UCI’s Black Students Feel Isolated on White Campus

‘I felt so intimidated because there are so few of us. I felt like people kept looking at me as if I was a big threat.’

--Student Moleto Smith

Campus police at UC Irvine have stopped Kenneth Kelly and asked him for identification so often, he says, that he knows some of them by name.

The 21-year-old UCI senior says he recognized the uniformed officer who last questioned him: “He was the first officer who stopped me in my sophomore year . . . now I even call him by his first name.”

Paul Johnson, a 20-year-old junior at UCI, attended a writing class as a freshman in which students discussed an autobiography written by an author raised in Harlem. Johnson fielded questions from several classmates who wanted him to recommend more books by the author and to describe Harlem.

Like Kelly, Johnson is black. He has never been to Harlem.

3% of Students

“I guess they figure I could give more insight because I’m black,” Johnson said. “They asked me to explain Harlem, and I told them I couldn’t because I’m from L.A.”

Kelly and Johnson are two of about 400 black students at UC Irvine, a number that accounts for less than 3% of the university’s total enrollment of more than 14,000. Like other minority students there, they sought out UCI because of its reputation for academic quality, and they say they have not been disappointed on that score.

What did catch them unaware, however, was the isolation they feel in the sea of white faces. While Kelly, Johnson and other black UCI students interviewed by The Times said overt racial discrimination is rare on the Irvine campus, all agreed that they have been troubled to one degree or another by a pervasive sense of alienation from the student body at large.

‘Hostile Environment

They encounter racial stereotypes at every turn, they say, and frequently are stopped by campus police because their very presence rouses suspicion.

Moleto Smith, a 23-year-old senior, said he felt like a “black intruder” during his freshman year at UCI.

“I felt so intimidated because there are so few of us,” Smith said. “I felt like people kept looking at me as if I was a big threat.”

Black faculty members agree. Fillmore Freeman, who teaches in the university’s chemistry department, calls UCI a “hostile environment” for black students because there are so few of them.

“No administrator is surprised that black students are feeling uncomfortable,” Freeman said.

Nor does the size of the black student body on campus appear to be on the verge of any dramatic growth. UCI administrators say they have been recruiting black students heavily, but they contend that those efforts have been less successful than they would like because University of California applicants tend to choose the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses over Irvine.

“Orange County is a completely new environment for many black students,” said Manuel Gomez, director of UCI’s Educational Opportunity Program, which recruits minority students.

Figures from the last federal census, in 1980, show that the number of black residents in Orange County totaled 25,285, barely more than 1% of the overall county population of about 2 million.

While UCI administrators want the minority enrollment numbers to be higher, Gomez said, “we are located in an area that is not necessarily the first choice of blacks and Chicanos. Many black and Chicano students seek an environment that is highly urban, an environment that UCI doesn’t have.”

The total number of black students at all nine University of California campuses is only 5,964.

“We would like the figures to be higher,” said Carla Ferri, University of California coordinator of admissions. “But a variety of problems, such as society, economics, lack of high school preparation keep the black enrollment figures down.”

Recruiting Programs

In an attempt to attract more black students, UCI has established recruiting programs in Los Angeles high schools providing information about the academic qualities of the campus and advising students on what high school courses are required for acceptance, Gomez said. Recruiters also contact community leaders to reach parents of prospective students.

But Black Faculty and Staff Assn. members say UCI administrators do not try hard enough to recruit black students or faculty members, and have not responded to their recommendations to hire blacks for key recruiting positions and to establish more multicultural courses.

“Our recommendations to the administration concerning the recruiting of black students and faculty are rejected and are not acted upon,” said Aliko Songolo of the school’s French department.

Just as there was a consensus among black students interviewed by The Times that UCI is a good academic institution, there also was general agreement that much of the student body is culturally naive about blacks and that many students accept racial stereotypes as fact.

“People come up to me and ask me why do blacks do this and that,” Moleto Smith said. “Many times they are genuinely sincere and non-sarcastic.”

