The
1992 "Angelazo,@ Los Angeles, U.S.A.: "A House Divided Against Itself . . ."
By
Victor M. Rodriguez[1]
Department of Chicano and Latino
Studies
California State University, Long
Beach
(Abbreviated article, for references contact the author. Chapter 2 in Latino Politics
in the United States: Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Class in the Mexican American
and Puerto Rican Experience (2nd edition, 2012), previous
versions of this article appeared in the Blueprint
for Social Justice, Loyola University and the Newsletter of the Society for the Study Social Problems)
The events that rocked the city of Los Angeles
on May of 1992 opened a new chapter in race relations in the United States.
These events became a metaphor about what is ailing U. S. society. The United
States is not a society neatly divided into black and white Anglo-Saxon worlds;
it is a shattered glass whose pieces represent the various racial and ethnic
groups that strive to become a part of the "mainstream." The
mainstream is the concrete fulfillment of the materialistic "American
dream." Its realization, in the
concrete lives of the myriad of the majority of the communities of color
communities that make up the United States, is becoming increasingly elusive.
Despite expectations to the contrary, the Los
Angeles rebellion did not create a significant change in attitudes toward one
of the root causes of racial/ethnic antagonism in Los Angeles. A survey carried
out by UCLA professor, Lawrence Bobo, (1992) following the events, indicated
that social barriers to mobility were still not seen as the main culprits for
high poverty levels among minorities. The worldviews of Latinos and blacks were
relatively similar in that 76 % of blacks and 68 % of Latinos felt that
"social barriers" in some sense "caused" higher poverty
amongst these groups. On the other hand, only 50% of Anglos and 57% of Asians
feel that social barriers were to blame for poverty levels. In fact, only 61%
of Anglos and Asians feel that more spending to assist Latinos and blacks is
necessary to resolve poverty levels. These attitudinal levels were not changed
significantly by the events in Los Angeles (Mandel, 1993). The Atwo nations@ the Kerner Commission talked about in the 1960s is still present in
the southern California social landscape. Two worlds and two perspectives: one
an individualistic understanding of social ills held by whites, and one a more
systemic, institutional perspective that shapes the understanding of
communities of color.
On April 29, 1992, when the Simi Valley,
California white jury delivered a not guilty verdict for four Los Angeles
policemen that were being tried in the beating of African American Rodney G.
King, the city was stunned in disbelief. As the news spread like a wildfire
throughout the city, Los Angeles became engulfed in rioting, looting, shooting,
and protests.
While the initial incidents of violence took
place within a sector of the African American community of South Central Los
Angeles, in a few hours they had spread to the Latino, and other racial/ethnic,
communities within the city. Forty-one (out of fifty-three who died) that were
killed by gunshot wounds, ostensibly by the "forces of order,"
nineteen were Latinos. One policeman who killed a Salvadorean national the
second night had fatally shot an African American person in 1987, an incident
that had been protested by the black community forcing Chief Gates of the Los
Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to criticize the police officer. Eventually, more than twenty cities in
southern California experienced incidents of violence and protest.
Thousands of California local and state police
forces, supported by units of the U.S. armed forces patrolled the city of Los
Angeles in the days following the worst urban social conflagration the United
States has ever experienced. Further, hundreds of Immigration and
Naturalization Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms agents, swept the city's communities like a swarm. Undocumented
immigrants particularly were singled out and became, all of a sudden, blamed
for what ails southern California.
Units of the Marine Corps that were deployed in
the city following the disturbances had been part of the troops that had
participated in the military action against President Manuel Noriega in the
republic of Panama. Also, some of the army units deployed throughout the city
from Fort Ord, California, had been involved in combat against Iraq in the
Persian Gulf.
During the uproar, fifty-three persons lost
their lives while 2,400 more were injured and thousands arrested. More than a
thousand structures were set on fire and damages reached hundreds of millions
of dollars in direct losses in this city, better known for its film industry
and palm trees than for its social conflicts.
Los Angeles, the second largest city of the United States was rocked by
such an outburst of rage that analysts are still trying to discern its causes.
But, "public opinion" had already made up its mind about the
culprits.
In the aftermath of the disturbances, a Los
Angeles Times poll in May 1992 found that 50% of those polled called for
moral leadership from within inner-city communities (read blacks and Latinos)
and a CBS poll found that 43% of those polled attributed the causes of the
incidents to "breakdown in family values" while only 35% blamed "government
neglect." This predominantly white
majority public opinion was the target of former Vice President Dan Quayle=s comments that year
about family values. The subtle message was that "these people" lived
immoral lives and therefore engaged in immoral acts of violence. This
criminalization of what was a violent social action led officials to ignore
almost completely the underlying causes of the rebellion. The ALaw and Order@ theme used so effectively to quash the social movements of the
1960s, was reinvigorated in liberal California.[2]
The events, plastered on prime-time television,
broadcasted live for hours, seemed to be beamed from a far away third-world
nation. Yet, through the great technological advances of satellite, microwave
communications, video, and computer graphics we could experience the rage and
feel the heat of the fires right in our own living rooms.
Despite the intensive media coverage and the
thousands of words that have attempted to capture the context for this
"Angelazo," many were grappling for an explanation. Despite visits to the ravaged local
neighborhoods by politicians of all stripes, including then President George
Bush Sr., despite its impact on the 1992 elections discourse, local, and state
commissions report, it still seems that the national elites have not discerned
the content of the message sent by this rebellion.
