese society,” he says. In doing so, the Americans also “brought in a lot of their stereotypical views about black Americans and Africans.”

From the perspective of a Japanese-American who grew up in the Crenshaw--”where Queen Bee Soul Food stood right next to Yoko’s Sushi”--there was much cultural schizophrenia.

“We felt the tug of so many cultures,” says Ed Iwata, 32. “At home we got the Buddhist and Confucian influence of our parents. In the larger society, the overpowering white influence. And out on the streets of the neighborhood, we got the African-American culture staring us in the face. I think a lot of us Japanese-Americans grew up schizophrenic.”

Then and now, Iwata laments, ignorance bred much “mistrust and hatred” between blacks and Asians. But there were always exceptions: a Yuri and Flipper Fairchild, Iwata in his youth.

“My best friend growing up through grade school and junior high was a black guy named Harry Price--I’d love to hook up with him again,” Iwata says.

He and Harry rode bikes together, played “basketball to all hours of the night,” says Iwata, a free-lance writer based in San Francisco. He shakes his head and gives out a nostalgic chuckle worthy of “The Wonder Years”: “We discovered Playboy together in his father’s bedroom.”

Back then, circa 1969, the Crenshaw District--the area roughly a few blocks east and west of Crenshaw Boulevard between Pico Boulevard and Florence Avenue--was undergoing yet another ethnic transformation. After World War II, whites began to leave the neighborhood.

From the 1950s to the 1960s, the area was the center of the Japanese-American community, says sociologist Harry Kitano, professor of Asian-American studies at UCLA. Japanese-Americans had moved west to Crenshaw from the Little Tokyo area and East Los Angeles. By the 1970s, they moved to Palos Verdes and Gardena. Though the Crenshaw is predominantly African-American now, “remnants of older, second-generation Japanese-Americans still live there.”

Iwata and his young friend parted company in the eighth grade.

“Our grade school was mostly Japanese-American, Coliseum Elementary,” he says. But their junior high school, Audubon on Santa Barbara, now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, was mostly black.

“Japanese-Americans,” he says, “came under a lot of attack. A lot of us got beat up a lot of the time. And poor Harry, because he hung out with us, was attacked several times. His parents finally transferred him to another junior high school.”

Iwata’s parents, who still live in the Crenshaw District, never knew of his beatings: “I never told them. It was very frustrating for Asian kids because we rarely tell our problems to our parents. Speaking out loud, communicating in a frank manner is unusual and uncomfortable for us, even for third-generation Asian-American kids.”

Even when his mother picked him up after school one day and found him bloodied, tears streaming down his face, she said nothing: “Her glance indicated that I was up to no good and she didn’t approve. She just assumed I’d been in a fight and goofing up. She thought I was a rowdy kid because I hung around with this black guy.”

He had, in fact, been attacked by black street gang members who had designated the last day of each semester as “kill Buddha day. Seems funny now,” he says, “it was terrifying then.”

Yuri and Flipper Fairchild’s Afro-Asian children caught hell from all sides. The memories are so painful for the two eldest children, they decided not to speak on the record for this story.

But Flipper Fairchild recalls their childhood differently.

When they were teen-agers, “the children said they’d been ostracized” because of their background, he says, a bemused look playing across his face.

“I was totally unaware of such a thing,” he says, his head slightly bent and moving side-to-side in a motion of disbelief. “We went to Bethel AME church. The children were part of the Sunday school, part of the junior choir. I never thought they were ostracized. . . . I was shocked when my daughter, as a teen-ager, said the colored girls didn’t like her, which I think was more of her imagination than anything else.”

His wife interrupts: “No, it’s true, they called her half-breed. . . . She felt very ostracized.”

In general, people who marry interracially “are not aware of the dilemmas the children face. In many cases, they are not denying the fact that these children may have these problematic experiences. They just don’t have the background to understand,” says Thornton, who describes himself as BJA, black Japanese-American.

Halford, 41, says his identity and rejection by his peers was “quite a bit of an issue” early in his life: “In the junior high school years, people are at the height of their unfriendliness toward each other. Kids talk about people being fat or skinny, light or dark. My own racial background and physiognomy made me the target of that kind of adolescent chiding and abuse. I think I was scarred by some of that for a long time.”

But by high school, things had changed. The time and the school had much to do with it, says the scholar, a former president of the National Assn. of Black Psychologists.

He graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1967, when blacks, Latinos, Asian- and Euro-Americans each made up about 25% of the school. The ‘60s liberal social attitudes contributed to the school’s interethnic harmony, he suggests: “It was a unique time. . . . Everyone seemed color-blind. I think about the parties we had . . . lavish parties in Hollywood, Venice, Hancock Park . . . in the homes of millionaires, usually whites. But the . . . cultural style that predominated among the Latinos, Asians and whites, was black. They were all hip in the black style.”

Recalling that time, he says, “what really tears at my heart is the black-Korean interaction in this community, which is not good. It might be that the Koreans are first generation and the language difference and cultural differences are very pronounced. When I was coming up, most of the Japanese kids and Hispanic kids were all second generation, all native English speakers. That made a difference.”

The belief that cultural differences are at the root of the conflict between blacks (who claim they are exploited by Korean merchants who take their money and treat them with racist contempt) and Korean immigrant shopkeepers (who see blacks as criminals, unemployed loafers and welfare queens) is common. It is used to explain tensions between Asian-and African-Americans generally.

But those who make the argument don’t see the socioeconomic forest for the trees, says Ronald Takaki. The UC Berkeley professor, noted historian and author of “Strangers From a Different Shore, A History of Asian Americans,” says frictions are caused by economic, not cultural, factors.

