I later ask if microaggressions at the workplace increased after the riots, and she says, “Too numb to know, too numb to know, too numb.”
Her “compartments” stored memories well, for she continued in detail: “The hurt and the discouragement and the hopelessness, where we used to feel hope—even in slavery, it was like, if I can just get free. How do you ‘get free’ now? There’s no hope to get free. Where is the hope that you can pull yourself up? Like, I was thirty years old and I was driving down Pico heading to Bullock’s department store to take my daughter to what they call White Gloves and Party Banners Class. And we’re driving down the street, and I look at the building that’s being built down there, and I don’t remember if that was the Transamerica Building or what—it’s short now by comparison. I started to cry ’cause it was the first time it had ever occurred to me that no matter how hard I worked, what I did, or what I accomplished, I could never own a building like one of those. That my ceiling was way down. No matter what I did—and I remember just sobbing and tried to pull myself together, and I was in a depression hole for a few weeks after that. I was thirty when it hit me. It’s kind of bizarre that I was . . . I really believed in the dream. I think they [the rioters] must have had the same realization about whatever they had set for their freedom.”
After the Watts riots, the gangs that were around during Regina’s childhood were virtually nonexistent. Black migrants began to form solidarity with one another in tandem with the rise of the civil rights movement. Bunchy Carter, the son of Nola Carter, who migrated from Shreveport, Louisiana, to California, became the leader of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles. Bunchy was a member of the Slauson Street gang, a group of predominately black boys who resisted the white gangs that intimidated them when black families moved into white neighborhoods during the early and mid-twentieth century. After the police and FBI cracked down on the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, and similar groups, the gang violence increased again, but now the gangs’ focus was not on protecting neighborhoods but on territory and crime.1 One had to be mindful of where one was and which gang dominated that area, or else one’s life hung in the balance. The solidarity people had with their own block often meant becoming adversaries to another.
Regina told me about a woman she knew whose child was in a gang and was murdered right around the corner from her house. That woman still lives in that house; Regina doesn’t know how she does it. Regina suspects that “she’s given up.” I realized that this is why my mother was hesitant about going to certain areas. It wasn’t just a matter of being unfamiliar with Los Angeles; it was also because, depending on which territory you were in, you could be in danger. After the many decades of whites working to confine blacks to impoverished areas of the city, black people created minor communities on their blocks that dictated which interactions with those from adjacent blocks could turn deadly. Gang wars now changed from black versus white to black against black, an effect of the many decades of suppression of their self-actualization. As Regina told me, “The dreams aren’t fulfilled here.”
I was at a loss for words. Here was a woman who inadvertently found herself in the meat grinder of American history. She was traumatized. You could almost hear the stress in her quiet home. There were things that she chose to forget, or that her body made her forget, in order to protect herself and stay alive. I recognized this pattern. This was the impetus of my trip: a recovery from forgetfulness, a pilgrimage from the lands abandoned to the routes traversed. Then a question arose inside of me like a brief glimmer of light. If I knew the pattern from coast to coast, I had to ask this question, and I hoped that she would not be offended.
“When the riots were happening, did you ever feel the impulse to leave?” I asked.
“At some point I had a dream of living in the country and being peaceful and sitting on the front porch making circles in the dirt with my big toe, and then I realized that’s too much work.”
This exhaustion was of a level that I hadn’t confronted till this moment. Regina was well aware of all that her parents had done to get here. She remembered how much she toiled to make a better living for herself, only to find herself swept up in one of the biggest riots the country has ever seen. Even afterward, she realized that she would never get as far as she’s dreamed. But it was “too much work” to uproot and replant herself someplace else, no matter if she knew where her family came from or not. There was too much baggage, too much personal history in California.
Like Regina, Geraldine never achieved her dreams. To this day, no one is sure if she’s alive or dead. Could Geraldine, like my family, have heard so much about the California dream that no matter what hardships she met when she got here, she had to stay, not just for herself, but for all those who never made it there? Did she, like Regina, believe it was too much work to return home? Did Regina stay because of all this history weighing her down? I was OK with assuming that the answer was yes. After all, she’s still affected by the events that happened over a half century ago. But I knew that Regina was just one person. She was also a part of a different generation. Maybe the next generation, those who grew up in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, had found a better life, with less violence from gangs and police and more economic opportunities. This was what I had to explore next: did those who came after Regina find better in Los Angeles or not?
3
WHEN MY UNCLES Rodney and Freddie were preparing to make their move out to Los Angeles, it was my mother who was most worried for them. She knew that they weren’t familiar with the landscape and that there were restricted neighborhoods where they as outsiders shouldn’t go. My mother worried that my uncles had to fear violence not only from white people, but also from blacks, if they were not conscious of which territory they entered. Despite both Rodney and Freddie being adults and their living arrangements being in a very affluent part of Los Angeles, she feared for them as black men: “Well, I thought about Rodney King and that video of him getting beat up. If they could do that to one black man, they’d do it to others.” I knew the story of Rodney King. His beating happened in 1991, the year before I was born, and it reinforced just how much I, as a black person, should fear the police.