While some analysts have focused on the broad
participation of all ethnic sectors as evidence of the class basis of this
rebellion, the overwhelming majority of those involved were African American,
Latino, and Asian. Race and ethnicity were the most important factors in any
contextualization of this rebellion. What happens in American society is that
being Latino or black means a greater likelihood of being in a subordinate
social and economic class. Communities of color clearly understand this
reality, but the white elites still do not.[3]
Additionally, although the media has tended to
characterize this conflict as a black/white issue, in fact, this is probably
the first "multicultural" uprising in the United States. While the
media and the Hollywood industry still represented Los Angeles as a black and
white city, the reality is that in 1992, 39% of the population was Latino, by
the year 2000, the Latino population rose to 45% of all Angelinos, and whites, who represented
39% of the population in 1992, declined to only 32% of the population in 2000. Despite the
portrayal of Los Angeles in 1992 as an Anglo and African American cauldron of
conflict, only 10% of the city=s population was black. Within the Los Angeles Unified School
District, more than thirty languages were spoken in the classrooms. This city
is probably the most multilingual city in the United States, it is also a place
where various forms of bilingual education became the law of the land.[4]
Ironically, the center of the rebellion was
South Central Los Angeles, for example, this district, which encompasses the
area most devastated by the 1992 rebellion and the 1965 Watts uprising, is
today 50.1% Latino and 44.8% black. Within the city of Los Angeles proper, more
than 40% of the population is
foreign-born. This is an area that increasingly has become more polarized and
stratified.[5]
Collective Behavior in the United
States
What took
place in Southern California cannot be reduced to individual psychology.
Focusing on individual psychology will confuse and lead away from developing a
frame of reference that will make sense of these events. The focus needs to be
on the social and collective nature of human social life. Collective behavior
is an inherent part of our humanity and must be placed within the context of
ordinary people responding to extraordinary situations.
During the last decade of the
nineteenth century, a French sociologist, Gustave Le Bon, was asking himself
the same questions we pose today. Why do people participate in such seemingly
irrational political or social upheavals? Le Bon was partially responding to
some of the social conflicts that accompanied the modernization and
industrialization of France.[6] Today, those who speak about
"animalistic behavior" are for the most part coinciding with Le Bon's
analysis. He thought that people's behavior in crowds is reduced to the
"lowest common denominator." The main difference with what happens
today in the United States and what happened in France during the eightteenth
century is the intense process of racialization that accompanies these
characterizations of those who engage in social protest (Rodriguez, 2005). This
process of racialization becomes intensified if the protestors are persons of
color.
Le Bon notwithstanding, the issue is not so
simple. While it may give us a false
sense of understanding and social distance from the behavior pervading the
social conflagration in Los Angeles, to label such behavior as sub-human truly
misses the point. These were not only violent irrational outbursts growing out
of frustration, in reality there was a rational structure to these events.
There was leadership, division of labor, and clearly discernible behavioral
patterns and a process in these events.[7]
These were not the first or the last of these scenes in the United States'
race/ethnic relations drama.
One characteristic of these events is that just
like in the 1965 Watts insurrection, during the Los Angeles 1992 insurrection
one could see looters stopping at red lights and crosswalks with their trunks
full of stolen goods. We also could see looters helping other female looters
when they tripped over and fell to the floor because of the heavy load they
were carrying. How can we make sense of such seemingly contradictory images?
First, as much sociological research
has clearly demonstrated, not all members of a crowd share the same emotions
and feelings. During the 1970 Kent State riot, which resulted in the killing of
four students and the wounding of nine others, participants were shown to have
different feelings and proclivities. The crowd that seemed to confront the
National Guard was not a homogeneous mass.
There was no "herd instinct."
The violence that has pervaded this city was
indicative of a social insurrection. As in other similar events through history
we will eventually find that many ordinary people were part of the set of events
that rocked the city.[8]
We can be made to feel more guarded and protected by labeling the participants
as anarchic "hoodlums" or "riff raff" but we must not allow
ourselves to be coddled into a false sense of security.
For example, recent 1990 census data provides
proof of this fact. The first outbursts of this rebellion originated not from
the poorest districts of Los Angeles but from its most stable
neighborhoods. This tends to support the
notion of the "continuing significance of race" within American
society. The basic sense of frustration arising from African Americans was
their treatment as second-class citizens, even when gainfully employed and
living stable lives (Dunn & Hubler, 1992).
Latinos, who are historically represented as passive, docile, and
malleable, engaged in collective behavior in areas like Pico-Union, a center of
newly arrived Central American immigrants. A significant number of these
Central American immigrants--Salvadoreans, Guatemalans--are also political
refugees. While most of them are poor, they are part of the working poor and
not part of a Awelfare dependent,@ stigmatized and Ainner city@ lumpen population so prevalent in the popular culture=s imaginary.
Genesis of the Social Despair
This
social insurrection evidenced the fine and tenuous basis of community in Los
Angeles in a way that no natural disaster had ever accomplished. The bond that holds society together is the
shared agreement that legitimizes social norms. These rules have power over us
because we have some sense that they have some measure of reasonability and
fairness and that they somehow apply to all persons.
This tenuous consensus was
shattered by the jury's verdict on April 29, 1992. The majority of the
residents of Los Angeles, as surveys clearly evidenced, felt that the verdict
was a miscarriage of justice. Simi Valley, where the trial took place, while
not the bigoted community the media had projected is still, sociologically,
very distant from Los Angeles's rich ethnic diversity. This city had become a site where law
enforcement officers found refuge while working for the city of Los Angeles,
but it was also a "refuge" for other whites and upwardly mobile
minorities to escape from Los Angeles' problems. In some ways, it was a site
for Awhite flight@ just like Orange County was during the 1960s and 1970s.
