City Lights: Cross-cultural director’s success means no headlines
Monday morning, I sat in the office of a man who might have already prevented the next Ferguson.
Might.
That’s a tantalizing word, but as hard to dismiss as it is to prove. Kevin Huie, the director of the Cross-Cultural Center at UC Irvine, isn’t what you’d call the militant type. He spends long hours in his office every year working toward a few basic goals: tolerance among campus ethnic groups, empathy for the less fortunate, understanding among students of different faiths.
Huie may not have a Rosa Parks moment on his resume, but he doesn’t think much in terms of moments. His job, to him, is an ongoing process, one in which forums and film screenings and volunteer opportunities gradually forge an enlightened environment. Thousands of people, by now, have passed through the Cross-Cultural Center’s programs, and what they’ve truly taken from the experience may never show up on CNN.
This summer — thanks in part to CNN and other 24-hour media — American tolerance has been on trial again. After the high-profile cases of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the national reaction is starting to feel like a set of choreographed steps.
Al Sharpton protests. Larry Elder gives the shooter the benefit of the doubt. Op-eds hold forth about the dangers of being a black pedestrian and the perils of police work. Advocates bristle on both sides of the gun-control debate. The issue fades, unresolved, and then another front-page story ignites it again.
Listening to all the divergent views, it’s hard not to nod yes to each one. Yes, the legacy of Jim Crow has not disappeared. Yes, police officers have to make snap decisions. Yes, black-on-black violence is a significant problem. Yes, racial profiling takes place. But whatever greater implications we may draw from the Martin or Brown cases, the simple fact is that neither would have happened if one person, or perhaps two people, had acted differently at a particular moment.
We will likely never know the full story of either case; footage of the altercations doesn’t appear to exist. But it is tempting — and maddening — to try to determine cause and effect.
If George Zimmerman had had one more friendly encounter with a black teenager, would he have hesitated before calling the police on Martin? If Brown and Officer Darren Wilson had regarded each other differently when they first made eye contact, would their encounter have passed without incident? Absent a segregated bus to boycott, trying to save the next potential Michael Brown can feel like a hopeless, speculative pursuit.
All of which is not to say that it can’t be done — or that it hasn’t been done many times. And that’s the work that Huie and his colleagues commit themselves to, day in and day out, without much fanfare beyond Ring Road.
This year, there may be a little more fanfare than usual. The center plans to celebrate its 40th birthday on Oct. 16 with a mural showcase, musical performances and cultural workshops. Alumni from the center’s umbrella organizations will share memories, and Joseph White, a UCI professor emeritus and psychologist, will give remarks. The center, which makes its headquarters in a two-story building near the Irvine Barclay Theatre, has other commemorative events scheduled throughout the coming year.
Otherwise, it will be down to business. Once again, the center will host dialogues between international and domestic students and lead workshops on social justice. During spring break, it will organize the annual Alternative Break, in which students perform community service. The Summer Multicultural Leadership Institute, another annual offering, will train up to 50 first-year students in free speech, conflict resolution and more.
All very laudable. But can an idea take root at UCI and blossom in Ferguson or Sanford? For a possible answer to that question, I arranged a meeting with Huie in his second-floor office overlooking UCI’s grounds.
A Chicago native, Huie is more than an appropriate fit to oversee a cross-cultural center; he described his ethnic heritage as “Chinese-Filipino-Spanish-Irish-English-French-German-Hawaiian.” With his short hair and slightly protruding ears, he bears a resemblance to Barack Obama. Like the president, he worked years ago as an activist in the Windy City, serving as a consultant and diversity trainer for public schools and other institutions.
Huie doesn’t consider racial tension to be an overt problem at UCI, but he knows his way around cultural differences — which can be as major as the recent Muslim Student Union dustup or as minor as a freshman roommate squabble over explicit music on the stereo.
And he sees plenty of moments of realization. When the center hosted a screening of the film “Fruitvale Station,” which depicts the 2009 shooting death of a black man by Bay Area Rapid Transit police, some spectators admitted afterward that they hadn’t even heard of the incident.
Someday those spectators may be officers themselves. They may be teachers or other people in power. They may simply be bystanders, whose actions can make a difference as much as anyone else’s. At a key moment, will a memory of “Fruitvale Station” come into play, even subconsciously?
“I think that that’s one of the hardest things to measure — the amount of sensitivity that you can build going to a workshop or watching a film,” Huie said. “I mean, how can you measure that? Can you observe the actions, the choices that someone makes out on the street, on Ring Road? That’s very unlikely.”
Maybe so. Cause and effect is always tough. But the next time you pick up a newspaper without a story of another Trayvon Martin in it, the credit for nothing happening may belong to someone like Huie.
MICHAEL MILLER is the features editor for Times Community News in Orange County. He can be reached at michael.miller@latimes.com or (714) 966-4617.