Twenty-five-year-old Rodney King was driving with two friends down the Foothill Highway toward the San Fernando Valley. He was an unemployed construction worker from Altadena who was on parole from a one-year sentence for armed robbery. Knowing that the alcohol on his breath would be a parole violation that would send him back to prison, King tried to outrun the Highway Patrol officers who were pursuing him for speeding. Eventually he stopped, but instead of acting professionally and simply making the arrest, as they almost certainly would have done with a white suspect, four white LAPD officers converged on his car, beat his passengers briefly, shot King with a Taser, and then were filmed beating and clubbing King fifty-six times in revenge for the chase. He sustained many injuries besides eleven broken bones, including a fractured cheekbone and a broken ankle. To add insult to injury, he was held in the Los Angeles County jail for three days before being released. In almost three decades, LAPD’s violent racism had not changed at all. The only difference between 1965 and 1991 was the video camera with which witness George Holliday filmed the attack, letting the entire world see the truth despite police lies. This video began the entire genre of videos of police brutality circulating on the internet in the present day. For young black people like me, however, fear of bigot cops had already been instilled in us by our parents and grandparents, who already knew how untrustworthy law enforcement was.
Ironically, in Los Angeles, my uncles weren’t targeted, but my aunt Sharene was. She and my mother were in South Central Los Angeles to visit the swap meets, but my aunt was wearing sweatpants and a red bandana. Red is a gang color, signifying affiliation with the Bloods. That day, locals told Sharene to be careful, with good reason. Police were circling the block where my aunt was until she removed the bandana
. Before this moment, she had had no idea that simply wearing the color red could make her a target for both gangs and police. My mother, who was in South Central to order soul food, was warned not to sit in her car, because “they” would shoot her. I wanted to know who “they” were and so did my mother, but it didn’t matter. Neither my mother nor my aunt knew how to conduct themselves in certain Los Angeles neighborhoods or understood just how deeply the gang lines and racial barriers were embedded there.
Black people who came to California seemed like a problem to law enforcement and white people alike. Whites, schooled in prejudice for centuries, felt threatened by imagined “savages,” and redlining and police surveillance were common. But I had not realized how much the gangs and the police brutality were simply an old problem in a new decade. Another riot resulted—the 1992 uprising sparked by the Rodney King beating and the subsequent trial. Although the prosecutor was black, there were no blacks on the jury, which acquitted three of the police officers charged and reached no verdict as to the fourth. The riots began a few hours after the verdict was announced.
Through this fieldwork, I had believed that the gangs and their territories were a response to the racism that curtailed black migration and settlement, and that organizations like the LAPD and the KKK were the root causes of this violence. First, I was going to get into the gangs and their relationship with police. I had preconceived notions about what the gangs were, as many other Americans do, regardless of race and location. They were the scapegoats that white pundits used to avoid discussing white violence against black people. The line was “What about black-on-black crime and gang violence in (insert major city here)?” I thought gangs were filled with members who were often unemployed and shunned from society. I never asked the heavier questions, like how did this unemployment begin and why has society shunned them in the first place? I thought gang members killed recklessly and that anyone who joined them was bloodthirsty. But I wanted to investigate the idea that, if acceptance and community rather than a thirst for blood was what gang members sought, why weren’t they getting it elsewhere? Could that speak to the systemic racism that they faced?
At one point, South Los Angeles, particularly Watts and Compton, could not be divorced from their gang culture and vice versa. Snippets from the late Oscar-nominated director John Singleton’s oeuvre, especially Boyz n the Hood and Baby Boy, form a montage in my mind. I can hear Eazy-E and MC Ren, members of the iconic rap group N.W.A. (Niggaz Wit Attitudes), and Bloods & Crips in one ear, and the rapper Warren G, formerly a Crip of a different sort, in the other. Even as a child, I knew that to venture into South LA, one had to proceed with caution. There were certain colors you couldn’t wear, depending on which block you walked on, and if you didn’t follow the dress code, you were essentially asking for death.
The precursors to well-known gangs like the Crips and Bloods began with whites’ anxiety about the influx of black migrants to Los Angeles. It goes without saying that gang culture is not an inherent part of African American culture. Gang culture is a by-product of black migration to Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and other cities, and the socioeconomic and existential problems they found when they arrived. Los Angeles had been no stranger to gang violence before the arrival of blacks, but the first target for white people was Mexicans.
