The L.A. riots are now part of our modern racial history, added to a list that stretches from Birmingham through Boston to Howard Beach. Here are some Americans wrestling with our lingering national dilemma:
Spencer Holland Director, Center for Educating African-American Males
My first reaction was, what am I going to tell my children?
I’m still grappling with that. We told them that this kind of thing was finished in America. We’re on them to do their academics, to stay in school, and then something like this happens.
I say to our children all the time that if it hadn’t been for white citizens of good standing, slavery would not have ended. If it hadn’t been for white citizens of good standing, the civil-rights movement wouldn’t have taken hold the way it did. So white people should let their children know that white people who do things like the police in the King case are wrong, just like black people in the ghetto who sell drugs are wrong.
But there is no need to burn down your own community. We learned those lessons in the ’60s. You don’t burn down your community. You mobilize and you wake up and you help each other.
Bill Bradley Senator, New Jersey
I had prayed I would never see this again. I hoped I’d never have to worry about another war at home.
The key thing now is to avoid a chain reaction, to stabilize the situation. Then we have to use these events as a pretext for rather dramatic action. We have to fight for and build democracy in every generation. We have to do it at every level: the presidency, every state, every community, every family. Federal money is necessary–but not sufficient. We do need a sizable infusion of federal money. If we decided to spend $15 billion to $20 billion a year on rebuilding our infrastructure, much of that money would wind up being spent in the cities. We need to do that. We also need to spend more on the Job Corps, neighborhood development, unemployment benefits, welfare reform. We need to fund what are called 15-month houses, where new mothers can care for their newborns in the first, crucial months, in a residential setting that gives the children a chance. We need honesty and straight talk. Go home tonight and reread the Kerner Commission report. And ask yourself what it is we’ve managed to do in all the years since it was written. The answer is: not nearly enough.
Norman Amaker Loyola (Chicago) U. law prof.
African-Americans will draw from this the lesson we’ve always known. Our lives aren’t worth shit. It’s as though my entire career has been a waste of time. Same situation I encountered in the South when defending Martin Luther King.
White people must determine where we go from here. The outrage that ought to be pouring forth is that of the white majority. Black America did not create this problem. We cannot solve it. Now it’s time for some white people to step up and say enough is enough. If they don’t, it means they don’t care enough. It’s that simple.
Armstrong Williams Graham Williams Group, a D.C.-based public-relations firm
A few weeks ago I would have told black highschool students there was a justice system that would protect them. After the King verdict I cannot tell them that they’re not being discriminated against because they’re black. I can’t tell them that anymore because I don’t believe it anymore. It’s horribly painful. It makes me want to weep.
How can I as an African-American conservative tell kids to “stop harping on racism” and, “If you work you’ll succeed”? Everything I’ve ever said and been working for has been shattered in that verdict. For a juror to say that the baton wasn’t even hitting. You know what that’s like? It’s like the crazy people saying the Holocaust never happened.
I would like to say that there was no need for an NAACP. But I can see the need for it now. I’m going to silently wait and give the white community the benefit of the doubt. But I can understand why a lot of these black kids feel the way they do, that the legal system is not designed for them and nothing will ever change that, not when you can see that videotape like I did.
Keaven Dollery President, Afro-American Patrolmen’s League
I was an African-American before I ever thought of becoming a police officer-in fact I never thought I would ever be a police officer. Maybe white officers need to take a sensitivity course to know how to handle black people because we demand respect as well.
I’m afraid for my kids right now out in the street, knowing that there is a possibility of an officer stopping them and beating them and being acquitted. Right now I don’t feel like putting the uniform back on.
Jonathan Rubinstein Author, ‘City Police’
Why is it that we have a profound division in this country along racial lines, yet black people in America only feel moved to public protest around issues of police brutality? White people and large numbers of black people feel threatened by the crime that plagues them all the time, black people in particular. Black people are so far out of politics, so far out of the context of American life that the only time they feel legitimized to make a protest is when they feel their lives threatened by the “white master.”
We try to explain away the problems of the black community because of poverty, lack of education, unemployment. But we have to recognize that living in these neighborhoods is a pathology-they are a dumping ground of crime and all that is unsavory, as ghettos have been for centuries. We have to recognize that the black community has a special problem, which has a history. It doesn’t just mean we need more cops with more sticks, it means we need more policing. Until we can establish some kind of public order there will be no hope, no employment and no education.
Brenda J. Muhammad President, Mothers of Murdered Sons (MOMS)
We can’t trust the police and we can’t trust each other. Last year we lost more than 25,000 people on the streets of America. Of that 25,000, more than 70 percent were blacks who were killed by other blacks. When are we going to raise up in arms about that? We need this same vigor every day when a black person has been killed on our streets. But not until we rise up as we have in this particular case will we make a difference. The cheapness of black life perpetuates the attitudes expressed by the King jury. I feel that what a lot of those jurors were saying is, “Black folk don’t care about black folk, why should we care about black folk?”