But sometimes the naivete can become insulting.

Said Byron Kelley, a 22-year-old senior and co-president of the Black Student Union: “One time in my sophomore year, a person said to me, ‘We’re friends. Can you explain to me why all the blacks in the inner city do not appreciate the help they get?’ And he really expected an answer. I couldn’t believe him. That’s incredibly ignorant.”

Stared at on Campus

Patrice Holyfield, a 20-year-old junior, said she is frequently stared at on campus because she is black.

“I would be walking with a friend, and people would just turn around and stare,” Holyfield said. “It’s like all the eyes are on me.”

Because the city of Irvine has a very small black population, students who come from that community are not likely to have a lot of experience with blacks in general, said Robert Erickson, 23, a member of Associated Students of UCI, the campus student government.

Student government executive vice-president Michelle Meissner, 21, agreed.

“It is worse for a black student because he is not seen as part of the ‘norm.’ The pressure for black students would be greater here than in Berkeley or in UCLA,” said Meissner, who is white.

Black students may also be alienating themselves by associating only with other blacks and socializing only in the university’s Cross Cultural Center, where most of the minority organizations are housed, said Erickson, who also is white.

“The black students try to maintain a sense of identity in the Cross Cultural Center,” Erickson said. “But in a sense, a majority of them segregate themselves voluntarily. They haven’t ventured out. It’s important that they feel comfortable. But that’s a drawback, too.”

Feel Comfortable

Black students say the Cross Cultural Center is one of the few places on campus where they can really feel comfortable.

“When I first came here I needed to find a niche, and I found it at the Cross Cultural Center. . . . It is like a University Center. It was a place to feel comfortable and to feel at home,” Moleto Smith said.

On occasion, UCI instructors have treated black students differently from others in the classroom and complaints have been filed in the Affirmative Action office, said Carla Espinoza, assistant vice chancellor of the Affirmative Action program at UCI. Espinoza’s office oversees the campus’s policy against discrimination.

When students complain, an affirmative action representative talks to the faculty member, she said, and there is an attempt to alter behavior if that appears necessary.

Cross-Cultural Festivals

The university has tried to counter stereotypical views of minorities by sponsoring cross-cultural festivals and an annual Martin Luther King Jr. educational symposium focusing on civil rights, said Horace Mitchell, vice-chancellor of student affairs.

However, black students say stereotypes are hard to erase and they are sometimes treated differently because of their race by students and faculty members, despite the university’s efforts. Several members of the Black Faculty and Staff Assn. say the administration is not helping black students feel comfortable on the campus and should offer more required classes about nonwhites to educate all students.

There have been several complaints about campus police stopping black students for questioning because of their color, Espinoza said.

Byron Kelley said he was a sophomore when campus police stopped him with several friends outside a 24-hour restaurant on campus at about 3 a.m. They had stopped for a snack after a late-night dance, Kelley said, and as they parked, two campus police cars pulled in to block their car.

“They hit us with the upper beams of their headlights, and it looked like daylight,” Kelley said. “It was very humiliating. They asked for identification from all of us and asked us what we were doing there. Then one of them said, ‘You guys shouldn’t be up so late.’ ”

Look Suspicious

Campus police stop only people who look suspicious and who do not look as though they belong on campus, said Campus Police Chief Michael Michell, who is in charge of the 21-member UCI force.

“Black students are not stopped on the campus just because they are black,” Michell said. “If a person is walking through the campus at 3:30 a.m. in the morning, he is more likely to be stopped for identification than a person walking at 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon.”

When students complain about the police, they are asked to be specific about everything they were doing before they were stopped, Michell said. In the past five years, no student has filed a written complaint against a campus police officer that involved racism, he said.

Byron Kelley does not dispute that, but he counters that complaining or filing a report is sometimes not worth the frustration.

