Racism in My Experience – Part 6
Los Angeles and California
Let’s start with California. When I moved here in the fall of 1979, the papers were filled with the story of Eulia Love who had been killed by the LA cops who were trying to discontinue her gas service for an unpaid gas bill. Shortly after I crossed (in the crosswalk, with the light) the street near where I had just moved in – excellent behavior by a Boston pedestrian’s standards --, the nearby armed and angry LAPD officer gave me holy hell because I didn't push the little yellow button and wait for the walk signal to cross. Welcome to LA. I had the impression that I was being welcomed to the Wild West and a nascent police state, not that I knew or understood much of anything about CA, just a first few striking impressions to counterbalance all the friendly smiles and “have a nice day” salutations so very different from buttoned up Boston.
In 1992, a large group of LAPD officers were filmed while brutally beating Rodney King at the end of a high-speed police chase for drunken driving and speeding. To the outrage of the citizenry, all four officers were acquitted; riots tore apart the city for six days, and many local small businesses were burned. The National Guard and US Army were called in. This was the same scenario as the Watts Rebellion of 1965. After this, the process of reforming the LAPD into a much improved and more accountable police department proceeded in fits and starts for the next 28 years. There were notable backslides such as the police riot against peaceful immigrant rights protestors on May Day of 2007.
LAPD now considers itself a national model for police reform. So how did it perform during the 2020 protests? Early reports are that the local police focused too much on arresting curfew violations and dispersing large numbers of peaceful protesters with beatings and rubber bullets, and failed to adequately stop, catch and arrest the small number of actual looters. It’s too early to have a comprehensive report, but my impression is that they made serious mistakes. The looting that did occur was primarily in wealthy shopping areas like downtown Santa Monica, Melrose, Beverly Hills, the Grove and Fairfax; in other words it was highly targeted and opportunistic, it was operating in the chaos and considerable shadow of large peaceful protests. As distinct from the rage-filled burning rebellions of ’65 and ’92 that so damaged the South LA neighborhoods, the 2020 protests have been very large, multi-ethnic and largely peaceful. The National Guard was called in primarily to safeguard the local merchants in the higher income shopping districts this month, not to patrol LA’s poor communities as in ‘65 and ‘92.
We need a careful look at policing behavior in the 2020 protests; did they needlessly harass and beat peaceful protesters, did they miss the boat in stopping the looting of local merchants? Why did they do so, was it the police taking matters into their own hands, or were they taking their orders from our elected officials who made bad tactical mistakes?
I’m not sympathetic to the calls to “defund the police”; it's the wrong message. But it’s way past time to get guns off the streets, to get AR 15s and their like off the streets, to end open carry laws and casual gun violence in the home and to shift the police role from warriors to guardians of the peace. It’s also way past time to shift our efforts from criminalizing drug and alcohol addiction to treating addiction and mental illness. It’s time to get people out of state prisons and into treatment for drug crimes and out of county jails and into effective mental health care for mental illness. You have to take the racism out of law enforcement and the criminal justice system in which it is deeply embedded. Money should follow the policy shifts.
California is a state carved from the territory taken from Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, and it’s a state where Native Americans were slaughtered and enslaved by the Spanish and then slaughtered some more by the American settlers. The Gold Rush of ‘49 quickly filled the state with fortune seekers and feverish gold dreamers from all over the world -- its non-native population grew from 20,000 in 1848 to 380,000 in ten years, to 40 million today, many immigrants striving for the American dream.
Over the past 160 years California has been a very racist and exclusionary state towards Asians, particularly the Chinese and Japanese, towards Mexicans and other Latinos while at the same time relying heavily on their hard manual labor. The Chinese in California helped build its farms and levees, gold mines and railroads starting with the Gold Rush; then in 1882 they were barred from immigrating to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act The Japanese immigrants played a key role in developing the state’s agriculture beginning in 1900; they were forbidden to buy land, to become citizens, to immigrate to the US in 1924, and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were then rounded up and detained as potential subversives without trial or judicial recourse during the Second World War. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/5views/5views4e.htm Asians in California now “succeed” in school and in incomes at far higher rates than non-Hispanic whites. Mexican Americans have been lynched, denied voting and citizenship rights, denied public education opportunities, illegally deported, and gerrymandered out of political influence; at the same time that they have become the state’s fast growing demographic, the backbones of the many agricultural, construction and service industrial sectors in California and now playing huge roles in our state’s political leadership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mexican_Americans
When I moved here from Boston, I loved the diversity of faces and color tones on the streets of LA, and it has ever become more so. California’s demography has greatly diversified over the past 40 years, and it has become a multi-ethnic melting pot of immigrant working families from all over the world, but particularly from Asia, Mexico and Central America. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/next-california The voter backlash from older and whiter citizens to these demographic changes have included Proposition 13 to roll back and freeze the rising local property taxes that supported public schools, Proposition 187 to exclude undocumented immigrants from health services and public education, Prop 209 to eliminate any form of affirmative action to improve the opportunities of ethnic minorities, and Prop 227 to end bi-lingual education and require English only education in public schools. Beginning in the early 80’s, California’s tough on crime leaders at the state and local levels ousted the State Supreme Court’s liberal majority, and locked up a growing percent of the state’s black and brown population for increasingly long sentences that peaked in about 2005. https://www.vera.org/downloads/pdfdownloads/state-incarceration-trends-california.pdf I remember visiting the medium security ward at San Quentin along with many black and brown family members seeing their loved ones, and asking why the ward was 95% black and brown and what crimes had they committed; the answer it was overwhelmingly drug crimes that they were serving time for. So we have been filling our prisons rather than treating the illness of addiction.
I’m told that California had a strong and effective public health system, public education system and public college system in the 1960s and 70s, before I moved here. Two of the three have foundered although one (health care) has mostly recovered; the public college system by contrast has steadily flourished and expanded, reflecting the bi-partisan support it has enjoyed with California policy makers – very different from the 60’s when it was the convenient punching bag for Ronald Reagan and his supporters.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 9/7/20