Five Oakland students pushed a campaign to incorporate ethnic studies into high schools during a UC Berkeley forum commemorating a student strike that 30 years ago helped bring ethnic studies to that institution.

The students, from Asian Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership, said they would target the Oakland Unified School District, the state’s sixth largest. Nearly nine of 10 students belongs to a minority group: 51 percent are African American, 22.9 percent of whom are Latino, and 18.5 percent of whom are Asian American.

“This diversity is what makes this community so beautiful and rich,” said panelist Jerry Yip. He added, however, that differences can also be the “root of tension, misunderstanding and violence,” which occurs when “our society fails to educate our youth about each individuals heritage.”

Since beginning the campaign this summer, AYPAL has joined with other youth organizations, including the Kids First Coalition (KFC) and Freedom in Re-education (FIRE). They want decisions about curriculum reform to be made by committees of youths, parents, and professors of ethnic studies and other experts in the field, and they hope college interns will serve as consultants and aides in ethnic studies courses.

Last year, the district began requiring freshmen to take a multicultural-studies class, but it includes a broad array of topics, from geography to how to write a report and make a presentation. “This class is a blend of all these subjects,” said panelist and Skyline High sophomore Isabel Chon. “It is not close to what we want for an ethnic studies class.”

Chon said the first step is to reform the course, a goal the youth advocacy group hopes to achieve by 2002. To that end, the group has conducted surveys and found support among many students and teachers, and it has spoken to members of the school board, none of whom have yet committed to the campaign.

Joe Anolin, a Filipino American who served as a youth panelist at the Berkeley confab, said training teachers would be critical to success. “We can’t just say, ‘OK, you teachers, we got this approval from the school board, now teach it’ and then they don’t know anything about it. That’s stupid.”

Teens like him, he said, seek a curriculum in which students can “learn about our culture, rather than how we interacted with Europe.” The course, he added, should focus not only on colonialism but also on economics and race—and it should be about understanding, not race-baiting. “Not all white people were oppressors; some were oppressed like the Irish and the Scottish. We want to learn together.”

Opression, he said, “was not just European groups, but also Japan and Spain and other groups. We need to study how their exploits affected us, our ancestors and how it relates to us today.”

John Kim of AYPAL and the Korean Community Center of the East Bay believe ethnic studies courses will put in place a “system of mediation in Oakland schools,” which, he said, are fragmented by racial tension. “Racial violence is probably the most pressing issue for students in Oakland.”

In January, an off-campus fight between an Asian American and an African American student escalated into race-related attacks at Skyline High School. Because the Asian American had reportedly wielded a crowbar, the black student’s friends retaliated by assaulting a number of other Asian Americans, including a ninth-grade girl who punched in the stomach, according to Kim. Many students were afraid to go back to school. Asian Americans said they felt threatened, and many blacks worried that the Asian Americans would use guns.

Society treats Asian Americans as model minorities, but that label does not apply to the majority of Asians,” Yip said. “First-generation offspring living in America, particularly Oakland, are ignored because society is lead to believe Asians can fend for themselves. Such stereotyping is the result of not knowing the truth about other ethnic groups.”