(credit: L.A. Times)
As I turned out, I stayed there for several days — helping to cover the L.A. riots, which broke out shortly after my flight landed. It was one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history.
The airport was shut down amid the escalating violence, complicating plans to send reporters to L.A., and I was there anyway (albeit overdressed with a skimpy overnight bag). Some of my colleagues just hopped in their cars and drove down to join me.
It was an ugly and unpredictable story to cover. I had vague memories of the 1965 Watts riots from my L.A. childhood (I was very young), but the 1992 riots are vivid in my memory.
The rioting started on April 29 after a Simi Valley jury trial resulted in the acquittal of four L.A. Police Department officers accused in the videotaped beating of Rodney King.
Riots — you learn on the scene — do not occur everywhere at once, and damage often is concentrated at certain intersections and strips. You have to be careful in your reporting, avoiding hyperbole. Many sections of South Central L.A. and Koreatown were untouched by the riots, for example.
In total, though, thousands of people rioted for six days — 53 people were killed and 2,000 were injured.
KING: “I WAS THE LUCKY ONE”
I reflected on the riots this past weekend, when Rodney King died. King, a Sacramento native, was uncomfortable with his role as a political symbol, noting that those who fought racism in the early 20th century faced even more difficult challenges. “I was the lucky one,” he once said.
Though it was 20 years ago, race relations haven’t improved much — if at all. In recent years, it seems, we’ve been reliving the past when it comes to civil rights, women’s rights and so on — rather troubling, especially when you’re raising an inquisitive 10-year-old. Not much has been resolved.
In our community, I couldn’t even find a headline on Rodney King’s death on Sunday — though I could read all the details about the Soapbox Derby. Some people from L.A. probably moved up here after the 1992 L.A. riots, part of the “white flight” syndrome we talk about. It still permeates our local politics and culture.
But it’s hardly limited to our community. Last month, a new Newsweek/Daily Beast poll found that America faces a deepening level of racial division and polarization.
Majorities of both whites (72 percent) and blacks (89 percent) believe the country is divided by race, the poll found. Twice as many blacks as whites say it is very divided. And a majority of blacks say that racism is a big problem in America.
“Whites and blacks disagree–and disagree fundamentally when it comes to when—blacks will achieve racial equality with whites,” it said.
Not much has changed in my lifetime — despite optimism to the contrary. In fact, I find myself having the same discussions with my son that my father had with me when I asked him about the Watts riots back in 1965. In the end, people just aren’t very tolerant.
Filed under: Uncategorized
The standard response emenating from many in our rural communities to issues of race in Ametica, which to fully understand you must actually study through its ignoble history, is to say, “that was yesterday, it’s all in the past now, and if you bring it up you are the racist.”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Racial prejudice, slavery, and Jim Crow are Americas original sin. To understand America, and love America for our accomplishments, to fully understand what a nation engaged in an inexorable march to freedom, individual liberty, and equality really is, one must not only know our history, but frankly assess our faults, inequalities and at times crimes. Only by embracing the truth can we continue to build a great nation, and peacefully spread the blessings of liberty to others.
This is the fundamental difference between the “America-Love It Or Leave It” crowd and the “America-Lets Build A Better Future” crowd–one looks back and redefines history to meet their desires, the other looks forward and says let’s make it the best it can be. Who is the ‘real American’?
Here’s to Rodney King, reluctant figurehead, who will forever be known for the simply and quintessentially American statement, “We can all get along.”
Well put Steve and I totally agree. It is a hard nut to crack, despite the denials that there is no nutshell.
I’ve pasted a short piece on this subjet:….
President Barack Obama giving the 2012 State of the Union address. (AP Photo/Saul Loeb)People are usually reluctant to admit their real feelings in surveys, but there’s no doubt that our experiences and our prejudices play a part in the way we vote. In order to figure out whether racial bias affected Barack Obama’s results in the 2008 presidential election, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard University, passed over easy-to-manipulate surveys and looked at data from another source: online searches.
Related: My 3-year-old has race issues. Where did she learn to think that way?
When most people are searching for information online, they’re likely to be alone and less likely to censor their thoughts, he explains. “You may have typed things into Google that you would hesitate to admit in polite company,” he writes in a New York Times article. “I certainly have. The majority of Americans have as well: We Google the word ‘porn’ more often than the word ‘weather’.”
