More Musings on the Causes of L.A.’s Riots
It is not myopia or chauvinism that forces magazine editors to push aside stories on tribal warfare in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia for articles on Los Angeles.
Given events of the last two weeks, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear that the National Guard is being replaced by a United Nations’ peacekeeping force. Then maybe some people would notice what others have known for years: This city is a world-class mess.
The second wave of ruminating on that realization arrives in mailboxes this week and focuses on several perspectives.
Leadership Vacuum
When most Americans recall the folks who came in to cool the riots and sort the issues, they won’t envision George Bush or Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown or Ross Perot, or even Maxine Waters.
More likely, they’ll think of Arsenio Hall, Edward James Olmos and maybe Oprah Winfrey.
It’s a bizarre but predictable shift in whom the public trusts. Let the true media age begin.
Already, Bush and Clinton are plotting ways to exploit the riots in their television commercials, Time reports. The President’s campaign may play off the Reginald Denny beating to strike a Willie Horton chord, the magazine says; Clinton will tug at heartstrings with shots of multiethnic squads push-brooming through the rubble.
Meanwhile, no credible leaders are stepping in to fill the candidates’ real responsibilities: “The list of Washington-based black leaders Bush summoned to meet with him before his trip (to Los Angeles) could have come from a 20-year-old Rolodex,” Time says.
Maybe what the country needs is a new definition of leadership. Sadly, the opportunity for a clean-slate approach to charting Los Angeles’ future seems to be fading fast.
Too many entrenched factions fit the description given by a senior White House adviser, as quoted in U.S. News & World Report: “This is a time for history. But nobody here wants to commit history. That would take passion and conviction.”
Cities’ Plight
Time hammers home the urban versus suburban tensions with a powerful juxtaposition of photographs, one of cheery white Seattle suburbanites, the other of burned out inner-city minorities.
“America,” the accompanying article says, “is rapidly dividing into two worlds, separated by class, race and drive time.”
Underlying the dilemma is a Catch-22. The division, Time says, is accelerated when cities raise taxes to solve the problems that began driving the middle class out in the first place.
Recent history doesn’t encourage. Urban problems helped inflame Detroit. After that city’s 1967 riot, the Kerner Commission had big suggestions for patching things up.
Not much happened. As a result, Detroit’s population plummeted from 1.6 million to 1 million, and crime skyrocketed anyway.
As one academic told U.S. News: “If someone could come to Detroit today and re-create the conditions of 1967, he’d be considered a miracle worker.”
Crime, Poverty and Race
U.S. News has the good sense to point out what was obvious to any television viewer but lost on many commentators: Los Angeles’ rioters came in all colors, including white.
Still, race relations were at the core of the upheaval, and magazines are on target in investigating the problem.
Newsweek reports that Claude Brown, author of “Manchild in the Promised Land,” turned to white America on CNN after the riots and said simply: “The time has come when you have to sit in on the card game and ante up.”
But before anyone tosses in their cash, they’ll want to know where it’s going.
Enterprise zones? Tenant ownership of public housing?
Dozens of ideas are in the mix for fixing the problems of poverty and crime in the cities.
Newsweek has provided the best overall magazine coverage of the riots. It also presents the most contradictory interpretations.
One article, for instance, points out: “Like it or not, we Americans are a hyphenated, intermarrying and increasingly blended people--and we are likely to become both more diverse, and more nearly like each other, as time goes by.”
That story then wonders why the issues of poverty and crime were ever allowed to become intertwined with race in the first place. It laments such “fashionable myths” as a growing and increasingly violent black underclass.
But another Newsweek article says that people of all colors have a sound basis for their fear of young black criminals: “They commit a vastly disproportionate amount of crime.”
“Responsibility” is the most pervasive concept percolating through various political camps. As Newsweek points out, the related “self-help gospel” preached by contemporary conservative black intellectuals such as Shelby Steele, has roots in the thoughts of Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.
The Utne Reader, meanwhile, reprints two articles that shed particular light from decidedly different angles.
In “The Trouble With You People,” reprinted from Esquire, Jake Lamar presents an acerbic satire of white America’s obsession with exactly the sort of “underclass” problems discussed in this column today.
“The desperate yearning to be considered normal, part of some standard Disneyfied American citizenry, runs deep in white consciousness. . . . To reaffirm your conventionality, you must constantly tell yourself what you are not.”
Lamar’s only partly tongue-in-cheek assault on white pontification about black problems is largely brilliant.
But then he decides to have it both ways. He wants whites to feel guilty. Then (perhaps feeling a twinge of middle-class black guilt), he denies whites any means of addressing the situation they’re supposed to feel guilty about. For instance, he lambastes whites who see merit in Steele’s ideas.
Steele is also quoted in Utne on the subject of white guilt, but he has a different take: “Selfish white guilt” motivates the sort of entitlement programs that transform whites from victimizers into patronizers and keeps blacks “where they have always been--dependent on the largess of whites.”
Not that whites shouldn’t feel guilty about being born with an advantage. But healthy guilt, Steele writes, “is simply a heartfelt feeling of concern without any compromise of one’s highest values and principles.”
While Steele falls short by refusing to suggest specific avenues for expressing that concern, his analysis is particularly intriguing in the wake of the riots.
“Selfish white guilt is really self-importance . . . a sort of moral colonialism,” Steele writes. “The selfishly guilty white person is drawn to what blacks least like in themselves--their suffering, victimization and dependency. This is no good for anyone--black or white.”
Steele would likely approve of The New Republic’s ideas (May 25) for salvaging the urban underclass.
“What we have just witnessed in Los Angeles is a glimpse of a racial and urban crisis in this country that is steadily growing in intensity,” New Republic editors write.
“Neither Republican neglect nor traditional Democratic liberalism comes close to solving it. It’s time to start over.”
To roughly paraphrase, New Republic’s plan goes like this:
1) Even in Los Angeles, racist cops are a small problem compared to black-on-black crime. So quit pussyfooting around with criminal justice. Dump probation and parole in all its euphemistic forms and put violent criminals behind bars. Then follow up with compassionate community policing that will reduce crime.
2) Make the federal government pay for first-rate, prison-based drug treatment programs. Also allow the Feds to spring tax dollars to treat non-criminal addicts.
3) “We propose replacing all financial payments to the able-bodied poor (including Aid to Families with Dependent Children, ‘general relief,’ Food Stamps and housing subsidies) with a simple offer of a government-provided job.”
If nothing else, events of the last two weeks have pressured people to think more clearly about subjects that have befuddled the nation for the better part of two centuries. Given the nature of those events, it will be hard for liberals or conservatives to play pretend with the issues much longer.
As Harold Meyerson, executive editor of L.A. Weekly, writes in New Republic: “Even on the wacko nether-reaches of what remains of the American left, this will be a hard riot to romanticize.”
