 |
| Photo by Phil Parmet |
Those riots, for those of you who don't remember them or just remember catching a news flash or for whom the riots are little more than another historical event you'd heard of but didn't experience, akin to the Vietnam war protests or the invention of color television, were the last great violent rebellion of the modern American era.
Yes King was by all accounts a ne'er-do-well and, yes, he was driving at almost twice the legal BAC limit and would have probably gone to jail for this probation violation and, yes, he had resisted arrest. But the response of the police was not only an example of representatives of the government abusing their power over the people they were supposed to "protect and serve", it was yet another example of the racial and social inequality plaguing this sprawlingly diverse city - if it was a crowd of black cops beating on some white Hollywood deviant those cops would've been fired, charged, and possibly incarcerated, so was the sentiment.
The poor and the black and the disenfranchised of Los Angeles lashed back with the only thing they knew to use to get anybody's attention - after unsuccessfully trying to do it the right way, via a system they already suspected was rigged, they used the one tool of the proletariat as old as class systems - violence. The riots lasted 6 days with approximately 54-68 deaths and countless theft, destruction, and general chaos left in its wake. What had started as a racial thing had grown to include all the angry, all the wasted, everybody who'd ever been a victim of this corrupt city and its corrupt police department at the height of its morally bankrupt apocheir. Just harken to Sublime's recap of the riots APRIL 29, 1992: "They said it was for the black man, said it was for the mexican but not for the white man but if you looked on the streets, it wasn't about Rodney King, or this fucked up situation or these fucked up police; it's about running up, and staying on top, and screaming 187 on a motherfucking cop." Then Bradley Nowell went on to detail all the shit he and his band stole as they joined in the looting. Just look at this gallery, put up by the Baltimore Sun. The city burnt and, much like the wildfires are a natural part of the Los Angeles hills, mother nature's way to destroy all the old mesquite and palms and brambles and chaparral of the desert foothills surrounding L.A., perhaps this had to happen to make way for a new future in this city.
New York City used to have the reputation as the most diverse city in the country. But as rents have risen and the streets are cleaned, the lower classes (meaning as well disproportionately large amounts of minorities) are increasingly bussed in from Queens, the Bronx, and further out on Long Island. South Central is about 6 miles from Beverly Hills as the crow flies. San Francisco has always been too small to be properly diverse, its racial communities more like appetizers than full entrees reflecting all the colors of the spectrum, though of course the Golden Gate city has its bread and butter when it comes to the rainbows of its Castro district. Detroit was white with black minorities, then they had race riots in the 60's and became black with white minorities (thanks to the city's great white flight). Chicago is too insulated from the coasts to attract the high number of immigrants who literally got off a boat and stopped. And from these big starting points the cities get smaller, more regional, and less inviting, then, of people looking to find a large community of likewise people struggling amidst the massive white cloud of America.
And as anybody with actual experience will tell you, the intermingling of races, far from breeding tolerance more often actually fosters tensions and frustrations as people become divided along values and look to create support groups, the most natural being a group based on the undeniable factor of race (you can disagree on politics or child-rearing or even religion but you can't disagree on the solidarity of one's racial identity). Just look at the petri dish that are prison communities, where people often gravitate to racially-determined cliques and gangs. Not to say this is a viable or correct way to live one's life. In fact, these self-imposed segregations are more often based on fears, most of which are unfounded, that people who don't look like us or act like us or believe like us can ever actually like us. Or help us since the only reason for having a community is surrounding yourself with people who can help you both when your chips are down and your chips are up. People don't like people who aren't like them seems to be a generally held (but denied) sentiment. Add to this the factor that L.A., as Axl Rose so succinctly called "the jungle", is a city of 3.8 million people all struggling for their little chunk of this ocean-to-mountains paradise and you have even more incentive for people to dislike each other, the ultimate fire-starter of competition, and thereby it's simplest to revert, again, to the undeniable differences presented by race. As goes the tagline for CRASH, the Oscar-winning Paul Haggis movie about racial and social tensions in Los Angeles, "Moving at the speed of life, we are bound to collide with each other." While Rodney king was certainly the spark, this riot had been building for years, just another in the long line of riots that included Watts in 1964 (about Civil Rights) and the Chicano protests of 1970 (in which famed anti-government Chicano reporter Ruben Salazar was killed by a cannister fired by LAPD riot police - it was during the investigation of Salazar's death for a national article that a rising Rolling Stone reporter, on the tails of his successful book about the HELL'S ANGELS, met a fiery Chicano attorney Oscar Acosta and in the middle of writing this article, a process that plunged the writer into paranoia of police execution as he uncovered more and more evidence that Salazar's was a premeditated police assassination, he was sent by Sports Illustrated to write 1000 words on the Mint 400 as a kind of escape from the headiness of this bad mojo. That writer of course was Hunter S. Thompson, Acosta of course became Dr. Gonzo, and that escape from the pressures and fears of the Salazar piece became the basis for FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS). And as such, these fires have brought about a newer Los Angeles but America is far from the post-racial oasis that people had been claiming over the last few years.
The LAPD is the most visibly changed part of the Los Angeles social construct in the post-Rodney-King riot days. Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, who had taken the helm in 1978, stepped down 2 months after the riots. With a reputation as a racially-insensitive asshole, according to an LA Times article "he generated controversy with gaffes about Latinos, blacks and Jews, most famously with a remark about blacks faring poorly under police chokeholds because their physiology was different from that of 'normal' people." Also, per that same article the LAPD has gone from 59% white to 37% (still, with Los Angeles being only 28.7% non-hispanic white that's not fully representative, though it's certainly better than 59%). Though at the same time they still shoot unarmed men in the back and form secret cliques to hunt gangs and whatnot so perhaps there's still some ground to make up.
