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.