For a week, I was a volunteer for Unicamp, a non-profit charity organization at UCLA that allows children of underprivileged families from Los Angeles to enjoy summer camp in the San Bernardino Mountains. Unlike my standard L.A. routine of chilling in air-conditioned boba cafes with wireless internet, Unicamp meant that I didn't shower for a week, sang a lot of camp songs and enjoyed a wonderfully unpolluted view of the stars at night. That, and I was always surrounded by kids half my age.
No matter how much kids are willing to give up MP3 players, video games, make-up or cell phones for a week, you can't expect them to leave everything behind, including ingrained attitudes concerning race and class.
Our group of kids was from West L.A. and consisted mostly of African Americans and Korean Americans. This meant that for the most part, kids tended to cluster amongst color lines with very little intermixing.
When a group of Korean American girls got into a lengthy discussion on the merits of kimchi, an African American girl overhearing this loudly quipped, "What the heck is kimchi?"
Many of my fellow Unicamp volunteers expressed frustration over this. They tried a number of different tactics to alleviate this problem by assigning arranged seating during meal time and trying to separate the ethnic cliques during group activities.
"It's not like they're hostile towards each other or anything," one volunteer said. "They just prefer to be like that, being amongst themselves."
Hearing this discussion brought back a lot of memories. I remember the sense of disillusionment I felt upon entering middle school, when the standard adolescent hierarchy of the cool and uncool kids became more harshly enforced, and not only that, kids wanted to stick with other kids of the same color. White kids with other white kids, Hispanic kids with other Hispanic kids, Asian kids with other Asian kids, et cetera.
It doesn't get that much better in adulthood. After all, I understand this inherent desire to cluster with people who have the same cultural and racial upbringing as I do. Upon entering college, I eagerly threw myself into Asian American classes, AA organizations and essentially enlightening myself on all things AA. I sometimes wonder if I did all this at the expense of alienating my non-AA friends.
I think this is one of the reasons why I decided to join Unicamp this year. It was a nice change from what I was usually used to doing. Forget the model minority myth and the objectification of Japanese women and the lack of AA representation in the media. Regardless of ethnic background or cultural background, we're all here to help out the kids; let's forget this whole race discussion for just one second.
Of course, when you are in Los Angeles, there is no escape from the race discussion. Coming up to camp was a rude awakening of just how much work we have to do to promote interracial harmony so our next generation of children are not so alienated from each other among strictly defined color lines.
Within our Unicamp circle, we keep reminding each other of the starfish story that was told to us the night before we left for camp. The story basically goes like this: a man comes across a child who is spending an entire afternoon picking up starfish from the beach and throwing it back into the ocean. The man retorts that it isn't remotely possible for the child to save all the starfish in the world washed up on the scorched sand. The child throws a starfish into the ocean and replies, "But it made a difference for that one."
I remember one particularly trying night when we were all discouraged, sleep-deprived and overwhelmed. One volunteer told an anecdote of how during a thunderstorm, a Korean-American girl and an African-American girl crawled into a sleeping bag together because they were both scared of the loud noise and comforted each other. We all eagerly soaked up this small incident. One starfish, maybe.
Published August 4, 2006
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