Rodney King has also changed. From robber and addict to race relations spokesman, pacifist ("Can't we all get along?") hip hop producer (he used part of the $3.8 million he won from the city in a civil suit to start a hip-hop label), and, well, addict (he was on CELEBRITY REHAB WITH DR. DREW last year). He just recently struck a plea deal for yet another DUI.
The city has been rebuilt and possibly for the better as one need only look at many of the crumbling shopping centers and east-side eateries which survived the fires to wonder if perhaps their salvation at the time might be regretted now that the neighbors have nicer buildings and parking lots thanks to insurance money and whatnot.
On the other side, Los Angeles is the "Gang Capital of the Nation" with 450 gangs combining to total 45,000 members. Even more, as certain neighborhoods clean up the violence, gentrification has reverted to its old sinister technique of containment instead of eradication. For example, many children growing up in the gang-ridden neighborhoods of South L.A. (formerly known as "South Central") exhibit symptoms of PTSD and, as pointed out in Stacey Peralta's doc MADE IN AMERICA in spite of being surrounded by the some of the greatest wealth and minds as well as some of the most powerful people in the world, these children are essentially ignored, almost Invisible Children style but in our own backyards. Think this isn't bound to fester into a new generated of disenfranchised youth tired of being on the fringe and having to settle for proximity to an American Dream that will never be theirs?
On my old drive home I used to get a nice taste of Los Angeles. Start in Beverly Hills. Which becomes West Hollywood, driving past the Beverly Center (where you can buy luxury brands and where Akon's protege was shot and killed). Which becomes Hollywood where the shiny becomes slightly less so. Which briefly becomes Hancock Park(ish), nice big tudor homes for the rich folk who want a little history with their overpriced square footage, ending in the Wilshire Country club, a line of demarcation as Beverly Blvd windd through lush rolling greens smelling of fresh grass and dew, springtime year round. After that things smell like burnt metal and concrete and the storefronts appear with Korean letters as I entered Korea Town. Then the sort of no-man's land of the East side, kinda Silverlake as you arc through the strip malls and pupuserias and Korean grocers and Mexican meat markets just south of the uber-hip parts of the Los Feliz - Silverlake - Echo Park triumvirate that hangs from just south of Sunset up the hills to Griffith Park. Then you turn at the giant exterminator building to find yourself on my old hillside apartment in hip Silverlake, where apart from the restaurants and the gay clubs everything is frighteningly caucasian.
Now I live in Hollywood. My neighbors on all sides are of all colors, races, denominations, and walks of life. Including the tranny hookers I pass on my way into my local 7/11 and the crusties backpacking through Cali who sleep in local Delongpre Park. My wife's car's sideview mirrors were busted by a black kid saying he was spurned to bust them (amazingly he was caught by the police) by gang-members shooting at him nearby and, in fact, shells were found where he claimed the shots were coming from. And on the gates to 7-figure H-wood homes can be found tags from one of the local Mexican or Salvadorean or whatever Latino gangs patrol our neighborhood.
My church has masses in English and Spanish. The local music school has black students trying to work in hip hop and white death-metallers and alternakids and goth and all in between. Hollywood boulevard is prowled by whites and blacks and yellows and reds and cafes and browns and pinks and tawny's equally in search of a good time at the many clubs and bars nestled into the black marble and the old stars. When I got stomped at the Roosevelt Hotel it was by a gang of 5 spoiled white boys with one huge black kid and another stringy Latino. As much as I can remember, that is.
When I look out across the national landscape I start to think maybe L.A. is a success story. From Trayvon Martin to the national outcry from racist HUNGER GAMES fans about a character they'd misread as being a cute white girl being portrayed on screen by a cute black girl (which is actually correct, per the novel) America is anything but a post-racial society, despite the media claims otherwise.
While sure, everyday my drive to work is peppered with racist expletives as I navigate through the slow, the indecisive, the distracted and idiotic and inattentive, my insensitive remarks are against all races, including my own. Fucking white drivers are the worst. Never pay attention to shit, always on their cell phone or afraid to punch the goddamn gas to make that left turn. Maybe that's the real lesson to gain from Los Angeles' riots, in which blacks and whites and Chicanos alike burnt the city down and stole new appliances and in which racist cops were kicked out of the positions of power they simply abused - that for America to ever truly be post-racial, the secret is that we have to hate equally. Anger is good and anybody who tells you it's not has probably never really cared about anything.
20 years later most of the people weighing in on an extensive LA Times piece seem to think the city is better for the riots. It took this explosion from the bottom to shake things up, to rebuild a city still languishing from its soulless 80's (see LESS THAN ZERO) into what today is - well it's still a rodent but where it used to be a rat at least now it's a weasel. On its way to being a capybara. Perhaps that's the other part of the lesson, the old Vietnam adage about destroying a city to save it. Not that this should be a call to arms. But like that brilliantly catchy Fun song goes "Tonight we are young, so let's set the world on fire, we can grow brighter, than the sun."
Set the world on fire. Hate equally. And while we're at it, let's try and do one better and maybe get a shrink in to see those fucked up kids in South Central. Join me in the glow of the new and improved (but still pretty fucked up) America. Let's stop aiming for utopia. I'd settle for a place where the cops are shook up into at least a semblance of non-corruption every other year, where racial differences are little more than a way to frame jokes about a person, and where every couple years, like the wildfires of the Angeles Forest, the old rotting infrastructure is burnt down to make way for the new.
Happy 20th year anniversary, Rodney King Riots. Savor it now. Because nobody will remember you when you turn 30. We Americans have a frighteningly short memory.
God bless.
- Ryan
No comments:
Post a Comment