The irony in race relations in California is that the situation is the reverse of what it was in the 1960s. Whereas the public realm once offered the way out for racial and ethnic hostilities in private life, today racial frictions are greatest in the public life. The difference suggests that the deepest faultline of all in the Golden State is not racial or ethnic but public versus private. Sandy Close is executive editor of Pacific News Service. This essay appears in a longer form in the September 18 issue of The Nation.

SAN FRANCISCO -- I am a journalist whose main sources are young people -- street hustlers, vampire kids, pimps, cyberpunks, undocumented migrants, born-again Christians, homeless skinheads whose favorite food, by the way, is burritos. My sources are people the ancient Greeks called "idiots" -- people without a public life. But I have come to see them as the people we as a culture are becoming. They have more to tell me about our future than I have to tell them. So you will understand from the outset why I'm preoccupied with the idea of borders and of people crossing borders, and why I believe the great faultline in California to be crossed is not racial or ethnic but public versus private.

Across the political spectrum, the key concern anywhere you go these days in public California is this: EVERYTHING IS FALLING APART! I call it "the chaos view." Robert Kaplan, in his cover story for the Atlantic last year, a cover story faxed to virtually every CEO in the country, used the bloodbath in Mogadishu as a metaphor for what he called "the coming anarchy." Seen in this context, initiatives to end affirmative action, clamp the lid on immigrants, lock up one out of every two young black men in the state, are fingers in the dike -- the last gasp of a besieged white minority.

What are they, what are we in public California, so afraid of? The fears say more about ourselves than what's out there.

The irony in race relations today is that the situation is the exact reverse of what it was in the 1960s. In the 60s it was the public realm that offered the redemptive hope -- that public policy that would bridge the gaps between black and white America. Race relations in private life were non existent or abysmal.

Today it's the public realm where racial frictions are greatest, where distrust is most pervasive. The fight over affirmative action is nothing if not a struggle between haves and nearly-haves over who'll get access to a shrinking share of government entitlements. At the level of private life, people are making accommodations on a day to day level -- as UCLA demographer David Hayes Bautista and his colleague Gregory Rodriguez have observed going door-to-door in the once-black and now increasingly-Latino East and South Central Los Angeles neighborhoods. Living next to neighbors you hate and who hate you is, after all, not very tenable.

And that's the point. For all the racial and ethnic tensions on the ground (almost one out of two blacks in LA voted yes on Proposition 187 to stop immigrants from moving in, living 14 to a room, and taking over their neighbors' houses), for all the tensions on the street and in the high school corridor, there is also a rubbing of elbows and shoulders, a melting down of borders. "You don't have to like each other to change each other," author Richard Rodriguez has observed. At the height of black-white racial conflicts in the 1960s, whites fervently wanted to have soul, Aretha Franklin style. Today, a kid I know in Oakland whose mother is Mexican and whose father is black calls herself "Blaxican." Sonoma State University demographer Larry Shinegawa has estimated that as many as 20 percent of all marriages in California cross racial and ethnic lines.

Yes, racial and ethnic frictions are there -- ask any high school student. But they're insignificant compared with the frictions one finds in one's own family. The deepest anger of the skinhead, the anger of militia members, is not at blacks or immigrants. It's at the white political class, the white figure of authority, one's father or mother, for abandoning them. They have wound up as alones in America at a time when the worst position to be in is an alone. Just look at the homeless man on any street corner. In the private realm, the central fact of life is that personal relationships are in shambles. True dispossession has less to do with the amount of money you have than with having no social structure left to hang on to.

Every month my colleagues and I meet kids of all races and ethnicities at Bay Area high schools. The question I always ask them is this: what makes it hard for you to get to sleep at night, what are you afraid of? Invariably, their answers reveal a sense that the world is out of their control and that they are alone in it. Last month eight kids described in vivid detail the moment at which their dad, or mom, left home for good. Everything wrong in their lives they traced to that moment.

If the driving force in public life is fear of the unknown that calls for bolting down the hatches, in private life the strongest impulse is to reach out and touch somebody. The key organizing impulse in a world of alones is to bond, and invariably religion serves this purpose far more effectively than politics. A few weeks ago, when the film "Panther" opened in Oakland, I visited the building that once housed the Black Panther Party school but is now home to the Acts Full Gospel Church. In the early 1970s, the school boasted 300 students. Today, the Acts Full Gospel Church claims 4000 parishioners, forty percent of them former male drug or alcohol abusers. In San Quentin today, a Muslim imam says there are conversions to orthodox Islam every week.

As the public-versus-private gap grows, so does fear among those in the public sphere of newcomer California. My worry is that as this fear deepens, time will run out before the energies shaping California from below can play themselves out. If you lock up 40 percent of black males in California, or 40 percent of Latino males, or 40 percent of white males, and offer them nothing better than a third strike for their future, you will produce at the least a series of explosions: a generation not of Panthers fighting back but of Zebras conducting race war by assassination.

What can be done?

The most pressing responsibility for those in public life is to restore a sense of inclusion to those on the other side of the public-private gap. Policy can't rebuild the ravaged social fabric but it can let people -- especially young people now on the margins -- know that what they do when they get up in the morning matters to the civic life profoundly. Right now, the message is the opposite. California is spending more money to lock people up than to educate them. But for every kid locked up for life under the three strikes law, nine others will be out there on the street beyond the law's reach. On the other hand, for every kid who parents another kid, who takes responsibility for the other kid, the ripple out effects are astounding.

There is a message of inclusion the public realm can send and it's this: make 1996 the year of the first grade. Make 1997 the year of the second grade. And so on. Turn primary education into the state's number one priority. As the state fronting on East Asia, California may actually learn from osmosis what the Little Tigers have already known: this is the most effective way to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Ultimately, it is the only way to traverse the public-private fault line.