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Star promotes cultural tolerance

By Sharon Christersen, On-line Forty-Niner
April 20,1998

Walking through the glass doors marked "Multicultural Center," on the Cal State Long Beach campus, one enters a drab hallway. The walls are bare, with one small bulletin board and three doors there.
 
Through one of these doors is an office that seems warm and cluttered in comparison to the hallway.
 
Posters and other signs cover every inch of wall space. On a large conference table in the middle of the room lie stacks of fliers, for one event or another.
 
In the back corner of the room is a door, also covered in posters, which leads to another office.
 
The walls of this office are similarly cluttered with photos, ads for lectures and a photocopy of a poem written in Spanish.
 
Thrown over the back of the sofa in this office are T-shirts, one of which reads, "Celebrate Diversity!"
 
"The STAR curriculum ... is now resonant to an inclusiveness
it never had before."
- James Sauceda,
director, Multicultural Center
 
This is the office of James Sauceda, speech communication professor at CSULB and founding director of the Multicultural Center on campus.
 
Sauceda is also involved in a cultural-awareness program called Students Talk About Race.
 
STAR trains college students from local campuses to go to nearby middle and high schools and present the STAR curriculum by means of open discussions.
 
As the trainer for STAR, Sauceda is co-author of the current curriculum and leads the program's six-hour training sessions.
 
These sessions consist mainly of teaching the students facilitation skills, according to Cathy Buranahirun, a STAR facilitator and UCLA psychology major.
 
As a Chicano growing up in mainly black Compton, Sauceda said he found common ground in the "outsideredness" expressed in the writings of John Keats and Emily Dickinson.
 
Sauceda said reading their works "helped to bridge certain ways of looking at the world," and left him in awe that these poets of such different backgrounds from his own could speak so directly to him.
 
As director of the Multicultural Center, Sauceda's own philosophy of inclusion of all races reflects these early experiences.
 
Also, the STAR curriculum which Sauceda recently co-authored is "now resonant to an inclusiveness it never had before," he said.
 
The STAR program began in 1990 in North Carolina as a project of People For the American Way, or PFAW. The group was founded in 1980 to fight the political agenda of the religious right.
 
PFAW is a nonpartisan organization with 300,000 members.
 
According to its web site, PFAW works through lobbying, education, organizing, and legal advocacy to engage more Americans in civic and political action, to defend and strengthen vital institutions like public education and public broadcasting and to protect individual and religious liberty.
 
After the North Carolina program was absorbed into the state school system, PFAW decided to make Southern California a model for STAR, says Joseph McKenna, Ph.D., professor of world religion and philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and director of STAR's Los Angeles program since 1995.
 
According to Sauceda, PFAW contacted the CSULB Multicultural Center in 1992 to begin the STAR program in Los Angeles. The program was begun here "in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots," according to PFAW's web site, although Sauceda says the program is a reaction to a specific problem. STAR's goal is not to promote harmony among the races which, Sauceda says, "is denial of difference."
 
STAR sets out, through eight hours of discussion over eight weeks, to encourage the students to realize their own perceptions of others and to change them from intolerance to tolerance and, finally, to a celebration of the cultural diversity around them. But does it work?
 
The facilitators vital to this process are mainly "sociology, psychology and education majors" at local universities, says Buranahirun. McKenna says that most of the college volunteers who participate "are the kind you want."
 
As STAR is strictly a volunteer program, there is a "self-selection" for the students who are willing to donate six hours of a Saturday to the training and one hour a week for eight weeks to the students.
 
McKenna also says that there is no certain type of school chosen to participate. He says that as the director, he sends information on STAR to principals, counselors and teachers at middle and high schools within a four-to-five-mile radius of participating colleges. This, he says, makes STAR more of a neighborhood program. But does it have a lasting effect?
 
No statistical evidence can be found to determine the long-term effects, if any, of STAR. Currently, says McKenna, the Mott Foundation, based on the East Coast, is sponsoring a study by social psychologists from Cal State Northridge to ascertain any results of STAR.
 
According to McKenna, the evidence of its success has been anecdotal but positive. McKenna says, "we feel it's pretty successful." He estimates that nearly all of the participants speak highly of it. McKenna also points out that some teachers have been "coming back for years" to participate.
 
One such teacher is Cliff Kusaba. A teacher at Long Beach's Jefferson Middle School, Kusaba has participated in STAR since its introduction. He says that his school has an ethnic mix of mostly Latino, Cambodian, and black. But Kusaba calls Jefferson a "neighborhood school," meaning that all the students live in the area, a situation which decreases racial tensions on the whole. As a result of the STAR program, though, Kusaba says that the students realize the differences in each other's backgrounds. He says, "as they're going through it, (students) like when the facilitators come in."
 
Long Beach's Washington Middle School was identified as a problem school for gang activity and receuved a state grant known as the Gang Violence Suppression Grant. This grant, given in 1992, provided funding, allowing local police to closely monitor such schools and identify and arrest suspected gang members.
 
Cpl. Jose Yarruhs, a 12-year veteran of the Long Beach Police Department, has spent 18 months at Washington, dealing with their gang problems and says that much of the problems of these schools are not race related so much as they are gang related.
 
Most of the tagging and fighting that goes on is caused by "a small number of kids," Yarruhs says. He says that despite rare occasions of racial mixing within gangs, the gang members themselves are "incredibly ignorant" when it comes to seeing beyond race.
 
According to Yarruhs, when it comes to gang retaliation, for example when looking for payback for a drive-by shooting, the kids can't see that "no race did this to you, it was one person." However, he says that at Franklin Middle School, another school he monitors, he has seen "all the races having a good time (together)"
 
Yarruhs insists that the main problem for kids is "not race, it's just gangs."
Nedra Miller, a math and science teacher at Washington is about to participate in STAR for the first time. As the first participant at her school, Miller agrees with Yarruhs that "most of (the problems) come from ignorance," although she says that it's ignorance of other cultures causing the tensions. She hopes that STAR will open up a dialogue with the kids and hopes that as a result they will be able to talk to each other. She says, "it certainly can't hurt." Yarruhs, however, has his doubts. "As long as people are talking, it's good," he said.