But this verdict was merely a catalyst that
unleashed many forces that were festering in U. S. society. Forces that had
accumulated with an intensity and a force that had weakened and undermined the
hold of social norms over people's behavior. Los Angeles had become a matrix
where various ethnic communities, while sharing common geographic spaces at
some points of their everyday life, lived in separate cultural spaces. One
cultural space was marked with material abundance, in which law enforcement was
really there to Aprotect and serve,@ although the other cultural spaces were marked by poverty,
declining social services in deteriorating neighborhoods, and a law enforcement
system that harassed and stigmatized them. The bonds that created community
were facing a challenge, and they had
lost their legitimacy. For communities of color, the daily experience of
racialization perpetuated their growing sense of them as Anonwhite@ which in our society
means not dominant, not entirely AAmerican@ not fully human (Chavez, 2002). Particularly for Latinos, this
sense of Aotherness@ was clearly expressed in popular culture expressions like the late
1990s Chicano rap of Kid Frost where a sense of being the Aracialized other@ was clearly expressed
in the lyrics (Chavez, 2002).
These bonds that keep Los Angeles society and
most United States communities together, especially in large urban areas, were
weakened during the previous two decades before the rebellion. The process of
healing that supposedly took place after the 1965 Watts rebellion never reached
fruition. The roots of that incident and this recent one have hardly been addressed.
The origins of this crisis lies not in the Rodney G. King trial and its
aftermath, but deep in the core of contemporary U. S. society. The rendering of
the verdicts were just a spark that hit the powder keg of the nation.
Joining the Ranks of The Third World?
Some regions of the United States are
increasingly becoming mirror images of the countries that we have disdainfully
labeled the "third world."
Third world nations that confront declining incomes and rising external
debts have historically been fertile ground for social unrest. Globalization
has meant the reproduction of third-world conditions inside of the metropolis.
Because parallel to these super exploited nations in the global economy, large segments
of U. S. society have become places where rising poverty, despair,
hopelessness, and rage, are only contained by the state's coercive apparatus.
Law enforcement has clearly assumed the role of an occupying army in these
barrios and inner city cores.
The Los Angeles Police Department had become in
the last decade before the rebellion probably one of the most
"militarized" and proactive police department in the United States.
Its policy of active enforcement (with very high arrest rates of minorities) is
almost the civilian counterpart of "low intensity conflict"
strategies carried out by U.S. military in the Third World in the 1980s. The
cuts in the state=s budgets as a result of Proposition 13 led to a reduction in the
budgetary resources invested in policing in Los Angeles, then LAPD Chief of
Police Darryl Gates, militarized the department in order to face a large
community with fewer resources. In fact, despite the talk about how armed the
populace of Las Angeles was, not one policeman died during the rebellion. Of
the 239 shooting victims, only three of them were policemen. Law enforcement
agencies had overwhelming firepower while the rebellious masses did not.
One of the reasons for the militarization of the
Los Angeles Police Department is the very small ratio of policemen to the large
population of Los Angeles. Other cities like New York had twice the number of
police officers that Los Angeles had. In some sense the LAPD had to adapt to
the challenge of a relatively small police force. Obviously, they chose to
implement a racist policy on what was in fact a society bursting with social
problems. These communities became the new "internal third worlds."
In some sense, these places have been created by
processes of segregation that, although more subtle, hidden, and covert than
thirty years before, still have the same overall effect. Institutional racism
is still alive and well and operates in more covert ways than in earlier
decades. Real estate, insurance, and banking have for years used and still use
illegal redlining practices to avoid investing social and economic resources in
these internal "third worlds."
Recent studies of the banking system have
evidenced clear patterns of discrimination in lending practices. The Atlanta
Journal/Constitution newspaper published a series in 1988 that evidences this
clear pattern of discrimination.[9]
These inner-city districts have become places where despair and hopelessness
abounds and from these emotions, righteous indignation and rage are just a
short step away. A decade after the rebellion, studies document that these
segregating and discriminating practices continue today (Stein & Laila,
2003; Turner et al., 2002).
The rage was also fueled by heavy-handed police
tactics within these minority communities. The LAPD was criticized by the
Christopher Commission, a commission whose role was to audit the police
department's activities in light of heavy public criticism. Similarly, during
the summer of 1992, a study completed for the Los Angeles County Supervisors
sharply criticized the Sheriff's Department record of police brutality,
particularly against members of minority groups. These law enforcement agencies
have compounded the inner-city problems by trying to deal with issues for which
they have no cultural competency.[10]
During the rebellion, the rage overflowed the
upper edges of the forces of order's ability to contain it. During those days,
for a brief period of time, the streets of Los Angeles were in the power of the
masses, anarchic masses notwithstanding.
What underlies the forces that were unleashed by
the opening of the floodgates? What raw nerve was snapped when the Simi Valley
jury delivered its verdict of not guilty for four white policemen?
Growing Social Inequality
It seems obvious that in the last
two decades before the rebellion social inequality had become more visible and
intense in the United States. Numerous politicians of all political stripes blamed both the Ronald Reagan and George Bush
Sr. administrations for creating the conditions for the social unrest. The
truth of the matter is that the roots of the growing chasm between the rich and
the poor could not be placed entirely on the lap of the Reagan and/or Bush
administration. In reality, while the social and economic policies of both the
Reagan and the Bush administration compounded the increasing polarization, they
did not create this social trend.
The growing gap that divided the United States
then and today has its origins some decades ago when the nation was healing the
wounds caused by segregation, separation, and racial hatred. While these
attempts to heal were being made a social chasm was being built right
underneath society's efforts. The progress that was being achieved gradually in
certain programmatic efforts were being set asunder by larger, structural
changes in the character of the nation's economic system. In fact, the police
forces were handed a situation that they are not able to cope with. During
those days debates in the United States about "community policing"
created much discourse but never became the panacea that many of its proponents
hoped it to be.[11]
While the "great society" efforts were
being implemented, the process of restructuring and de-industrialization was
rapidly gaining momentum throughout the United States. In addition to the
dismantling and de-funding of federal programs like Aid for Dependent Children
and Families (AFDC), other major structural changes were impacting the destiny
of the poor.[12] These
poor also include the high percentage of communities of color like Latinos and
blacks who are poor. This social and
economic trend has had a dramatic impact on this nation's social structure and
specifically on the relationship between the socio-economic classes of the
United States. This secular social trend has challenged the U.S. middle class,
has created a seemingly permanent group of persons mired in poverty (which in
the popular culture are constructed as people of color), and has made even more
difficult the forging of a national political consensus.
