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The L.A. Riots: misplaced questions, true solutions

By Ryan Masaaki Yokota

The L.A. Uprisings were a burning red light like the one you see on your car dashboard when you've run your car in the red zone for too long and with too little oil. Like smoke from your hood, the Uprisings were a visible reminder of the need for desperate change within the structures of Los Angeles and California institutions.

"Riots," as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted, "are the language of the unheard." Despite the heat and rage, some three years after the L.A. riots, nothing has changed. The problems that sparked the situation remain, and in many ways, have intensified to new heights.

When the uprisings erupted, it was my second year at UCLA. I can still remember the strangeness of those times and the mad unreality of it all. The television screen flashed images of the chaos that took place in the streets. Innocents were being pulled from cars and beaten. Arson and looting spread like wildfire over a prairie, taking the city by storm.

Back here on the Westside, I sat in my apartment wondering at the sheer madness of it all. It reminded me of the previous year, when fires over Kuwait were broadcast across the world, but the strangest part of it all was that the destruction on the television was something I could smell and see from the top of my apartment building. The war had come home.

But even now the war continues. The civilian bombings are taking place through quiet legislative decisions which affect everyone in L.A., mostly in terms of the judiciary, economic and social services restrictions that have been placed on the general populace in the Uprisings' aftermath.

Let's consider the incidents that truly sparked the Uprisings, for when we do so we see that they didn't start at Florence and Normandie, rather with the inhumane treatment of Rodney King by LAPD officers and the longstanding history of police abuse, discrimination and harassment that has been the department's hallmark.

Despite the brutality against Rodney King caught on film, nothing has changed in terms of the way the police hold power in L.A.

In fact, with increasing rhetoric of the need for greater police protection (subtly calculated to play on the fears of L.A. County and California residents who do not live in the inner cities and do not understand the dynamics of what goes on in L.A.), politicians rode into office on pledges of increased police protection. Racist legislation such as the "Three Strikes" bill fails to take into account the fact that the people most often stopped and harassed by the police ­ and most often sentenced to prison ­ are overwhelmingly people of color.

Even further, the bill fails to recognize the need for civilian control boards to ensure that average citizens will have a clearinghouse for complaints of police abuse. People don't seem to understand that increasing police repression and discrimination in response to a problem that arose out of police repression and discrimination (such as the King beatings) is like throwing gasoline on a raging fire.

People also don't seem to understand that major inequalities underlie the economic situations that keep large portions of the city in poverty.

It seems pretty obvious that the same political "leaders" that have advocated such things as "free enterprise zones" to lure businesses in order to "rebuild L.A." are actually advocating for tax free business zones for their corporate buddies and donors ­ not for a real opening of enterprise in L.A., as can be seen by the sort of resistance given to advocates of the full legalization of city street vendors.

In fact, much of the talk of opening L.A. to business enterprise only obscures the fact that a monetary supply in the form of corporate investment already exists in L.A., though such investments are not "trickling down" to the majority of the city's residents.

City planners may succeed in bringing corporations into L.A., but that provides no guarantee that such investments will translate into any substantial increase in the standard of living for members of the working poor or for other L.A. residents.

In fact, serious socioeconomic inequality persists, remaining an open scar on the fabric of L.A., largely due to the lack of unionization in L.A. (which would provide better worker wages, health services and benefits), the lack of adequate public transportation and the failure of the government to provide decent educational and vocational opportunities.

At this point, it seems important to demonstrate the way in which the current immigration debate has been playing itself out in the media, since it has been linked to the Uprisings in many ways.

As outgoing L.A. school board member Warren Furutani noted, when you consider the associations that come up when you hear the word "South Central" (where a great deal of the Uprisings occurred) you realize that the phrasing used by the media conjures up images of South and Central America, notorious hot spots of civil unrest, which, when connected with the images of Latina/os that were seen during the lootings, provokes severely racist connotations. I doubt this is an idle coincidence.

In fact, with the passage of Proposition 187, California has completed its job in "punishing" its most disenfranchised, vulnerable and easily scapegoated people for the economic problems that have existed in L.A. And as with the passage of the "Three Strikes" initiative, the California populace has once again applied a band-aid to the problems of the state instead of looking to the root causes of the current economic situation.

Many of the problems that had precipitated the crisis of the rebellions had their roots in three things.

First is the too-long delayed de-escalation of the military industrial complex at the end of the Cold War and its effects on the California economy.

Second is the 30-year process of economic restructuring that involved the flight of American industry from L.A. to (in many times) other countries.

Third is the deunionization of the remaining industries in L.A. that resulted in the growth of the working poor and homeless population in L.A. and the increased reliance of the population on government social services due to the continued ghettoization of the inner cities.

In many ways, the point of this article is to explicate the issues that caused the L.A. Uprisings and how they still remain in large and malignant ways. Efforts by the California populace have remained consistently misplaced, constantly failing to address the root causes of the current problems in L.A.

Yet there is still time and there is still hope. We must begin to address these problems by analyzing the roots of racial and economic inequality as they play themselves out in legislative decisions. We must stand firmly in refocusing the debate on change in California from crime and immigration to education and increasing vocational training opportunities.

Also, we must continue to demand that our basic human and civil rights are protected from harm. Through it all, we must make active steps in our lives to make sure that the problems of inequality in America are erased once and for all, so that situations such as the Uprisings never happen again.

Yokota is a fifth-year senior majoring in English/American studies and history with a specialization in Asian American studies.