“That colored boy.”

I don’t know why La Jara physician Vaughn Jackson picked that description. He didn’t return my call.

Jackson’s words while defending his son Trey against charges of racism surprised a lot of people I talked to Tuesday.

“I’ve had that colored boy in my home,” Jackson said of the teen son of an African-American high school basketball coach.

If the southern Colorado town of La Jara needs a place to start mending an ugly racial rift, Dr. Jackson’s phrase would be a fine place to start.

Racial tensions led Centauri High School to postpone its prom and to close for a day for fear of violence.

To African-Americans or anyone who has dealt in race relations, Jackson’s words in an interview with Denver Post reporter Electa Draper recall paternalism and second-class citizenship. At the very least, referring to a black teenager as a “colored boy” shows a lack of understanding. If black teenagers are still “colored boys” to adults in La Jara, the charge by parent Ra Vernon that the “N-word” has been tossed around a usually distinguished rural high school makes sad sense.

As for the clandestine raising of the Confederate battle flag on the Centauri High flagpole over Easter, well, that’s hard to spin as anything but an attempt at racial intimidation.

Ditto for the Internet photo of four Centauri students, including Trey Jackson, holding rifles and a pistol while giving what looks like the Nazi salute.

Problems at Centauri High stem from five white and Latino athletes who didn’t think they got enough playing time from basketball coach Larry Joe Hunt, who is black. The recriminations have festered into a community crisis for La Jara.

Some folks blame school officials for not acting sooner on the sports situation. But principals and administrators almost never mediate playing-time disputes. And the hands-off approach almost never leads to public displays of racism.

The best news out of La Jara in the past week is the approach of the North Conejos school board. It has committed not only to find out what happened, but also to reunite the school and the surrounding community.

School board president Leroy Salazar admits that the Confederate flag has become a symbol of “oppression and intimidation” to blacks and that every member of his community should know that. He also doesn’t use the term “colored boy.” But Salazar says a lack of African-Americans in La Jara could lead to misunderstanding the phrase’s offensiveness.

“There are many more people of goodwill here than people of ill will,” Salazar said Tuesday as he repaired fences on his farm. “Tonight, there is an interfaith, ecumenical church service to celebrate the things that bind us.”

The school board asked for investigative help from the state police and the district attorney in sorting out the Centauri situation. But the board also invited the University of Colorado’s Center for the Prevention of Violence and a U.S. Department of Justice community relations program to help organize classes in diversity and cultural sensitivity.

No one should doubt the offensiveness of the phrase “colored boy,” said William King, a professor in the ethnic studies department at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

King called the phrase “disparaging and dehumanizing.”

Think N-word light.

“Colored boy” is the polar opposite of “people of color.”

“In Colorado, not everyone was raised in a diverse environment,” acknowledged Omar Montgomery, director of black student services at the University of Colorado at Denver. But for African-Americans, “‘colored boy’ reduces us to that slave mentality. It relates to the period of Jim Crow.”

Think separate, but very unequal.

Salazar hopes the recent racial tensions will have everyone “putting themselves in the other person’s shoes.”

With racially insensitive phrases and Rebel flags flying, it might be the only way to heal La Jara’s wounds.

Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.