A Post-Industrial Society for A Global
Economy
One result of the rationalization
of the United States industrial production has been the relative
de-industrialization of its economic base. As industries have vied to compete
in the global market they have abandoned local U. S. communities and located their
manufacturing processes in places where the costs of production are lower.[13] From the northern border of Mexico to the
Asian nations of the Pacific Rim, U.S.
capitalism has globalized even farther its manufacturing activities.
This process of rationalization has had two
faces, one, the process of corporate restructuring undertaken by major industrial
and financial enterprises, and two, de-industrialization. The corporate
restructuring is one way that corporate America has utilized to create leaner
and supposedly more efficient units that can compete more effectively in
today's markets. One result of corporate restructuring has been the merger
mania that has engulfed many corporate sectors in the last few years. Another
contemporary outcome has been the Aoutsourcing@ of productive activities to other parts of the world, including
highly skilled work.
The merger process has obviously not created new
productive capacity but has allowed many corporate firms to reduce costs in
order to pay for the high costs of buyouts and mergers. Additionally, they
have, in some cases, been able to streamline their bureaucracies and focused
their services on the most profitable areas while outsourcing others. At the
same time, many workers and middle-level management had found themselves
without a job in an increasingly weakened economy.
Parallel to this process, the
de-industrialization trend that has changed the character of the U. S. economy
in the last two decades has eliminated hundreds of thousands of good paying,
union-protected manufacturing jobs throughout the nation. Jobs that provided
the economic basis for the rise of many United States workers to a middle-class
status in the U. S. stratification system. Jobs that because of the apprentice
programs had provided an entry-level door into the economy and specifically
entry into the industrial sector for many young U. S. citizens. These
entry-level jobs, which are paths to further advancement into a secure
middle-class status, have experienced a dramatic decline.[14]
This process has also changed the character of
the United States' large urban areas which have experienced dramatic
transformations. Urban areas used to be centers of manufacturing, today they
are centers of a myriad of services. From financial to information transfer
services to trade and commerce, cities today have become emblematic of the
post-industrial economy.
In substitution for manufacturing jobs, this
service sector has created a significantly large number of jobs. But, these
jobs seem to be polarized between jobs that require high levels of education at
one end and low-skill, low-paying jobs at the other end. Many people of color
and poor whites have found themselves locked out of the economy by this new
"post-industrial" economy. The present state of extreme poverty
experienced by some groups like Puerto Ricans and African Americans in New York
and Chicago are partly the result of these urban transformations.
Race, Poverty, and Social Inequality
The very latest poverty statistics released by
the Census Bureau in August of 1991 were startling to say the least. In
general, there were 2.1 million more poor persons in the United States since
1989. The poverty rate had increased from 12.8 % in 1989 to 13.5 % in 1990.
In fact, one in five U.S. children lived in
poverty and not only did they continue to be overrepresented among the poor,
this proportion of children who are poor continued to increase. Among all the
industrial nations of the world the United States had the highest proportion of
children who are poor. This nation, among industrialized nations of the world,
was the nation with the highest infant mortality rate.
Michael B. Katz, a historian whose work has
focused on U. S. history, and especially on the history of our welfare system,
published a book in 1989 entitled, "Undeserving Poor." The subtitle:
"From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare." This is a very clever description of what we
have been seeing in the United States during the last fifteen years.
Katz
explains that definitions of who are the deserving poor have shifted and that
social policy and the popular culture's understanding of the poor hardly ever
has had much to do with the reality of poverty. Today is not much different
than yesterday. The possible exception is that in California, being poor means
being Latino or black, not white.
When people think about a family on welfare, a
distinct image appears in people's minds: an African American or a Latino woman
with a large number of kids. This image rises despite the overwhelming social
scientific evidence that this is far from the truth. In fact, the average
family on welfare during the early 1990s was made up of 2.2 persons.
The 1992 electoral campaign of white supremacist
David Duke was barely defeated. Yet it was effective in gathering a large
proportion of Louisiana's highly educated young voters. The subtle, encoded
messages were clearly understood by the electorate. When Duke mentioned in his
speeches the "underclass" people knew exactly who he was talking
about.[15] When
he talked about "blood sucking welfare cheats," everyone, without
using any epithet, knew who he was referring to. Popular culture in the United
States has reached a very coherent consensus. Blacks and Latinos are sucking
our resources by their indiscriminate use of the welfare system.
The reality is so different.
First, at least half of the poor are not black
or Latino, they are white. An essay in the December 16, 1991 edition of Time
by Barbara Ehrenreich provides some interesting statistics about this issue.
Unfortunately, some of her statistics are misleading because in her essay she
says that whites constitute 61% of those receiving welfare when in fact, those
figures include a good percentage of Latinos who classify themselves as whites.
Nevertheless, whites still constitute a major
portion of those on welfare recipients. The major difference is that Latinos
and blacks constitute 66 % of the poor in our central cities.[16]
Obviously, when the media and people in our communities see the images of the
central city poor they assume that the overwhelming majority of the poor are
black or Latino across the nation.
Conversely, in non-metropolitan areas, those
areas outside of our cities, including rural areas, are very different with
respect to who are the poor. Only 29 % of the poor who live outside of our
large metropolitan areas are Latino or black. While being poor may not seem
qualitatively different whether it is in a non-metropolitan area or a rural
area, the reality is that it does make a difference.
