Race Relations

"Biggie and Tupac" and "Two Towns of Jasper" have everything and nothing in common. Both are documentaries, both deal with the violent, controversial slayings of black men, and both are among the most talked-about and admired films in this year's Sundance festival. But after that, they diverge in intriguing and even provocative ways, ways that demonstrate that the nonfiction form is much more supple and adventurous than it's often given credit for. "Biggie and Tupac," erroneously titled "L.A.

When Nathaniel Weber started walking around Los Angeles Dorsey High's campus last fall, some of his fellow students were suspicious. "Everyone thought I was an undercover cop," he said. Weber is 6 feet 6 and 310 pounds, but it wasn't his size that elicited stares. It was the color of his skin. Weber is one of only seven white students in a student body of almost 2,000. And he is the lone Caucasian playing football for a school where African Americans are 62% of the student population.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson has stepped back from a proposed boycott of Toyota Motor Sales after the Torrance-based company said it was considering the addition of an African American advertising agency. Toyota executives and Jackson will meet again later this summer to discuss diversity issues at the company, according to Toyota Senior Vice President Don Esmond. "Our commitment is to work with Rev. Jackson, and we appreciate his input. There is no boycott, and no need for one."

The shattered windows of the Live and Let Live pub have been boarded up. The burned-out automobile carcasses and police barricades have been removed since Britain's worst race riots in decades broke out last weekend. But the rage that fueled two nights of pitched street battles between police officers and Pakistani and Bangladeshi youths is still simmering. The wounds inflicted on all sectors of this deeply segregated town on the outskirts of Manchester are open. "We are a part of this country.

In the barbershop education of Kevin E. Hooks, 30, his civic duty as a black man has been drilled into him early and often this campaign season. Vote Jim Hahn for mayor of Los Angeles. "His father didn't have no crooked in him," explains Mr. Jones, resident elder at L.T.'s Barber Shop on Florence Avenue near Western Avenue. Mr. Jones refers, of course, to the late Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, whom he called a trusted friend of the black community in South L.A.

A white police officer was charged Monday with two misdemeanors for fatally shooting an unarmed black 19-year-old wanted on a dozen traffic violations, an event which touched off three days of riots last month. The indictments triggered immediate but largely peaceful protests in downtown Cincinnati, which was braced for trouble. Critics attacked the charges, which could send Officer Stephen Roach to jail for a maximum of nine months, as too lax.

Orange County residents overall are taking a rosier view of ethnic diversity and race relations than they did several years ago, according to a poll released Saturday that may run counter to the county's image. The Chapman University Poll, which compared attitudes today with those seven years ago, found that residents think the different ethnic groups are getting along better and that the county's increasing diversity is good for the economy and the quality of life.

Wanting a new song for the final shows of his 1999-2000 reunion tour with the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen thumbed through his notebook early last year and noticed the words "American Skin." It felt like the ideal title for a song he wanted write about race relations in America. In drafting the song, Springsteen drew on images from a highly publicized 1999 incident in which four white New York City policemen shot an unarmed black West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, 41 times.

The UCLA professor's words were suitably highbrow: The 120 students in his interracial dynamics class were about to hear a speaker who would explore the complex tensions of social demands and individual ability to react to constraints, race and identity, sexuality and gender, body and image. Furthermore, professor Jeffrey Decker told the class, today's speaker would examine how the media enable or limit an artist's self-expression because of these identity strictures.