He chose a common racial insult that starts with “N” and looked for searches that used the singular and plural forms of the word. “The most common searches including the epithet… return websites with derogatory material about African-Americans,” he writes in his study. “The top hits for the top racially charged searches are nearly all textbook examples of antilocution, a majority group’s sharing stereotype-based jokes using coarse language outside a minority group’s presence.”
That held true for searches from 2004 through 2007 (searches for “n**ga” led mostly to rap lyrics, which he disregarded for this study). “I used data from 2004 to 2007 because I wanted a measure not directly influenced by feelings toward Mr. Obama,” he writes in the New York Times.
But from 2008 on, he discovered, “Obama” was one of the most prevalent search terms in racially tinged online searches.
Related: Obama’s team suggests racism behind proposed Write ad campaign
After gathering information on the racially charged search queries, Stephens-Davidowitz took a look at voting data from around the country and compared each area’s 2008 results, when Obama was running for president, to voting results from 2004, when all of the candidates were white.
Though many people believe that our first African-American president won the election thanks in part to increased turnout by African-American voters, Stephens-Davidowitz’s research shows that those votes only added about 1 percentage point to Obama’s totals. “In the general election, this effect was comparatively minor,” he concludes. But in areas with high racial search rates, the fact that Obama is African American worked against him, sometimes significantly.
“The results imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in the United States, prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points and 5.0 percentage points of the national popular vote,” Stephens-Davidowitz points out in his study. “This implies racial animus gave Obama’s opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage country-wide.”
“Any votes Obama gained due to his race in the general election were not nearly enough to outweigh the cost of racial animus, meaning race was a large net negative for Obama,” he adds.
The state with the highest racially charged search rate was West Virginia, where 41 percent of voters chose Keith Judd, a white man who is also a convicted felon currently in prison in Texas, over Obama just this May. Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, and New Jersey rounded out the top 10 most-racist areas, according to the search queries used.
Even if states that are considered fairly liberal, racism is prevalent enough in certain areas to put the entire state high up on the list. “Other areas with high percentages included western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York and southern Mississippi,” Stephens-Davidowitz points out in his New York Times article.
The 10 states with the fewest racially charged searches were Utah, Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Washington DC, Minnesota, Oregon, Montana, and Wyoming.
What does this mean for this year’s contest? “Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third,” Stephens-Davidowitz explains. “Prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.”
My same old angle on the age old problem. The problem isn’t really about race it is about who sits at the absolute bottom of the SES spectrum and skin color is an easy way to suppress a certain segment of the population. Those who sit atop of the SES ladder whether it be 2012, 1964, 1912, 1864, or the year 12 engage in class warfare setting up a system where those at the bottom of the SES are fighting for survival, fighting to get ahead, and fighting amongst each other instead of fighting the actual system that is in place. I don’t have a problem with someone who has much more training earning higher wages but I do have a problem when someone who shuffles money around makes $5,000 to $1 over someone who is paid off the strength of their back and the sweat of the brow. And the latter not earning enough for the basics of shelter, clothes, food, education, health care, and retirement. Here is a quote I use all the time that sums up the situation.
“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”
Jay Gould
Ben I am forced to disagree with you. There have been many who have been on the absolute bottom of the economic ladder in this Country. The bottom of the heap has been well stocked with national origins (Irish, Polish, Mexican), populated with minority religions (Roman Catholics), and marginalized by the color of their skin (Asians and Hispanics). There has only been one cultural group that has been property, the people who originally were from the African sub-continent and can be marked as such. A social/religious historical justification for the “curious” institution of slavery as it was practiced in the United States is informative–slaves were meant to be slaves because they were less than a human being. That is the social problem that we have inherited and that needs to be ruthlessly rooted out.
John, must disagree somewhat with your statement, as at least on the eastern coast in the various tribes commonly made war on each other and took prisoners for slaves. It may have differed in degrees from the institutionalized form that developed by the Civil War era, but then I’m one who doesn’t find oral history as authoritive as documented history.