“Koreans have a class edge. . . . I looked at a study of Korean green grocers in New York City and found that 78% came here with college degrees,” a big class difference between them and most blacks they serve. But it’s not education alone that helps them succeed, he adds. “They also bring money. . . . Many come with $50,000 to $80,000 in cash.”

Their success fuels resentment among blacks who can’t get loans to start businesses, and among the growing black underclass created by the loss of manufacturing jobs in America--historically, the major sector of the economy that employed blacks, explains Takaki.

“Asian-Americans, as a model minority”--he says the phrase with disdain--”have been pitted against blacks as an underclass.”

Why? Takaki asks.

“It has very little to do with Asian-Americans and blacks. I think there is a nervousness in middle-class white society about its own place and its own future. They feel threatened by Asian-Americans. We represent the fastest growing ethnic group in society.”

But the white middle class also views as “very threatening the rising underclass of blacks. (They) feel very vulnerable in public places--streets, subways--and don’t know what to do with this black underclass. . . . They are worried that this group may not have a future in America.” So they make Asian-Americans a “model” minority.

“It becomes a way of disciplining this black underclass, a way to say, ‘Hey, they too have been victims of discrimination. But they made it by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, thrift, hard work, emphasis on family values.’ ”

There’s nothing wrong with black family values, says Takaki, who taught the first black history courses at UCLA and established the Ethnic Studies Centers. Those in the underclass want the same quality of life as middle-class Americans, but “changes in the American economy (since the ‘60s) have caused the disintegration of the black family,” he says.

Where blacks with little formal education could once earn $15 an hour working in a factory, they are now locked into the service sector, says Takaki.

“We’re talking about McDonald’s, the hotel and restaurant business, where they earn the minimum wage. These are not wages that will enable blacks to support a family. This has nothing to do with their cultural values.”

In fact, African- and Asian-Americans--who Takaki notes have worked together in such varied spots as plantations in Hawaii, Louisiana and Mississippi--have similar values, says Thornton: “A collective identification with other members of their own group” is important to both. Part of that may stem from their minority status. But generally, it contrasts with the Western as opposed to non-Western ways of looking at the world. It’s the West’s individualism, versus the family orientation of those of Asian and African descent.

Despite real and perceived differences among the groups, the record reveals that the experience of much of the Asian and African diaspora in the New World is embraced by a historical arc filled with parallels.

“To some extent, both groups have experienced what could be called unfree labor,” says Takaki. “Blacks came here as slaves. Asians, for the most part, came here as free laborers, wage earners.”

But slavery is not the basis for a comparison between Asian- and African-American labor; it is, rather, the life of the black sharecropper and contract laborers on the Hawaiian sugar plantations.

Flipper Fairchild’s mother suffered the neo-slavery of the post-Reconstruction era in Arkansas; Yuri Hosoi Fairchild’s mother was whipped while working cane fields.

He recalls: “When I was about 1, (Mother worked on) one of those slave-like plantations in Arkansas, sharecropping with my father. A very cruel white man was taking advantage of us. She and my father knew they had to get out of that place.” They fled to Tulsa.

Yuri Fairchild nods silently. Her mother left Japan to be a contract laborer in Hawaii, where dozens of laborers on a sugar plantation lived in a “one-room cottage in the fields with no running water,” she says. They had to build fires outdoors to cook and generally “were treated like cattle.”

Like the allegedly lazy black slave who saw no benefit in working hard for nothing but a whipping, her mother pretended “she had a headache and would not work. They got a horsewhip and beat her.”

Says Yuri Fairchild: “My mother had spirit, like me. She said, ‘I’m not putting up with this nonsense.’ When she found her opportunity, she escaped.”

That path led her to work in the kitchen of a white woman. “There was my father, working as a cook in the kitchen. They got married.”

The couple opened the Hosoi Funeral Home and grew wealthy. “Anybody who comes from Hawaii, they know the name Hosoi,” she says.

Flipper and Yuri Fairchild also have done well in their own right.

In 1946, they moved into their first house on 37th Drive and Normandie Avenue. The neighborhood was “partly white, partly mixed,” recalls Yuri Fairchild.

With their savings, they bought their house on 37th Drive for $10,500. Later, they purchased the house next door. The owner wanted $12,000. Yuri Fairchild told her husband to offer $8,000. Surprisingly, the owner--a white woman alarmed at the number of blacks moving into the area--sold it for that price. They paid her in a few years, moved into a mansion in Los Angeles’ Berkeley Square for $21,500, sold it for $46,000 in 1961 when the Santa Monica Freeway came, then moved into their present home, a rambling, Craftsman-style house.

Yuri Fairchild says with a nod, “Yes, it’s true,” their net worth is more than seven figures--not from their Los Angeles property only.

Her brother, a wealthy Honolulu physician, realized his sister had made a good marriage. Their emotional cold war thawed in 1970 when they met at a party thrown by a relative too young to know that Yuri had been cast from the family decades before. Five years later, as Yuri’s brother lay dying, Flipper Fairchild rushed to Honolulu at the Hosoi family’s request to help care for him.

The brother left everything he owned--including a palatial mansion and a vast collection of Asian art--to his outcast sister. Eventually, she sold the mansion to a Korean businessman and had an auctioneer handle the art.

Have the Hosoi clan forgiven her?

“I don’t know if I want to forgive them,” she says. But, yes, they’ve reunited. “Who would want to kick out a wealthy heiress? “ she asks, then cackles long and hard.