Racial and economic segregation is sharper
within the core of U. S. cities. In other words, most of one's neighbors
in the city core will also tend to be poor and persons of color. This is not
always the case outside of metropolitan areas. Neighborhoods in general are
less segregated and the poor can very often be found among the middle and
working classes. Hidden and unobtrusive, but they are there. The stigma is less
powerful in the suburbs, particularly for poor whites, than it is for people of
color within the city core.
Inner Cities: Economic Deserts
Metaphorically, the inner core of
our cities are like deserts they are to be economically arid, dry and barren,
truly devoid of anything, including hope. In fact, the etymology of the word desert
goes back to the Latin word desertum or abandoned. That is the best
description of the effects of the process that has transformed the heart of our
large urban areas.
The corporate restructuring and
de-industrialization of the United States that received its momentum a few
decades ago is the underlying context for the changes experienced by our
cities. They are also the stage within which communities like South Central Los
Angeles, South Bronx, West and South Chicago have been transformed in areas of
anger and despair.[17]
For example, Puerto Ricans and other Latinos are
facing tremendous economic and social challenges. While the poverty rate in
1990 for Latinos in general was 28.1%, 40.6 %
of Puerto Ricans lived in poverty. In 1990, 51.2 % of Puerto Rican children lived in poverty
(U.S. Census 1991). Thirty-nine percent
of households are female headed households. The rate for African American
female headed households was 48.1 %.
The accumulation of disadvantages brought by a
legacy of racism, the present dynamics of institutionalized racism, coupled
with the basic economic transformations the nation is undergoing, have created
a wasteland inhabited by people of color in the heart of what use to be the
industrial hubs of the United States.
Epilogue?: Forging A Political
Consensus
The trial that the United States faces is
seemingly overwhelming. There are no recipes, no herbal teas and no home
remedies that can magically heal the wounds. How can the United States reach a
political consensus that will facilitate a national concerted effort to address
these economic, social, and political challenges? A consensus in the past was
established by heralding all the moral outrage that was present within the
majority Anglo/white community about the moral injustice of segregation. That
reservoir of moral outrage is empty today. In fact, we are running on empty.[18] The 1992 U.S. presidential elections probably
raised some hopes but the problems are structural in character. Today, with
terrorism and homeland security being the major focus, the theme of racial
justice is not part of the national political discourse.
During the cold war a consensus for raising
military budgets was built around the notion of a "common enemy." The
evil empire was the analgesic that allowed us to endure the pain of social
cutbacks, reduced services, and decreasing maintenance of the nation's social
and economic infrastructure. Then as today, the United States is experiencing
social problems that are blooming.
Yesterday, policy planners were concerned with
building a defensive/offensive capability that would protect the national
integrity and security of the United States. Today, every child that has to
grow and be socialized within the economic deserts that plague the nation's
urban areas is a bomb waiting to explode. The concern for terrorism that
pervades our contemporary culture focuses on the external, global issues at the
expense of the internal and domestic social and economic challenges. Instead of
social programs, urban issues receive legal repression. The recent passage
(1998) by 62 % of Californians of Proposition 21, to increase penalties and
make it easier to send juveniles into the criminal justice system will
potentially continue the stigmatization and criminalization of communities of
color.
Unfortunately, today there is no "evil
empire" to force the majority into a consensus, since the moral outrage
reservoirs are empty, what remains is narrow self-interest.[19] This
can also be a productive path if developed creatively. What is at stake today
is the issue of national unity, a major historical concern for the founders of
this nation as well as contemporary analysts.[20]
The real issues of national security that have
obsessed the United States for so long are today of a domestic nature. While we
focus on other lands the acid that corrodes the United States= social and economic
structure is not external but spawned by national policies and economic
rationality. More dangerously, as we move deeper into the twenty-first century
the basis for this nation's democratic processes in an increasingly culturally
diverse society are being undermined by economic processes.
Hanna Arendt said during the 1970s, and Arendt
is far from being a liberal, that the main contradiction of the capitalist
system is that it presupposes that people can be politically equal even though
they are economically unequal.
The United States is slowly pulling the economic
rug out of the foundations of its democratic system. A nation that
demographically is rapidly changing and becoming more racially and ethnically
diverse, a nation that is becoming more economically polarized, is a
"house divided against itself." A house divided against itself can
only collapse.
Epilogue to An
Epilogue: Or "How Los Angeles= Wounds Fester"
"It cannot be denied that the
masses revolt from time to time, but their revolts are always suppressed. It is
only when the dominant classes, struck by sudden blindness, pursue a policy
which strains social relationships to the breaking-point, that the party masses
appear actively on the stage of history and overthrow the power of oligarchies."
B Robert Michels (Political Parties, 1911)
Robert
Michels, a German political sociologist, in his thesis about the "Iron Law
of Oligarchy" states that large organizations can not but be undemocratic.
In the same way, a society dominated by large organizations will also tend to
be undemocratic. If we examine the events of the in 1992 Los Angeles, what
would be Michel's diagnosis? Have we expanded democracy to include the
"others"? Are we left with nothing but cynicism to build on?
Unmet Expectations
LAPD Officers Stacey Koon and Laurence
Powell where indicted for violating the civil rights of Rodney King on April
30, 1992. On April 16, 1993, both officers were found guilty of one count for
violating Mr. King=s civil rights and later sentenced to thirty months in a federal
correctional camp. While the tension over the impending verdicts was lifted,
the core issues that gave rise to the uprising remain even today (2005). Most
knowledgeable observers of the communities that make up Los Angeles never
expected anything serious to occur, even in the event of another acquittal of
all the defendants. There were not high expectations for a just verdict that
year. This explains the kind of euphoria that swept many communities of Los
Angeles in response to the guilty verdicts on these two officers that became
symbolic of the abuse against an entire community.
