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News Journal Special Report: Divided by Race ... United by Reason

Published Sunday, October 4, 1998
Copyright 1998 The Pensacola News Journal. All rights reserved

Paths to understanding

By Heidi Hall, News Journal Staff Writer

A T-shirt popular a few years ago screamed, "It's a black thing. You wouldn't understand." But sometimes it's not just a black thing. It's a Korean thing. Or a Mexican thing. Or an Armenian thing. And Renford Reese wants to overcome all those things, making a community where people come to an understanding of each other. That's why he developed a program that has taught 80,000 kids in 17 Los Angeles area schools the basics of communication with people of other cultures.

Reese, a professor of political science at California Polytechnic University, was in a doctoral program at the University of Southern California in March 1991. That month, a black teen-ager named Latasha Harlins walked into a south-central Los Angeles convenience store and got into an argument over a container of orange juice that the Korean clerk thought Harlins was stealing. As Harlins tried to leave the store, the clerk shot her in the back.

"I thought, 'There's got to be a way for us to defuse a situation like that before it escalates into this kind of violence,' " Reese said. "What if this lady had walked into the store and greeted the clerk in Korean? Would the same scenario have taken place?"
Two years later, he developed the Colorful Flags language program. Officials in each school district determine the five most prominent non-English speaking groups in the district, then all students learn basic communication in those all those languages.
The language program could help build unity here, Reese said. "If you really want to expose your students to the world, one way is through this program," he said. "If you teach them, they don't have any boundaries, they don't have inhibitions. The kids will ultimately be citizens dispersed throughout Florida."

Richard Mancini, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the Santa Rosa County School District, said schools in his district already exposes children to other cultures. Bagdad Elementary, for example, based a large part of its curriculum last year on studying the art, food, clothing and music of other countries.

Navarre High School teaches lessons in tolerance using materials from the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. He said teachers can pick helpful programs to use in their classrooms, including ones like Colorful Flags.