Teaching Tolerance : School Workshops Start Fighting Racism in the Early Grades

Two children, one black and the other Latino, are squaring off in a racially charged confrontation that is growing more heated by the second in the library of South Park Elementary School.

A black girl, towering above a diminutive Latino boy, glares at him with hands on hips. “I just want you to know that I don’t like you ‘cause you’re white, and you comb your hair back,” she announces.

The boy is silent, his back pressed to a wall and his eyes studying her with a mix of fear and fascination. What started out as an exercise in race relations has taken on a tense life of its own.

The girl presses on. “How come you so short, anyway?” she scoffs, taking a menacing step forward. Though his eyes widen with apprehension, he still says nothing.

Suddenly, a tall black boy with an authoritative air who has been watching the exchange, intervenes. “Wait a second, wait a second,” he says, stepping between them. He turns to the girl. “How would you feel if he said those things to you because just because you’re black?”

Now it is her turn to be speechless.

The tall boy takes the opening and quickly goes on to elaborate about the senseless prejudices that nearly brought about a fight. The girl sheepishly admits her wrongdoing, and a shaky peace is achieved.

Applause erupts from around the room filled with fellow students and school staff members intently following the exercise, part of a race relations workshop being presented at 19 Los Angeles elementary schools.

“It’s right to solve problems this way,” said 11-year-old Jesse Charles, the scene’s serious-minded mediator and an aspiring lawyer. “We have to get past it. . . . I have a lot of friends who are Hispanic, white, a lot of things. And racism isn’t just black on white, but black on black, white on white too.”

The way the students spontaneously resolved the conflict is the kind of reaction that workshop coordinator Nabil Antoine hopes to spark: children working out race-based tensions on their own.

Antoine, 38, is of Jewish, Arab and European ancestry and passionately believes in the importance of people--especially children--learning to get along. He is the founder of a youth counseling service called Alert America and is presenting his workshop as part of the L.A.’s Best after-school program at no charge to the district.

Antoine said too many children have come to believe that violence is the only way to resolve conflict.

“In the media, kids are too often exposed to only one side of the values coin,” he said. “I show them both sides and let them choose. Rather than try to change parents, I try to enhance the good in their kids.”

The workshop includes the screening of “What Color Am I?,” an award-winning video shot last year of people in and around Los Angeles frankly discussing prejudice and its effect on their lives. Many of those interviews were conducted during two days of last spring’s riots. A raw urgency in the voices and the images of a chaotic, burning city keep even first-graders focused for the video’s 27 minutes, Antoine said.

After the screening, students discussed their attitudes about racism and discovered they had similar anxieties that often lay surprisingly close to the surface.

“Something clicked in my mind,” said Jonathan Henderson, 10, after watching the video and the scene enacted by three fellow students. “It shouldn’t matter what color people are, or what country they came from. I just pray those riots won’t happen again.”

Antoine said he has encountered considerable fear among children, especially those living in or near riot-stricken areas, that there may be more unrest resulting from the federal Rodney G. King civil rights trial and the upcoming trial of the men charged with beating truck driver Reginald O. Denny.

“A lot of people don’t realize how much (they) have bottled up inside, and how few outlets they have,” Antoine said. “It’s very dangerous. So they learn guns are an OK way to settle problems. The messages we send kids (about how to resolve conflict) are very convoluted.”

Antoine said his workshops provide a neutral place for children to untangle such messages. At one session, a black girl told how she was insulted by a white woman in an elevator; a Latina recalled her surprise when a black classmate refused to sit next to her because he was afraid her color would rub off on him. Several students who related similar experiences ended up in tears.

“People shouldn’t express their feelings that way,” 12-year-old La-Shia Ransom said about the confrontation in the exercise. “They hurt themselves, not anyone else.”

Fifth-grader Angel Hicks said the workshop teaches a valuable lesson. “Just because we see color, we don’t have to judge by it,” she said. “If we all say we’re racist, we can all come together to help solve the problem.”

Antoine says the persistence of prejudice led him to create Alert America, a nonprofit organization that offers workshops and counseling aimed at strengthening self-respect. The group’s services include parenting seminars, a youth lecture series and a children’s handbook, “Don’t Worry Mom, I Can Take Care of Myself,” that advises children about dealing with schoolyard bullies, drugs, strangers and other realities of big-city life.

James Lewis, an L.A.’s Best coordinator at South Park who works extensively with children, said students have much to gain from Antoine’s workshop.

“It lets kids know there’s more to life than color,” he said. “I used to be a student here, and I’ve seen the neighborhood go from mostly black to mostly Latino. We have to learn that we’re all in this place together.”

Jacqueline Onofre, a sixth-grader whose parents are from El Salvador, said she realizes now where many problems lie: “We can’t judge a person, because we don’t know what’s on the inside. And what’s on the inside is all that matters, really.”