In some sense the expectations about how the Los
Angeles insurrection would change national discourse on the challenges that
face our nation's cities were unfounded. A 1994 poll by the New York Times and
CBS evidences that the racial/ethnic divide is alive and well in America. Only
37 % of Americans believe race relations were good. Blacks and whites still
have widely different perspectives on solutions to race relations issues and
problems. While 66 % of blacks still support preferential hiring when there has
been job discrimination in the past, this policy only received the support of
28 % of whites. In 1996, the voters of California voted in favor of Proposition
209 to dismantle the use of affirmative action in the public sphere. Again,
this measure indicated the continuing racial polarization that pervades
California as the majority of whites voted in favor of the proposition and the
majority of people of color voted against it.
Many white Los Angelenos, given the worsening
economic conditions in California would probably agree with Sheila Watson, a
forty-four-year-old homemaker from Moyer, Alabama who told the New York Times
in 1994 that "Things have changed for the worse for white people." It
is then not surprising to find that although change has occurred in Los Angeles
following the riots, the fundamental causes of the uprising have remained
untouched. We have changed without changing.
Los Angelenos also wanted "change."
The effect of the insurrection was devastating to the city. Its sense of
identity had been shattered. Los Angeles had always projected itself as the
most diverse city in the nation and saw its strength precisely in that
diversity. Many now feel that its diversity rather than its strength might be
its Achilles heel and its weakness.
A Cacophony of Ironies
The first effort at healing the wounds of the
city involved naming a white male to head the efforts to re-build Los Angeles
after the insurrection. Peter Ueberroth, a businessman from Newport Beach and
whose claim to fame had been organizing the successful 1984 Los Angeles
Olympics. Unfortunately, the title of his efforts, ARe-build L.A. Foundation@ did not bode good things for Los Angeles. Some have argued that Los
Angeles should not be rebuilt, rather recreated on a more just foundation.
But Ueberroth is a good organizer and a well
connected businessman, but as many of the efforts in the aftermath of the
insurrection, his efforts are tinged with irony. The fact that he is from
Orange County, the county adjoining Los Angeles, is in itself ironic. For years
after the 1965 Watts rebellion this county became the haven for the white
flight that ensued in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, the knights in white shining
armor that were to save the city would have to come from those communities that
had abandoned the city earlier. He proposed to re-build Los Angeles without the
use of public funds (in May 1994, Mr. Ueberroth resigned his position with
Rebuild LA).[21]
Another irony was the naming of Willie L.
Williams as the first African American to ever manage the LAPD with 9,000 officers
and 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of 467 square miles (1209 km5). The new chief of
the LAPD replaced Daryl Gates whose term was marked by controversy and was
sharply criticized by the Christopher Commission. Chief Williams comes from the
police department that was involved in the bombing of a whole inner-city block
to end a standoff between the Philadelphia Police Department and the Black
nationalist group, MOVE. One wonders what is kept in store for this city in
terms of "riot control" in future civil disturbances. Members of the
LAPD have disclosed, as they were preparing for the rendering of the verdicts
on the Rodney King 1993 civil rights case, that they will have greater
flexibility this time around in dealing with "crowd control." But
Chief Williams only lasted until 1997 when Bernard Parks, also African
American, was named chief until 2002, when again a white police chief was
named, William Bratton [22]
The final irony lies in that one of the last
acts of the Bush administration was to order the justice department to
prosecute the four police officers that beat Rodney King for violating his
civil rights. The prosecuting team did a very effective job in presenting a
strong case against officers Koon and Powell. They also were able to have a
multiracial jury despite the defense= efforts to eliminate African Americans from the process. On April
16, 1993, only Koon and Powell were found guilty of violating Rodney King=s civil rights, and
they spend thirty months in federal correctional camp. Rodney King won a civil
suit and received 3.8 million dollars with which he began a record company. The
irony is that the leader of the original prosecuting team was Terry White, an
African American district attorney. The leader of the prosecutor=s team for the second
legal process was Steven Clymer, a white district attorney.
In economic terms there was some
progress in the city's "rebuilding efforts." In some areas progress
has been greater than in other areas. In cities like Lynwood, 85 % of buildings
damaged or destroyed were rebuilt. But in the City of Angels itself only 17 %
of the buildings that received major damage had been rebuilt by 1994. Also, the
polarization that pervaded race relations in the city remains. The problems
raised at a national level by the Kerner Commission in the 1960s and the
California McCone Commission are still present in Los Angeles. While there are
improvements and important advances in some areas, in terms of police
brutality, segregation and unemployment, financial and commercial practices all
remain basically the same as they were decades before.
In fact, for all the publicity that the federal
government received for its efforts in the "rebuilding" of Los
Angeles, most of the funding has come from private sources, specifically the
insurance companies. The Federal Emergency Management Agency provided about 125
million dollars in grants and other forms of aid. The Small Business
Administration has provided about 318 million dollars although the insurance
companies have paid out close to 775 million dollars for close to 8,500 claims.
Rebuild LA's contribution, is more ambiguous, although officially stated at 500
million dollars many of the funds are actually pledges that did not
materialize.
On the other hand, Latinos feel that their
suffering has been compounded. Fifty-one per cent of the arrested were Latinos,
30 % of those who died were Latino, 40 % of the businesses destroyed were
Latino and yet, according to a study by the Tomas Rivera Center in Claremont,
California, denial rates for loans and grants to Latinos has ranged from 76 %
to 90 % (Pastor, 1993). Latinos constitute the largest minority group in the
city and in the state.
Still, some innovative efforts have sprung from
various sources, including the religious sectors. One of them, called the
"New City Parish," is the result of a coalition of inner-city
Lutheran congregations that have incorporated themselves in order to better
coordinate their efforts. Their efforts have ranged from food and clothes
distribution immediately following the uprising to the development of a child
care center, a tutorial center and a business maintenance service.
Unfortunately, the kind of massive economic aid
that would be needed to provide jobs for the thousands of young men and women
of this city never materialized. These local community economic development
efforts, while necessary, can only be effective as part of an overall economic
development plan.
