Beyond Tolerance: Moving Ahead Together
A Community-wide Conference Organized by the Santa Barbara School Districts
June 28, 1997
Kari Vang, Panel Member
Dos Pueblos High School Principal’s Advisory Committee Students
First, I have to say that I don’t have to say this anymore because I’ve graduated and I’ve gotten my grades already but I really liked my Dos Pueblos High experience. I really felt that I could be who I am and without being a pest or a tease or whatever.
We’ve been meeting once every three to four weeks during the course of the year and some of the ideas we discussed about our campus and, though we don’t see overt racism around campus, there is a problem with a lack of sensitivity and people being unaware about each other. They’re not understanding that when they say something, when they make their jokes or something like that they’re hurting someone. We know that these views develop as we grow up. We hear one way or the other and people laugh and they make fun and they fight and things like that and it seems like their respect has just gone down for differences and whatever it is.
Also, most teachers are very respectful of their students but some also lack sensitivity. Some are afraid to talk about racism and they think it may be offensive to want to talk about a different topic and they’d also prefer to just stick to the curriculum and teach what the books say instead of teaching little life lessons or whatever.
And also our curriculum, our world history and American history classes are okay, but they don’t really get to go into their differences or go into detail about things that happened with race or cultures or ethnicities – things like that. We never get that far. And so, even though some people will believe that having classes like Chicano studies, Black studies, is racist because it encourages segregation, well, our history classes can’t teach it, [so] who else is going to do it?
Also, we came up with some ideas that might help the situation, for example, to have semester long courses in Black history, Chicano history, Asian history. That stuff just goes ignored pretty much in our school and you kind of learn it as you go, there’s no textbook for it. Also having special guest speakers; we had an assembly this year with Paso Robles which was really good. We need more materials promoting diversity. Also we feel that we can’t really change the way people think by the time they’re graduating or they’re late in high school, and we think that if you’re going to change people’s values you’re gonna do it while they’re young.
And so we as high school students can be part of the solution by acting as role models, like in the DARE program. You have high school students going into 5th and 6th grade classes and it’s for DARE but we talk more about what high school is all about; you know, what’s cool, what’s not. Maybe if we did that with promoting diversity – "it is the cool thing and racism is not the cool thing" – then I think we’d reach a lot more kids. And junior high as well.
We, as high school students, need adult role models and people in college that we’re going to follow that say, "Racism is not the cool thing. Definitely diversity all the way." We also need to teach students what stereotypes are. What are the misconceptions, and how do we stay away from them? This does hurt people.
I’m still getting that when people call people Oriental, it’s [about] rugs and food, not people. We need to bring out the good side of everybody instead of looking to the bad, looking to what conforms people together. The different things that we have. It makes us all different and beautiful and so I think we need to promote that. We need to be willing to say, "Hey, that’s not a good thing that you just did or you just said." We’ve got to be able to stand out and tell our peers and tell our community what is not acceptable, what is hurtful.