By Jason Ma

As the new school year gets under way, students and administrators in the East Bay hope that they will continue to escape the race-tinged violence that cast a pall over semesters past.

The initial indications are positive. After four consecutive years of fights on the first day of school at Castlemont High in Oakland, Sept. 7 passed without an incident.

Previous inter-ethnic incidents include fights between Pacific Islanders and Latinos at Castlemont High last fall. Asian and Latino gangs scuffled at Richmond High School in the spring, and at Oakland’s Skyline High, a fender-bender quickly escalated into a racial brawl between African Americans and Asian Americans.

The Skyline incident in particular highlighted the snowballing effect that students from at least five East Bay high schools are hoping to prevent through Youth Together, a self-described “multiracial violence prevention and social justice project” to promote mutual understanding. Students at Skyline, Castlemont, Fremont, Berkeley, and Richmond high schools are among those involved.

On Sept. 7, the teens joined with Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, City Council members and several community groups to declare it a “Week of Unity: One Land, One People.” Activities throughout last week included the unveiling of a multi-cultural mural, lunchtime rallies, dances, and a multi-media display.

“We realized this needed to be a multi-racial effort to resolve these problems,” said Margaretta Lin, director of Youth Together. “Every group imaginable seems to be against each other.”

Indeed, despite the stereotype of Asian American students as the object of inter-ethnic violence, Lin said Asian Americans can be perpetrators as well.

“The pattern is not that the Asians are targeted by other groups,” Lin said. “Asians aren’t the victims, necessarily.”

Agannea Ropati, a Samoan American senior at Omega High in Richmond who has been involved in Youth Together for three years, said class presentations and early morning workshops on conflict management has improved the atmosphere.

“[Violence] was a serious problem, but I hardly see any fights now,” she said. “Now they don’t use their fists. They talk about it. They use conflict management.”

After last spring’s tension at Skyline, Youth Together organized mediation sessions between Asian Americans and blacks and helped Castlemont students launch their proposal for a Student Unity Center that they hope will provide peer counseling, mentoring, and mental health services. That’s still on the wish list, though Alameda County Supervisor Mary King pledged last week to house a teen health center in a county-owned building adjacent to Castlemont High.

Such programs are especially needed in low-income neighborhoods like Castlemont’s, Lin said.

“By the time they get to school they’ve been victimized by their own environment,” she said. “Young people come to school ready to explode.”

Advocates said the friction might be due more to the rate of change than to the diversity itself. According to figures from the California Department of Education, Latinos made up 9.8 percent of Skyline’s student population in 1997-’98; APIs made up 25.5 percent. At Castlemont, the figures were nearly reversed: Latinos comprised 26.1 percent of students and APIs 6.4 percent. Yet according to Art Research and Curriculum Associates, a group involved in Youth Together, Skyline High’s Latino population have increased more than 200 percent over the past 10 years; APIs are up 49 percent. Castlemont has six times as many Latinos as in the late ’80s and three times as many APIs.

Lin said perceived disparities in the administration’s treatment toward one group can create widespread resentment. At Castlemont, she said, African American students believed that teachers were favoring Asian Americans by putting large numbers of them in honors classes. Many Asian Americans, meanwhile, believed that administrators let African American students “get away with things” and were unresponsive to Asian American families’ concerns.

At Berkeley High, long touted as a paragon of diversity, overt racial violence is less pronounced than in Oakland -- but there also exists a class distinction that carries over into racial matters, said East Bay Asian Youth Center Executive Director David Kakashiba.

Explaining that affluent white and Asian American students living in the Berkeley Hills tend to get ‘tracked’ into more honors classes than poorer African American and Latino students, Kakashiba said, “There are a lot of clear divisions based on race in terms of socialization.”

For the 1997-’ 98 school year, 91 percent of white Berkeley High graduates met University of California eligibility requirements last year while only 27 percent of blacks did, according to the Education Data Partnership. Sixty- four percent of Asian Pacific Americans met the requirements.

“Berkeley is an integrated district, but at the kid-level people are not performing at similar levels,” Kakashiba added. “People know that in a very guttural sense.”

Kakashiba’s group, also a Youth Together participant, is working on a campaign to get the Berkeley School District to provide students with more personal attention in order to correct academic disparities.

Lin added that schools’ curriculums are not promoting racial harmony either, saying there are few ethnic studies programs at schools to help students understand the histories of their classmates. Without ethnic studies, she said, students will only react to media-derived images of different cultures rather than a genuine understanding of them.

“People haven’t learned about the histories of the kids they’re sitting next to,” Lin said. “What they’re going off of are the stereotypes.”