Shades of Difference

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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."