L.A.’s Unfinished Business : On third anniversary of riots, parts of the community are still suffering

Saturday marks the third anniversary of the outbreak of the Los Angeles riots, a cataclysm that caused $1 billion in losses. The occasion, though scarcely the cause, of the riots was the acquittal of four white police officers charged with abusing a black motorist, Rodney G. King.

Since 1992, the four officers have been retried and two have been convicted; the white man who was chief of police during the upheaval has been replaced by a black man; the black mayor whose election in 1973 promised domestic tranquillity has been replaced by a white man. RLA, the Rebuild Los Angeles recovery effort, has had real but limited success in repairing the damage done to the economic infrastructure of South-Central Los Angeles and other areas. Equally limited has been the city’s success in implementing the reform recommendations of the Christopher Commission. The real picture, in short, is a muddle of unfinished business.

And yet in one key regard, April 29, 1992, marked a major change in the self-perception of Los Angeles. The bipolar, black-and-white terms in which civic relations were imagined here gave way, starting then, to multipolar, multiethnic terms. Whites and blacks--the veterans, so to speak, of U.S.-style race relations--were joined by Latinos and Asians.

Some whites called the riot a crime spree. Some blacks called it a political uprising. For the Latinos who took part, it was a bread riot. And K. W. Lee, former editor of the Korea Times, introduced his own term in The Times Book Review last Sunday. Reviewing “Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots” by Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Lee called the riot a pogrom.

Korean Americans--the youngest, smallest and most visibly hit of all the groups affected by the riots--have been the slowest to recover from it. “Blue Dreams” (Harvard University Press) makes that poignantly clear, but indirectly the book makes something else equally clear.

What’s clear on this third anniversary is all of us are still recovering from the riots, and collectively we are no longer quite who we were when it all began.