In San Francisco -- with its highly diverse student population -- a battle has erupted over a school board proposal to require that up to seventy percent of the curriculum consist of works by non-white authors. What do young teachers and youth workers on the front lines of the new California majority think of the proposal? This is the second of three articles today by contributors to Brave New Word, a Pacific News Service-based coalition of writers in their twenties. Josh Parr is editor of Revolutionary Judo and an editor at YO! (Youth Outlook), a newspaper by and about young people produced by Pacific News Service. SECOND OF THREE ARTICLES.

Living in a world in which you are, like your stories, peripheral, means having no sense of home. Integrating stories of non-white writers into the public school curriculum is an attempt to provide students with glimpses of home inside the classroom.

Calculated by demographers as comprising between zero and .5 percent of the San Francisco population, no group is more implicated in an effort to include "minorities" in the curriculum than Native Americans.

But a word of caution. At the Native American Charter school in Oakland where I taught, my students often said, "Man, I'm sick of being taught what it means to be Indian." Through cultivating a traditional garden or sitting in talk circles, the teachers tried to instill a knowledge of culture, a sense of history, in their students. But the students identified more with Tupac and Little Kim than Black Elk and Joy Harjo. Encouraged to make murals in the garden, the students wanted to spray-paint their names across the fence.

Another group of young Native Americans I spoke with recently who attend various public schools saw things differently.

"We always learn about African American history," said one young woman, holding up Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon." "But we never hear our own stories." As the facilitator of many discussions about representation and racial identity among multicultural youth, this is a line I've heard repeatedly. America is so stuck on the black/white dichotomy of the 1960s that any discussion of representation or equity becomes, almost by default, a conversation about those two groups.

I remember a particular argument between two young men, one black and the other Native American.

"There has never been anything to compare to 400 years of slavery!" said the black man.

"You saying that genocide don't mean anything?" challenged the Native man.

The goal of this argument was to win the title of "Most Righteously Pissed Off at Whitey," and receive all the imaginary benefits thereof: scholarships, pages in the history books, welfare, 40 acres and a mule, whatever. It's a leftover idea from the days when white liberal zeal pushed forward an affirmative action agenda. Instead of eyeing a common enemy, the "oppressed" wind up battling each other.

If minorities begin squabbling over space on the reading list, this will reduce literature to just another footnote in the identity politics debate. Inclusion in the curriculum becomes an issue of clout. The small carrot of inclusion makes the Native American girl resent the black author. As always, the so-called gifts of the system divide people of color as they struggle to take care of their own.

Wanting "our stories" present is natural. Joining the national imagination sparks our own. We gain a sense of belonging, a feeling of power. And a diverse reading list is without a doubt better than a straight shot of vanilla. But the bottom line is that these over-hyped debates about representation turn "minority" groups against each other, leaving us, once again, competing over scraps.