Roy Innis Chairman, the Congress of Racial Equality
I don’t believe that this one incident-the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the miscarriage of justice in Simi Valley-will turn back that real social revolution that we should be so proud of, a revolution greater than the French Revolution in the 18th century or the Russian Revolution at the beginning of this century. I’m convinced that the romance America had with overt racism is over.
The justice system has protected and shielded us from the worst effects of prejudice and hate in the ’50s and ’60s. The judiciary has been the bulwark of black freedom in this country. Black America, and the rest of America, needs to hear from honest black leaders who will not attempt to alibi for the pillagers. There should be a legitimate protest at the way the trial was conducted, a protest to insist that the federal government move quickly and with great determination. But the only thing those riots are about is criminals acting like criminals.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chair of Afro-American Studies at Harvard
I haven’t felt this depressed about race relations in the United States since the assassination of Martin Luther King, and like that assassination, I think this is going to be a watershed event in history.
I have always been paranoid around the police. I often find myself moving into upper-middle-class white neighborhoods, and the first thing I do when I move into a neighborhood is to cheek in with the police and introduce myself. “Hi. I am Doctor Gates. I go away often and I was wondering if there are any security precautions I should take during vacations.” But of course that’s not it. It’s that sooner or later someone is going to see this Negro in a car and ask what he is doing there. I do it so they see this face. I’ve lived in all-white neighborhoods in Durham, N.C., and in Ithaca, N.Y., and now in pre-dominantly white Lexington, Mass. I think it’s disgusting to feel that you have to do that. It’s just a bizarre form of behavior that’s required by the racist nature of this society, and the police.
I don’t think that any of us who have quote unquote made it understand what it means to have no hope. It’s time for leadership to stop repeating tired, worn-out civil-rights slogans. It’s time to work with scholars to find out the intersections of race and class in society. We need something new and I don’t know what it is. But what has all this success of ours individually been about except to work together?
Andrew Hacker Queens College political scientist
The jury saw the tapes over and over. You have to wonder about these people, to ask what is going on in the Ventura counties out there, these white suburbs. And the mentality is, “The police are there to protect us; they have to be able to do anything they can to keep the away.” Rodney King represents the “them.” Simi Valley is 40 miles away from L.A., but these people are afraid of the Willie Hortons out there.
White America is doing fairly well and yet it feels that it has in its midst these former slaves who never adapted-never mind whether we let them or not-and now they’re threatening us. They’re supposed to know their place.
Tom McClintock State assemblyman from Ventura County
It is difficult to separate the social from the economic issues. Particularly in California, as the economy implodes, those at the lower rungs of the social-economic scale are feeling the pain the greatest and it is difficult to separate those emotions from social developments. Throughout the 1980s the economic expansion benefited all classes and race relations seemed to be clearly improving as economic opportunity improved. But that does not appear to be the case in the last year or two, and incidents like the King verdict compound the economic pressures that are building.
To the extent that economic opportunity is expanded, race relations are improved. But i the last few years we have unleashed the four horsemen of the recession: taxation, regulation, litigation and waste. To the extent that we can rekindle the economic expansion of the Reagan years we will see improvements in race relations.
Matty Rich Filmmaker
The riots are an excuse for white society to sit back and laugh. “I told you, these Negroes don’t know how to act; they’re dangerous.” America breeds the hatred in these white police officers, these jurors. This is the way America sets a tone, the beatings of blacks and minority people. We’re tired of the reminders that we’re just niggers.
I feel real angry and upset. I’ve seen friends die. But I’ve never been through anything where my black friends and m white friends both have felt such shame. Something like this takes us back years. It strips everything away. If they don’t show us the respect we are due, kids on the street are going to start plucking off cops -they’ve got more gunpower than the cops. The only way people will listen is violence.
If we had our black political leaders, this rioting wouldn’t be happening. There is no black political leader. I’m talking about our, not everybody’s, leader. I’m not talking about a rainbow coalition. I have nothing against Jackson, but I think the rainbow is an illusion. I think we need somebody who can relate to us on a street level, who can understand our frustration. Someone who can go to the high-up leaders and say, if you don’t pay attention, your streets are going to be burned, not our streets but your streets.
Charles Murray American Enterprise Institute
I don’t think the jurors’ reaction had as much to do with race as fear of violent crime. But most of the fear of violent crime is fear of black crime. That is not irrational and it’s something for leaders, black and white, to talk about openly. Frightened whites are responding to reality. If blacks say, “It’s whites who have been frightened by the Willie Horton ad,” we’re never going to get anywhere. They’ve got to say, “Whites are scared of something that they’re justified in being scared of.”