One business sector that is experiencing growth
and that is a harbinger of things to come is gun sales. Los Angeles and Orange
County (one of the adjoining counties to Los Angeles) were among the top three
in handgun sales in California in 1994.
Firing ranges were also doing some brisk business.
A Vision for the Future?
Whether or not there is another uprising in Los
Angeles in the near future, confidence in the fairness of the nation's
institutions has been given a respite. But this city is still an armed camp.
Whites are either moving or arming themselves because of fear that those same
institutions will not be able to protect them from the wrath of disgruntled
communities of color. Journalist Dale
Maharidge (1996) was able to capture in The
Coming White Minority the fear and sense of being in a state of siege that
is shaping the worldview of whites in California. What happens in Los Angeles is important, not
only because it is the largest city in this state and one of the largest in the
nation but because many Ahave come to regard Los Angeles as emblematic of our collective
urban future@ (Marks, et al 2003, quoting
Dear 2000).
According to a comprehensive study of attitudes
of Angelinos ten years after these events, AFear and Loathing in Los Angeles?@ (Marks, et al., 2003) indicates that 20,000 jobs were lost and
5,000 lost permanently. While the report cites a survey by Guerra and Marks
(2002) that indicates a greater sense of community and tolerance than expected,
contradictorily, but not entirely unexpected, Ahalf of those surveyed believe another riot is likely to occur
within the next few years@ (Marks et al. 2003:4). Some 50,000 persons participated in the
rebellion, causing damages that are estimated today to be at least 1 billion
dollars (Marks, et al., 2003). The events touched off civil disturbances in
thirty cities across the nation, and 3,700 police officers, 2,300 highway
patrol personnel, 10,000 national guardsmen, and 4,000 army troops were used to
quell the insurrection.
The United States will need to refocus the
lenses through which it views its diverse communities. In the aftermath of the
uprising one of the major television networks was advertising a program about
the insurrection. A voice-over was saying "again black and white relations
lead to confrontation in our inner cities." In the meantime, the images
that were shown were of young Mexican men waving the Mexican flag in front of
the Parker Center, the LAPD headquarters during the early stages of the
insurrection. The vision needs to be broader so that we can see the other
actors in the American drama.
Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican American writer,
said in an overly optimistic piece in the Los Angeles Times in 1994
that, "We are without a sense of ourselves entire." I agree with him.
This idea of America was formed in the struggle and the oppression of Native
Americans, of Mexican Americans in the Southwest, of African Americans, and of
Puerto Ricans in the Northeast. We have wanted to deny a part of who we are and
yet it comes back and shouts at us in the least expected places:
Los Angeles, Washington D.C., San Antonio, Miami . . .
"Can't we all get along?" Yes, maybe,
but we must first transcend the stage of denial before we can be stronger. That
"other" is the marginalized part of "us," we can learn to
know our authentic selves if we can open a true dialogue with each other.
Otherwise, the alternative will be less democracy for all and less stability
for all. It is chilling to read that in 1993 the Justice Department announced
that 300 FBI agents whose jobs had become superfluous because of international
changes would be assigned to the nation's cities. An internal "evil
empire" perhaps? The continuing xenophobia against undocumented immigrants
tends to spill over into the native-born sons and daughters of immigrants. But
more dangerous is how divisions based on race are being replicated within
communities of color. Native-born and foreign-born Latinos racialize each other
in ways that hark back to how the dominant community racialized Latinos as a
whole. In schools around the Southwest native-born and foreign-born call each
other racial epithets that the dominant society used against them.
Hopefully we will embark down this path not because
it is in our best interest but because it is right. Fortunately, the justice
system did not "pursue a policy that strains social relationships"
this time around. Hopefully, the next
steps will be about justice. As Martin Luther King used to say, in freeing
others we free ourselves, otherwise Robert Michels will have had the last word.
[1]. This analysis is rooted in decades of involvement in anti-racist
training and organizing in the United States. The experiences as Associate
Director for Racial Justice Advocacy at the National Offices of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in Chicago 1988-90 and as a core trainer and Board member
(until 2004) of Crossroads Ministry, an anti-racist organizing and training
organization, shaped my understanding and analysis of race in the United
States. A version in Spanish of this paper was read at the V International
Conference on Hispanic Cultures in the United States, 6-10 of July, 1992 at the
Universidad Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain. Journalistic versions of this article
in English have appeared in the last years in
International Report and in Spanish in Deslindes,
Colombia, Claridad, Puerto Rico and El Carillon from Andover, MA.
This version was updated (2005) but the analysis was left as close as possible
to its original intent, to emphasize the racial character of an event where
race and class intersected and where Latinos where invisible to the media.
[2]. In the period immediately after the Mexican American War, which
ended with the signing of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty of 1848, the newly
conquered community of close to 100,000 Mexicans living in the Southwest,
engendered the phenomena of social bandits. Social bandits were people who
engaged in illegal activity as a form of social protest against social and
economic oppression (Hobsbawn, 1965).
[3]. Because the Civil Rights movement gained the higher moral ground,
race-based discourse became tabu unless it was used to remedy the consequences
of racism. But today, an ideology of Ablind racism@ has developed where race has been erased from public discourse and
a coded language to talk about race has substituted the old racist discourse
(Bonilla-Silva, 2003). In fact, legal discourse now argues that unless race is
explicitly the purpose of an act of discrimination, in other words, unless Aintention@ to do racial harm can
be proved, the courts have determined no racial discrimination case can be
supported. At a time when the cultural consensus does not require the use of
racial categories to indicate the target group, this new legal perspective will
exclude communities of color from being able to effectively use the legal
system as protection of their civil rights.
