Racial issues persist in southwest Riverside County
Thirty-four years and counting is how long I’ve lived in southwest Riverside County.
Within a couple months of moving to Murrieta, I heard somebody use the N-word at a gathering of new neighbors of our just-built tract homes.
It was 1989. And like long commutes and hot summers, some things never seem to change here.
To this day, the headlines about racial issues still happen.
Most recently, hundreds of Temecula high school students walked out of classes after a resolution was passed banning the teaching of critical race theory, which examines how racism has been historically embedded in society and culture.
The teens — as well as some current and former school board members — said the ban isn’t needed because critical race theory isn’t taught in their schools.
No matter, three Temecula Valley Unified School District board members — Joseph Komrosky, Danny Gonzalez and Jen Wiersma — voted to prevent it anyway. Grandstanding indeed. Komrosky has called critical race theory “divisive ideology” and “racist.”
There’s that word again, a word used constantly in my time here.
When I moved here, the area was predominantly White. When the mass migration started in the late 1980s, people were fleeing from Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties to the cheaper housing that we’ve always had.
The sales pitches also referred to our wide-open spaces, clean air, smalltown living and safe neighborhoods. Left unsaid (but certainly implied) was that the big cities people were fleeing were big trouble. Today, the open spaces are mostly gone, the air isn’t as clean, the towns definitely aren’t small and while crime is still basically low, it’s not what it was.
Acts of racism were more constant back then. In the most public one in 1991, local churches, civic groups and then-Mayor Ron Parks wanted the movie “Boyz N the Hood” banned from a Temecula theater because of possible gang violence. Temecula city officials were bombarded with phone calls in support of said ban.
One problem with the nonviolent spirit: There were no gangs here. Left unsaid was that the protesters just didn’t want a movie about gangs, and therefore Black people, showing locally.
It was emblematic of why so many people moved here, to escape the crime, the gangs and the other problems of big cities that also (Surprise, surprise!) had dramatically more people of color.
Not so today. The local schools where I taught definitely aren’t as White as they once were. By the end of my 23-year-teaching career in Murrieta, my elementary school classes had gone from mostly White children to mostly students of color.
Now Temecula school board members want to ban something that local kids (Don’t you think they should know?) say isn’t even taught in local schools. Hmm, sure sounds a lot like banning a movie about gang violence in a town that doesn’t even have gangs.
Wait, there’s more public racism.
In August 2021, Moreno Valley cheerleaders were called racial slurs by Temecula Valley High School students at a football game. The cheerleading coach, Kenya Williams, said in a Facebook post that in her many years of instruction, she’d never “experienced such levels of disrespect and hate from an opposing school/team.”
And after racist social media messages were posted by former Vista Murrieta High School students a few years ago, a group of Black parents called on Murrieta Valley schools to take significant steps to improve race relations in schools.
Educators in Murrieta, where I now substitute teach, talk often about equity, which basically means giving every kid an equal opportunity to learn, no matter their demographics.
Still, despite all the uproar, all the training and all the newcomers of color who’ve moved here in the past three decades, the racism continues.
I suppose it’s better in the sense that somebody’s not using the N-word at a party like what happened right after I moved here.
But if that’s all the progress we can show, don’t you think we can do better?