When blacks say they’ve suffered years of neglect, a lot of whites are looking at pictures on TV of black looters taking things from stores as a disconsolate Asian sits by and watches his life’s work go down the drain. They’re saying, “How is it that this Asian guy, who we’ve not done one damn thing for in terms of social programs, how come he doesn’t deserve our sympathy instead of the looters?” Unless blacks come to grips with that reaction, we’re never going to get anywhere.
Candace An Big One Market, Los Angeles
When we saw the destruction we just cried and cried, the whole family cried. My parents worked for 15 years; in one night it’s all gone. We called for police protection and they said, “Sorry.” That’s not fair. That’s injustice. We didn’t have guns, but when we saw what happened we wished we had had a gun to protect ourselves. My parents want to rebuild but they’re afraid.
Everybody was rioting. It wasn’t just black people. Mexicans did it too. They’re hurting themselves. Who’s going to cash their checks now? They need us as much as we need them. We just lost the American Dream. That’s the dream that everyone has that you’ll be able to support a family, have a business and make a better life for your children.
Lu Palmer Chicago Black United Communities
The only remedy is from within. The problem is, because we do not control any institutions in our community or outside of it, we have virtually no chance of bringing about that remedy. Power comes from institutions. We control no institution. Not our schools, mass media, polities. Consequently, white men, in essence, control those institutions-and they thus control our minds. Our only way to escape that reality is through the building and maintenance of institutions.
Martin Luther King III Fulton County commissioner
I would like to see a massive economic protest. This case took place in Hollywood. It would be ideal if African-Americans chose for three months not to go to the movies, and not to patronize just for a month the record industry. When we affect white America in the pocketbook, it has always responded.
We have to address justice, and the way we do it is to utilize our power to vote. I would also like an effort of massive voter registration to come out of this.
Jawanza Kunjufu Educational consultant
I want our young people to read a book a month about their history and their culture and I want them to start with Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. We have young people wearing Malcolm X caps who haven’t read a book about him.
I tell young people to be very careful about the friends they choose. I tell young males specifically that where you are between 10 o’clock at night and 3 o’clock in the morning will determine where you will spend the rest of your life.
I ask them to remember the numbers 28, 30, 2 and 4: don’t: get married until you’re 28, don’t have children until you’re 30, only have 2 children and have them 4 years apart. Last, but not least, we want them to put God first in their lives because then they would have a natural high.
Adam Jones Writer, Peninsula magazine Harvard University senior
I’m horrified by the state of anarchy in Los Angeles. At least 44 people dead: that to me is much worse, at least in a statistical sense, than the occasional problems that result from excessive police force. A lot of people may be using this as an excuse to commit random acts of violence and looting. When people see that the power structure is breaking down, they lose their inhibitions. It seems to be a natural inclination. When one group starts to commit violence, then others say, “Wow, maybe I can get away with that, too.”
Here at Harvard people look at you and they assume by the color of your skin that you have certain values. I think that’s just wrong. I think things like affirmative action can promote racism; by saying you need someone from a particular background, you’re assuming all of them are the same. It promotes resentment on the part of majorities, who assume that they may lose to a less qualified person.
Angela Clark Atlanta University student
It’s Angela. Just Angela. If we cannot have justice there’s not going to be any peace. We can’t just sit there and say, “Oh, gee, that was so unfair.” It doesn’t work. It does not work. White people do not care. They can smile in your face but they don’t care. We’re tired of it. I want something better,, and I’m sick of it. I am sick of it. I’ve had it.
William Julius Wilson University of Chicago sociologist
The problems in the inner cities have actually gotten worse since the Kerner report. There’s a growing concern over poverty, increased joblessness and greater economic disparity. At the same time, however, since Reagan entered office, urban problems have received less attention on the national agenda.
I think there is an association between declining resources in the neighborhoods and increasing social problems. A lot of people important for maintaining stability in inner-city neighborhoods have left. This leaves behind what I call the truly disadvantaged population. As the higher-income black and white families depart, you have less stability, and in time you have the potential for a violent uprising if you get the right spark. It didn’t shock me that Los Angeles blew up. Unfortunately the problem with that incident is that it aggravates an already tense racial atmosphere across the country.
If the violence in Los Angeles had been minimal, I think there would have been general sympathy for the rioters. People could appreciate that folks are upset over this shocking verdict. But as the rioting goes on and the looters come out of stores, people shift their anger toward the rioters.
We need political leadership to direct frustration in a positive direction. If only we could get people of all races to realize they have mutual problems and mutual interests in addressing them. We need to tell lower-income whites that we’re aware of their anxieties and concerns and convince them that we should not be fighting each other for diminishing resources.