[4]. At least until 1998, when the voters of California approved
Proposition 227 that began the dismantling of bilingual education program in
the state. This proposition and others
that preceded it are indicators of the political racial polarization that marks
California, the majority of communities of color voted against Proposition 227,
majority of whites voted in favor. For
an interesting historical look at the debate around bilingualism and
"English Only" politics see Crawford (1992).
[5].. See Clifford (1992) good source article for the levels of social
stratification experienced by the city of Los Angeles. Most of the article's
focus is on socio-economic/class issues.
[6]. Le Bon (1946) attempted to understand the violence that followed
the French revolution.
[7]. The events that led to the rebellion follow a pattern very similar
to the one detailed by the AStructural Strain Theory@ or AValue Added Theory@ of collective behavior by Neil Smelzer (1962).
[8]. In fact, in a study done by George Rude in 1959 of the
"criminal riff raff" that participated in the riots that preceded the
French revolution of 1789, he found some interesting facts. Of the 662 persons
that were killed in the attack of the Bastille prison, all had regular
occupations and places of residence.
[9]. Similar patterns have been
found in Boston, Detroit, Denver, New York, etc. See "Mortgage Lending in
Black and White" in Dollars and Sense April, 1990. For Los Angeles
see Rosenblatt and Bates (1991). Recently the California Reinvestment
Commission (Stein & Laila, 2003) found a similar pattern in California for
African Americans and Latinos.
[10]. Police forces in general, and the LAPD in particular came under
additional public focus with the publication of former LAPD detective
Rothmiller (1992) This book reveals the inner workings of the Organized Crime
Intelligence Division, a unit that became a spying agency of the LAPD. Under
its surveillance were Robert Redford, Connie Chung, Rock Hudson, Tom Lasorda
etc. The surveillance net was extended even to the city's luminaries.
[11]. See an interesting critique of "Community Policing" by
Dean Lovelace, a community activist and Gordon Welty a sociology professor at
Wright State University, Ohio in "Community Policing in Dayton: More Flash
Than Substance" in the Dayton Daily News May 28, 1992.
[12]. A classic and clear summary of the debate about the "welfare
system" in the United States is Marmor (1990). This book also debunks the
idea presented by neo-conservatives during the late 1980s that "Great
Society" programs "created" poverty. Especially helpful are its
pointed critiques of Charles Murray's neo-conservative classic Losing Ground.
Unfortunately, President Clinton=s administration in 1996 fell to the ideological influence of the
neo-conservatives and dismantled the decades old social support net when the
1996 Welfare Reform Act was approved. The war against welfare was concluded.
[13].. One early good study on these processes are Bluestone and
Harrison (1982) analysis of de-industrialization and their more recent updated
analysis (1988).
[14].. An interesting description of the kinds of jobs the "Reagan
Job Machine" was creating is provided by this study by Barry Bluestone and
Bennett Harrison "The Great American Job Machine: The Proliferation of Low
Wage Employment in the U.S. Economy," prepared for the Joint Economic
Committee, U.S. Congress, December 1986.
[15].. There is a serious need for research about the nature of racism
in post-industrial society. The neo-marxist bent of some approaches has been
blamed for its failure to look at race as an "economic" force and
more as epiphenomena, but in fact, even within this perspective there is room
for a contextual understanding of race. There is also a need to break with the
black/white model to achieve a true understanding of race relations in the
United States today, any effort that does not include the particular
experiences of Latinos, Asians etc. will provide a flawed perspective.
Bonilla-Silva (2003) begins to lend a focus to a new perspective.
[16].. Since the number for whites include a certain proportion of
Latinos, in order to get to a approximation of the non-Latino white, I deducted
Latino and black central city poor from the total of central city poor. Most of
the "residue" should be white, Asian, and Native American poor.
[17].. This despite the evidence and wisdom that cities can be
productive places for the national economy see Jacobs, Jane, Cities and the wealth of nations :
principles of economic life New York
: Random House, 1984.
[18].. Despite the hoopla over the well publicized efforts at
"Rebuilding LA" the mood in suburban Southern California has been
very cool to linking with the inner-city communities in a circle of life. All
of Orange County's Congress representatives, a suburban adjoining county to
L.A. voted against massive federal aid to Los Angeles. Ironically, most persons
outside of southern California make no distinction between Orange County cities
such as Irvine or Anaheim and Los Angeles. The failure to link with Los Angeles
will affect the whole region economically. See Hubler (1992).
[19]. After September 11, 2001, the fear of Islam and Muslim terrorism
has replaced the Aevil empire@ as a divisive and uniting image for the United States. It has
served to fan the flames of nationalism, while it has polarized the United
States between those who struggle to maintain civil liberties and those who
seem willing to give them up in exchange for the false security of the national
security state.
[20].. The recent literature on multiculturalism evidences this concern
for national unity. Unfortunately, the issue of justice is not a clearly articulated
concern even in the liberal perspective of Schlessinger. See Dinesh D'Souza Illiberal
Education and Arthur Schlesinger's The Disuniting of America as
examples of early concerns for the disuniting effects of cultural diversity.
More recently, Samuel Huntington from Harvard University in a Foreign Policy
article in 2004 and a later book and Victor Davis Hanson, a Fresno State
University professor of classics writing a book on sociology of assimilation
have blamed Mexicans for their presumed inability to assimilate into
Anglo-Saxon culture.
[21]. By
1997, despite the fact that 500 corporations had promised they would invest
more than 1 billion dollars in riot‑torn South Central Los Angeles few actually
delivered on their financial commitments.
(Utley 1997).
[22]. Chief Williams left amidst another racially stigmatizing scandal
in the Ramparts division of the LAPD. A anti-gang units had used the power of
their badges to railroad dozens of Latinos and African Americans into false
convictions with fabricated evidence. Ironically, but not surprising, the lead
police officer was a Puerto Rican. This confirmed the community=s sense that the LAPD
while more Acolorful@ was still an instrument to perpetuate white supremacy.
