In Los Angeles county, where "minorities" now make up two-thirds of the population, governmental policies that were originally designed to integrate non-whites into mainstream society have now begun to protect the region's newest minority, Anglo Americans. PNS contributing editor Gregory Rodriguez looks at the effort to keep one elementary school's faculty "integrated." Rodriguez is co-author with David Hayes Bautista of a forthcoming book on California's post-minority culture.

LOS ANGELES -- "I don't like being allowed to keep my job just because I'm white," complains Colleen Jensen, a teacher at Los Angeles' Hamasaki elementary school.

At Hamasaki and indeed throughout Southern California, where changing demographics are setting racial politics on their head, many like Jensen are wondering whether decades-old policies to ensure racial integration and equality have outlasted their usefulness.

Late last spring the Los Angeles Unified School District displaced two experienced African American teachers and a Japanese American at Hamasaki to help ensure it would not lose its required percentage of "minority" teachers. In this case the new minority is Anglo American.

The district was implementing little-known integration guidelines adopted in 1976 as part of an overall school desegregation plan. The guidelines recommend that no more than 70 percent of a teaching staff should be either white or "combined minority." Originally imposed to make room for non-white teachers in what was then an overwhelmingly white district faculty, today the policy is being used to ensure white participation in an increasingly non-white school district.

The staff changes at Hamasaki have shaken the largely-minority staff's belief in racial policies that are beginning to cut both ways. (The school had been designated as "overly minoritized.") But it has also left white teachers feeling the mixed blessing of government largesse, a sensation many minorities have been experiencing for years.

Feeling guilty and humiliated over her good fortune, Colleen Jensen at one point seriously considered resigning to spare the more experienced teachers their jobs. Bill Savage, a displaced African American instructor with nine years seniority, says he finds it ironic that another white teacher who once vehemently argued against racial quotas retained her job because of one.

The rule makes sense in his head but its implementation doesn't sit well in his heart, Savage says. Although one of the few faculty members who supported the policy, he nonetheless admits that it infused racial friction into what had been a tight knit, highly integrated staff.

"The policy tore apart an already well mixed staff of Asian, Latino, black and white teachers to satisfy someone's ethnic ratios," agrees Marie Rodriguez de Martino, a pre-K teacher in the bilingual program. Rodriguez predicts "the kids are going to suffer because we let go experienced teachers in order to keep novices."

Wendy Hamamoto, a young Japanese American teacher who was displaced and has since found another position in the district, was more fervent in her opposition. "It's terrible. I lost my job because I'm the wrong color," she says. "I was every angry because I had never been told I couldn't do anything because of my race."

Dr. Michael Acosta, an administrator in the district's personnel department, defends the policy on the grounds that without it many schools would revert to the one-race teaching staffs the district knew in the 1970s. Critics point out, however, that Hamasaki was in no way in danger of becoming a one-race school. It was on the verge of having an over 70 percent "combined minority" teaching staff in a county that is 65 percent minority and growing.

What further disturbs many Hamasaki faculty is the fact that white teachers are being protected from displacement in a district where they are greatly over-represented. The district's current ratio of white to non-white teachers is nearly inversely proportionate to the ratio of whites to non-whites in the population at large. LAUSD's continuing use of a policy that lumps all "minorities" together as if they were one group ensures that white teachers will, as the faculty continues to diversify, increasingly become beneficiaries of the teacher integration guidelines.

Near the close of the past school year, eleven-year-old Alondra Ocampo, a student in Wendy Hamamoto's sixth grade class, got wind of the school's controversy after hearing adult gossip in the main office. When the teacher announced she had to leave Hamasaki, Alondra asked her if it was because her skin was the wrong color. "We try to teach these kids that the color of one's skin doesn't matter," says Hamamoto, "but yet the district has these policies in effect that says it does."

In the past year Hamamoto taught her students stories and songs emphasizing the children's ability to go and do whatever they wished with their lives regardless of their ethnicity. She worries now that other students like Alondra in the 632,000 student, 80 percent non-white district are catching on to the adult drama unfolding around them and getting a real life lesson in racial politics nobody wants them to learn.