John,
“There has only been one cultural group that has been property”
This is not true. Women roughly 50% of the population were basically property of men for a century or more both culturally and legally. http://www.historyofsupremecourt.org/history/gender/overview-essay.htm
John,
You’re missing the biggest point, it has been the system that set up this stratification. Skin color being easiest to identify makes it so darker skin color never really seem to leave the lower status in the US while lighter skinned European immigrants that spend some time at the bottom seem to rise out of it. After a couple generations assimilation can take place with little evidence but skin color is virtually impossible to hide or bury resulting in a perpetual lower status. It happens in just about every culture I know or read about. Here is a study of Mexico with skin color and social inequalities. http://www.utexas.edu/news/2010/10/06/social_inequality_mexico/
This is a complex issue but I am trying to keep it as simple as possible. It is something that is imbedded very deep within cultures and very difficult to explain in blog comments.
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” ~ H.L. Mencken
John,
I think the joke then becomes H.L. Mencken answer.
“A banker, a Tea Party activist and a Union organizer had a dozen cookies. The banker took 11 of them and whispered to the Tea Party activist, “hey, that union guy wants some of your cookie”. ”
I have used this example on SFR before and I will use it now. It is scene from To Kill A Mockingbird.
This is a description of Bob Ewell, an extremely poor white man that has little respect for anybody or anything including himself. The one power Bob E. does have is that of higher social status than Tom Anderson an innocent black man that is framed for raping Bob E. daughter.
“All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbors was, that if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white”
Race or skin color is all over this post but racism (taught) is a tool to create division, jealousy, and hatred among people who should be united against an unjust system that allows a small few to control so much. Power comes in the form of money=political or in numbers. Keep the masses at odds with each other and the political power=money stays in the hands of the few at the top.
Possibly in contemporary humor my point can be better understood. A joke that was going around at the beginning of OWS/ 99%.
“A banker, a Tea Party activist and a Union organizer had a dozen cookies. The banker took 11 of them and whispered to the Tea Party activist, “hey, that union guy wants some of your cookie”. ”
Keep those at the bottom fighting each other so they never unite against those at the top. Skin color is the easiest way to have a constant other to point a finger at for our problems and religion comes in at a very distant second in my opinion.
Just FYI: The SacBee is linking to this post over on the right-hand side:
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/18/4569626/reporter-remembers-trial-that.html
They sent a nice note about the value of linking to bloggers, and they also mentioned the thoughtful commentary by this blog’s readers on this post and others.
The internet is changing how we communicate.
Ed: Yes. That is true. But the institution of slavery as practiced by the Iroquois Confederacy was much different than that as practiced by Colonial and Ante-Bellum America. A slave was a member of the household and was respected. Eventually slaves were emancipated and often stayed as part of the family that they belonged to. And they were never sold.
Well John, I believe the conditions varied among the Algonquins, which of course included the Iroquois five nations, then when the Tuscurora from down south joined, the six nations. True, as tribes were depleted, they adopted others and merged, but very hard to generalize exactly what conditiions were for all. After all the Algonquins linguist group included most tribes along the eastern coast, and they had their own special tricks as savage and barbaric as anything the Europeans knew. So, while not the same per se, my research reveals that it could be terribly unpleasant. And, when they took slaves, they didn’t have to pay. Of course, no deplorable, inhumane, ocean crossing like the Africans endured. But complicity in the slave trade falls heavily on inter-tribal rivalry in Africa, too. A few Portugese soldiers armed with muskets that were cumbersom and took a long time to load would never come out of the African interior; it took raids by other tribes to bring rivals to the coast. People just can’t stop being savage toward other people. That’s really my point; centuries of slaughter, captivity, slavery, as mass movements of a people overwhelm an established people, be it in central Asia, Germany, the Americas. The pattern has always repeated itself. We were alwys told we are part Cherokee; very possible as early ancestors traveled from Carolinas to TX where my paternal grandmother was born, and that was the general path of the Trail of Tears. I guess that’s what history is, a trail of tears.
I guess I will end my trying to explain this complex nuanced issue with this; racism is taught and a symptom/ tool of a much bigger problem. The only way we eliminate racism is through correcting the huge income inequality gap along with everything that comes with it and education together. Neither one alone is enough.