Kelley said: “Most of the time it comes down to our word against their word. . . . It’s like trying to push over a bulldozer and it won’t budge. It becomes ludicrous to try to push one over. I tell people just to be careful and doubly safe until things change when there are more blacks on campus.”

Kenneth Kelly agreed: “If I got upset at every incident, I would be sitting in the police station right now and everyday. Instead, I feel I am making a difference for future black students by being here and doing well academically.”

Radio Broadcast

While most black students who were interviewed at UCI said they seldom encounter overtly racist slurs, several upperclassmen mentioned a talk show broadcast more than two years ago on KUCI, a student-run radio station, as an example of how easily things can get out of control.

Despite the passage of time, an apology from the radio station and the removal of the radio host from the air, several students and faculty members remain angry about the incident. They say university administrators did not act quickly enough to make a definitive statement against racism when students were clearly troubled by it.

It was during a two-hour discussion of racial prejudice on a 1985 open-mike show that KUCI radio show host Al Stone, a volunteer at the station, quoted from a book about minority groups that said black men think with their genitals.

“There was an angry atmosphere after the radio show . . . during a time when there were many student protests against apartheid,” said Carol Y. Martin, now a 21-year-old senior. “But here was racism happening in our own campus. It drew many black students together.”

Remembers It With Anger

George J. Butler, a 20-year-old junior, was a freshman when he heard the show, and he remembers it with anger.

“I couldn’t believe I was hearing that,” Butler said. “I come from L.A. in a black neighborhood, and I never heard anything like that. He made me angry.”

But Stone said he was just trying to show how racist other people could be.

Said Stone, who later was asked by the university to leave the station: “I was getting racism out in the open, and I even found some within myself. I sent out some incorrect information, and that was a mistake. But nobody saw that I got smarter . . . I learned.”

What concerned black students most was that Stone was making racist comments on a university radio station that could be heard throughout the campus and in nearby cities, said Moleto Smith. The racial tension on campus was enormous after the show and the administration did not act quickly enough to stifle it, Smith said.

University Action Cited

Administrators maintain that they acted immediately by investigating the show, demanding an apology from KUCI within two weeks and requesting that Stone leave the station. They also say that the university had no control over what was broadcast.

“The callers and the host were independent individuals giving their own opinions,” vice chancellor Mitchell said. “The host said things that shouldn’t have been said. If this was a university employee on university time saying this, he would have been removed. But he wasn’t a university employee. We also had to deal with the person’s free speech rights because he was a private citizen expressing in a free speech context.”

Nonetheless, Duran Bell, who teaches in UCI’s economics and anthropology departments, believes the university should have been less ambiguous about the incident.

“What bothered me is that the administration failed to give immediate and effective counteraction,” Bell said. “There was only a verbal expression of regret. It’s that failure to follow through at the administration level that leaves students feeling isolated and vulnerable.”

BLACKS ENROLLED IN UC SYSTEM

Here are figures showing the number of blacks enrolled at each of the seven University of California campuses, as well as the number enrolled systemwide. The figures are for the fall of 1986. UCLA Total enrollment 34,423 Black enrollment 2,037 % of black students 5.9 Berkeley Total enrollment 31,463 Black enrollment 1,466 % of black students 4.6 Davis Total enrollment 19,809 Black enrollment 646 % of black students 3.2 Santa Barbara Total enrollment 18,003 Black enrollment 383 % of black students 2.1 San Diego Total enrollment 15,912 Black enrollment 445 % of black students 2.7 UC Irvine Total enrollment 14,532 Black enrollment 392 % of black students 2.6 Santa Cruz Total enrollment 8,589 Black enrollment 205 % of black students 2.3 Riverside Total enrollment 5,726 Black enrollment 241 % of black students 4.2 San Francisco Total enrollment 3,608 Black enrollment 149 % of black students 4.1 UC systemwide Total enrollment 152,065 Black enrollment 5,964 % of black students 3.9 Note: These figures do not include students who did not state their race on admission applications.