May 2009 Archives

Kamala Harris blows into Bloom Café on Pico Boulevard, apologizing cheerily for being late. With her natty blue suit, groomed hair, heels and briefcase, she's an anomaly in this hip-casual L.A. eatery, the kind that serves organic coffee and seems to cultivate people with no steady jobs (including, on this day, yours truly). But Harris's energy does belong. Like so many of the vaguely employed who hang out here, she's trim and pretty. Over coffee and a cookie, she talks as energetically as the high-school girl two tables over who's exulting with a friend over having solved a math problem. Of course, Harris hopes to be in the business of problem-solving very soon: She's running for state attorney general. If successful, she'd be the first African-American AG in California history.

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Hard to believe, but my thirtieth high-school reunion is this August--Gardena High School, class of '79. Go Mohicans! (note: the mascot is now the Panthers, 'Mohicans' a casualty of the movement some years back of public schools to scrap team names and images that denigrated Native Americans. I completely understand, but miss the original nonetheless). Such a personal milestone is mind-blowing. But even more stunning is the fact that my GHS experience is turning out to be far and away the most racially integrated experience I've ever had on my home turf. With its almost equal mix of Japanese, white, Latino, black, Pacific Islander (Samoans constituted most of our football team's defensive line) and other Asians like Chinese, Filipino and Korean thrown in for good measure, Gardena High was a bastion of diversity long before the word came into vogue. And it was diverse in an organic way that other schools across Southern California could only imagine. In the late '70s, as the rest of L.A. was waging political battles over busing and court orders to desegregate--let alone integrate--I was going through high school assuming that the very mixed atmosphere at GHS was the norm, or at least a blueprint for the future.

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