I was telling my wife about this thread and she said that Sienna Gold on KVMR was discussing this very topic today on her show. Her guest was stating many of the same points I have made here. I am not saying racism isn’t alive and well in America but rather racism is a symptom/ tool of much bigger picture that keeps the masses divided. I remember a sociology professor I once had talked about how there were more hangings in the north during the post Civil War than in the south due to the fact that former slaves or their descendants were now competing for low wage jobs alongside poor whites.
The other thing we need to notice is whether we are talking about immigrant people of color, Italians, Irish, Mexican, or women in general many of the same stereotypes were and are used degrading the particular group. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
I’d like to see the numbers on lynching of low wage whites in America between 1865-1970. I think that most of them were killed more like Joe Hill or the fictitious Jim Casey in the Grapes of Wrath, fighting for their rights as part of a group. I may be wrong. I wonder if anyone has actually done a modern sociological study on lynching that is statistically accurate. According to one study conducted by the University of Missouri Law School with data from the Tuskegee Institute there were 4700 lynchings between 1882-1968, with 3500 being black and 1300 being white.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html
I am reading a great book on the American Revolutionary period and the origins of the the Constitution right now called Freedom Just Around the Corner by Walter McDougall and they are discussing the origins of the term “lynching”, which came from a Virginia justice of the peace, one Charles Lynch, who ordered the extralegal execution of loyalists during the Revolutionary War.
And, of course, lynching wasn’t the only means in the post war South to get rid of black men. I may have posted this before, but at that time the militias began to fill up with black men. this according to Saul Cornell. And then, at night, these black militiamen began to be dragged from there homes and murdered, not necessarily lynched. If I remember correctly–and maye I don’t–but I think it was some years after the war and Reconstruction that the NRA was established and the efforts to “Spin” the meaning of the 2nd amendmend began, consciously or otherwise.
@All. This is a great thread. I would like to keep it going in person. Lets get together as a meetup and follow this up.
It is a great thread, John, and I have a few more comments. I hope you realize, I only mildly disagreed with you on the Indian slavery issue as an Institution. And, in truth, I don’t remember much about slavery and the Iroquois; I do remember the Iroquois did embrace depleted tribes under their umbrella of confederacy and protecttion. But the slavery issue among the Indians–and that is how I shall refer to the various tribes; the same as historians do, and as do Native- Americans themselves everytime I see them advocating an issue on TV. Also, when I was still working, I had an Indian CD playing, drum circle music, when a co-worker and good friend arrived and I used the word Indian to describe the CD and he corrected me, being PC, as much of the time I would have Ravi Shankar playing–this is before students arrive. But just that weekend I’d read a poll of Native-Americans and the responses were about the same to all questions: 87% didn’t have a problem with the use of the word Indian, or names like Braves, Redskins, Illini, etc., for school sports teams. There were more questions along this thread, but the responses were overwhelming against the Politically Correct version. Just wanted to avoid any issue over choice of words.
But slavery was widespread and “had a long pre-contact history among southern chiefdoms, although the original scale was relatively small,” but it grew. “Slavery was already a fact of daily life in Indian society, but with the opening of English trade,the scale on which it was practiced ballooned. . . .The first Indian group to take up commercial slaving were the Westo.” The Westo were driven from their homes on the southern shore of Lake Erie during the Beaver Wars of the mid 1600′s, in which the Iroquois basically wiped out the Susquehannock. This war was fought beyond the sight, so to speak, of the Europeans, so written, eyewitness records are lacking. And of course the Spanish were nearby, in Florida, and captive Indians, by Indians, were sold for work on the sugar islands.
Quite different for sure, but still much potentential for great unpleasantness. (latest source–The First Frontier, Scott Weidensaul) An ironic aside–several pages are devoted to an ancestor of mine, captured during King Philips War after much of Haverhill, MA people were massacred. She escaped, so the story goes, hatcheting a bunch of Indian children, which did not receive universal acclaim it seems, but Cotton Mather thought it just Splendid. (Perhaps his father was Incensed.) Found this out only two weeks ago. doing geneological research and contacting a person back east. Interesting but tedious work. But I was entrusted with a partial tree over 50 years ago, by grandmother which goes back to 1638 and those intolerant Puritans.
BTW, John, Allan W. Eckert has written an excellent series of books, starting with The Frontiersmen, then The Wilderness Empire which I think deals with Sir Wm. Johnson, the Iroquois and lots more. I read the series years ago.