In a 2017 documentary called LA 92, the revisiting of the Los Angeles riots sparked by the “not guilty” verdict of four police officers who had mercilessly beaten Rodney King seemed to presage yet another major reckoning on the part of black citizens as the problem at hand was never and has never been resolved. Fittingly distributed by the National Geographic channel (for the effects of racism truly are something out of the darkest recesses of [human] nature), the tagline for the documentary is, eerily, “The past is prologue.” To what, though? More injustice? Or eventual vindication? It appears, for the moment, only more of the former. Almost thirty years later, the scenes of looting and fires burning on the streets of Minneapolis echo the infamous war zone rendering of South Central LA, before fires and property damage spread to other parts of the city as well. But to understand reaching that level–which apparently many white people need charts and graphs to help their unfeeling brains compute it–filmmakers Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin take us back to one of the root causes of black people’s sense of injustice in Los Angeles, where real estate and property laws consistently relegated them to outskirts and slums–perpetually separating them from white suburbs as a means to “divide and conquer” (a mantra Donald Trump still seems to believe is viable in 2020).
The cauldron of dissatisfaction has to reach a certain boiling point before it explodes, and in 1992 Los Angeles, all the elements of a detonation were there–starting with a recession under George H.W. Bush affecting black people the most as usual, the killing of fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins by the 51-year-old Korean woman working the convenience store while her husband (the owner) napped in the car out back, said Korean woman getting off scot-free thanks to the judge, the release of the videotaped beating of Rodney King and, finally, the “not guilty” verdict of all four police officers filmed brutally beating King. The coinciding of all these events reached their breaking point on April 29, 1992, a Wednesday in “sunny LA” that turned the town hotter than ever with rage. The same rage that had cropped to the surface in Watts that August 11th of 1965, of which one CBS reported commented, “The August riots may only be a curtain-raiser to what could blow up one day in the future” as a result of not actually addressing where that caliber of anger was coming from–instead suppressing and subjugating it anew. At the time, it was the city’s worst case of unrest (spreading to other parts of Southern California as well) until 1992 rolled around–the California National Guard brought in during both instances, hence Governor Newsom’s hesitancy to do so again considering the PTSD factor (though, still, they’ve been summoned).
Yet the racial tensions of LA were not–and are not–restricted solely between whites and blacks. It is Asians, too, that have caused their fair share of resentment. And black people are not without profiting from their own racial beefs with the Asian community, pitted so often against blacks for resources in low-income neighborhoods. One of the ways in which they did benefit was from the internment of 70,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII, when blacks moved in on the suddenly vacant property in more “mainland” LA areas like Little Tokyo. Later on, the tenuous “alliance” between Koreans and blacks in South Central were shattered when Soon Ja Du was acquitted by the white female judge, Joyce Karlin, who determined that, despite the jury’s recommended punishment of the maximum sentence, the verdict should be overturned in favor of her own (community service and probation).
The black people of the community, already seeing Koreans as capitalizing on their limited economic means, were horrified that the “law” had merely further confirmed to them what society had been reiterating for decades in LA: black lives did not matter. Latasha was shot over a bottle of orange juice, which Du immediately suspected her of trying to steal when, in fact, she had the money in her hand to pay after putting the juice in her backpack. Following an altercation, Latasha turned her back to walk out when Du shot her, killing her instantly. In the battle between the “model minority” and the black person, White Power had shown yet again who its sympathies were loyal to.
Brewing in the background of what happened to Rodney King, the sense of injustice could not be quelled. Just as it cannot be in the conglomerate of events that have led to the present uprising and unrest of 2020 in all the USA. While it might have started in Minneapolis, it has spread everywhere like a brush fire–LA included, naturally. But it wasn’t just the grotesque filmed eight-minute murder of George Floyd by a racist cop that has escalated people’s actions. No, just as the case was in 1992, there are myriad coalescing factors at play. So when some white and non-black folks wonder why black people are getting “rowdy” again, think of all that has happened to them this year to keep emphasizing their insignificance in the eyes of White Power and the structures thereof. Starting with the pandemic statistics blatantly showing the disproportionate divide between black/brown and white lives–as the white privilege that allowed many office workers and congenitally affluent people to “stay at home” without being affected or risking their lives at an “essential worker” job. Funny, how being essential doesn’t seem to tie in with equality or adequate pay though, innit?
As the economic and health effects of coronavirus hit black communities the hardest, there was the sudden viral video of Amy Cooper in Central Park defaulting on her white privilege with the threat, “I’m going to call the police. I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” This after the Ahmaud Arbery shooting in February, his “crime” being simply “jogging while black” in Georgia. His death at the hands of, who else, a former white supremacist cop and his son. Following that, there was the shooting of Breonna Taylor in her own home by officers of Kentucky’s Louisville Metro PD. And so Floyd’s chokehold murder was the straw that has broken the black community’s back in 2020 and maybe forever. Because the “tolerance” for being treated this way cannot be sustained, as we’ve seen repeatedly throughout history.
Author Kimberly Jones recently vented on the scandalization over more LA ‘92-style looting and violence in the wake of all this, “You can’t win. The game is fixed. So when they say, ‘Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?’–it’s not ours! We don’t own anything! We don’t own anything! Trevor Noah said it so beautifully… there’s a social contract that we all have–that if you steal or if I steal, then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us! So the social contract is broken! And if the social contract is broken, why the fuck do I give a shit about burnin’ a fuckin’ Target? You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a fuck! You broke the contract for four hundred years when we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract, so fuck your Target! Far as I’m concerned they can burn this bitch to the ground. And it still wouldn’t be enough. And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.” Because, believe it or not, the latter is not what rioting and looting is about. It’s about making the noise that is apparently required to be heard. To be noticed by government, by comfortable white people in a place to use their voice for change, by everyone worldwide. To say, “I’m not fucking taking this shit anymore. And if I don’t matter to you, then the things you hold dearly don’t matter to me.”
While the alignment of LA ‘92 and USA ‘20 bear similarities in how the riots and protests came to fruition, maybe there can be one fundamental difference between them. Maybe USA ‘20 is different from LA ‘92, as some have been saying. Maybe the start of real systemic change can come from all of this. Because if it doesn’t, no one should be surprised when all of America gets set ablaze for the last time.
