L.A.'S RACIAL ISSUES NOT JUST BLACK, WHITE YOUR CHILDREN'S EMPLOYERS LIKELY TO BE LATINOS, ASIAN-AMERICANS.

Byline: Sharon Woodson-Bryant Local View

TUCKED neatly away in attorney Johnnie Cochran's amazing portfolio of accomplishments was his ability to speak Spanish fluently. He not only had an abundance of talent and charm; he also had vision, and he most likely understood that the black-and-white, English-only era was fading fast.

Just a few days ago, my friend Vicki mentioned casually that April 21 is Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day. She added, ``Blacks should be taking their children to work and teaching them how to speak Spanish and Korean, because these are the people who will be their future employers.''

In case you hadn't noticed, out of the top-ranking minority-owned businesses in Los Angeles County, the only African-American-owned company on the list was the staffing firm Act-1 Group, with revenues of $622.7 million. Ranked by 2004 companywide revenues, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal, the list of 50 was led by 21 Hispanic-owned, 14 Chinese-American-owned and five Korean-American-owned companies.

As a group, the 50 largest minority-owned businesses employ 12,281 people in the county, and they reported combined revenues of $9.8 billion. Plus, they are growing by leaps and bounds, with a 20 percent increase from last year. Vicki makes a good point about who will be hiring your kids in the future.

But, collectively, it seems we are still locked into looking at the world through old-school lenses.

The latest National Urban League report states how the unemployment gap widened between black and whites last year, endangering the financial gains African-Americans achieved in the l990s. Economists and public-policy specialists say that blacks have a harder time finding work during a recession and are often the last to benefit in an economic recovery because of discrimination by employers, limited skills and the fact that many blacks are in lower-level jobs.

With all due respect to the Urban League, does any of this surprise you?

It is time that we look more critically at diversity challenges - challenges and choices that go out of the black-and-white box.

In Los Angeles, we have a full-color palette of problems. According to a recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California, the predicament of L.A.'s racially and economically segregated communities creates a bad omen for the future.

Blacks, Latinos and Asians in these separate neighborhoods are living very different lives, prohibiting them from having the same perceptions about their current conditions. Whether it's crime, unemployment or a poor school system, people don't know what to do to change it. Nor are they sure if, or how much, the government should be involved.

What do you do when you live in a condominium complex and suddenly there is a surge of new owners who do not speak English and have no understanding of a homeowners association or their responsibilities as owners? Before you accuse me of being an Archie Bunker, I want you to know that we tried and tried to help them make it work. But my husband, who was president of the association, and I grew weary of accommodating their indifference. We sold our town house and moved.

Even in the workplace, I have seen cultural barriers. How do you educate co-workers who have no awareness of the civil-rights movement and have been shaped by another country's culture that seemingly has little respect for blacks? In this case, my young colleague was fiercely opposed to developing a community-relations program aimed at the black community. He actually called it illegal because, in his world, blacks should not be getting what he perceived as special treatment.

Other friends have related experiences of being refused service at small ethnic restaurants because they are black and the owners were evidently not aware of laws that prohibit discriminatory behavior. These are the angry black moments that we reveal only among our close allies, and I am sure that other ethnic groups have moments of anger against African-Americans. But we don't talk about any of this openly or sanely.

The most frightening aspect of ethnic and culture clashes is illustrated in another study by professors at Dartmouth, the University of Washington and the University of Chicago, showing when people are unemployed they are more likely to lash out at another ethnic group they perceive to be a threat. This may explain the underlying current of edginess among African-Americans, Latinos and Koreans in Los Angeles. Local organizations and government officials should no longer speak of only black-and-white issues with all of this swarming around us.

Yes, blacks are going to need to speak other languages for business and professional connections. Yes, we will need those personal relationships to help bring racial harmony and stability to Los Angeles. But in order to get to the intersection of understanding and appreciation, this community needs to be honest about racism. It isn't just a black-and-white thing anymore.