Young Mexican men loved wearing zoot suits—long suit coats with wide lapels and padded shoulders, paired with baggy trousers secured at the cuffs and pleated from the waist. The “zooters” often wore their hair long and greasy. For white Americans, such flamboyance in the underclass was extremely inappropriate, especially since the country was rationing fabric due to World War II. On June 3, 1943, groups of sailors joined white civilian mobs to roam downtown LA in search of zooters. Any they found were beaten and forced to take off their clothes in front of the crowds. Streetcars and buses were stopped and searched for zooters. The Zoot Suit Riots, as they are now called, lasted for several days. No one knows exactly what the original catalyst was. The high percentage of mothers who worked outside the home at factory jobs led to social anxiety in the community as they wondered who would protect their children. LAPD officers escorted the white mobs, sometimes joined in, and arrested around five hundred of the victims, most of them Mexican Americans but also some Filipinos and blacks.
The secondary target was the black people. White youth gangs were beginning to spread in the 1940s, especially around Huntington Park, Bell, and Southgate. These three neighborhoods weren’t far from Compton, a once predominantly white neighborhood that turned black during the Great Migration. One of the most notorious gangs was the Spookhunters, whose logo was a caricature of a black man in a noose. Between Slauson Avenue to the south, Alameda Street to the east, and Main Street to the west, if black people dared to appear, the Spookhunters would attack them. Other whites attacked black-owned properties, bombing, shooting, and setting fires. Black people couldn’t leave even if they wanted to. Racially restrictive covenants banned them from living in most Los Angeles neighborhoods. They were allowed to live only where the housing was decrepit and overcrowded and where there were no parks. In self-defense, black youths also formed gangs, like the Slausons, the Gladiators, the Outlaws, and the Rebel Rousers. In City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis, a scholar on power and social class in Southern California, writes of this reaction: “As tens of thousands of 1940s and 1950s Black immigrants crammed into the overcrowded, absentee-landlord-dominated neighborhoods . . . , low-rider gangs offered ‘cool worlds’ of urban socialization for poor young newcomers from rural Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.”1
The decades that followed were rife with endless cycles of poverty. From 1959 to 1965, black Angelenos were excluded from the good-paying jobs in the construction and aerospace industries. Unemployment rose from 12 to 20 percent in Los Angeles as a whole but was 30 percent in Watts. At the time of the 1965 riots, black migrants were fed up with the violence that could strike them at any moment from white youth and police, but now they felt emboldened by the civil rights and Black Power movements to do something about it. They soon learned that their leaders in the justice movements were being spied on, harassed, framed, and sometimes murdered by the FBI’s COINTELPRO operatives, the LAPD’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division, and many other city police forces in a concerted effort to halt the march of blacks toward equality under the law. The murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago police in 1969 was an especially egregious example. During this period, the black youth of Los Angeles were searching for new identities and ways to be empowered, supported, and protected. Enter the Crips and the Bloods.
I met with Cameron Johnson, a former Bloods member, who remembers the family rift over the Black Panthers. “That’s one thing I didn’t like about my mother and her sisters, is that they were not revolutionary. They were afraid of the Black Panthers. It’s definitely because of what they’d seen.” I didn’t need Johnson to elaborate. If these women were afraid of opposing the system, they obviously had seen with their own eyes what happens when black people protest injustice or seek autonomy. “My mother told me that I had to use the system. She wanted me to work in government or be a police officer. But I can’t try to conform to a system that isn’t even designed for me.” The generational divide is illustrated by how much freedom and expression seemed possible to two members of the same household. Johnson was born in 1963. His mother came to Los Angeles at age five, from Texas, and his father was born in Watts.
Growing up, Johnson had heard of the Slausons and Gladiators, among other black gangs, and he knew that they didn’t emerge for no reason: “The system definitely created it. You know the show Happy Days, with the sock hops and all that? Well, it didn’t include black people. So they had to create their own social groups and their own social settings.” When Cameron was around eight or nine years old, he recognized the influence of the local gangs whenever he couldn’t watch a movie at a certain theater because the Crips would be
there and he didn’t want to get them agitated. As the years passed, their influence never waned. Cameron couldn’t go to Inglewood theaters because the Crips would be there. At thirteen, he had had enough. He was tired of not being able to move where he pleased, tired of being jumped and robbed.
Usually, when one wants to join a gang, there is initiation involved. The initiation varies from gang to gang but often the men get “jumped in”—beaten up by the rest of the group. Women usually have to sleep with all the male gang members to establish their subordinate position.
However, there was no initiation to become a Blood in the late seventies. All Cameron had to do was choose not to be a victim by not cowering before other gangs. He told me, “We didn’t beat you up . . . no. Just be aggressive—just don’t run whenever someone asks you where you from. I began to be a predator and not a victim.” As long as Cameron swore that he wouldn’t back down, he was in.
Cameron’s personal story of frustration is a part of the collective story. The Bloods began in Los Angeles as a defense against the Crips’ aggressive expansion. Cameron’s grades began to suffer, and most of his previous friendships began to falter as well. Each gang claims certain avenues and street corners as its turf. Cameron had unaffiliated friends who lived in enemy territory. Before he was a Blood, he could sleep over at their houses. Once initiated, these ties had to be severed. By the time he reached high school, these former friends were the ones he fought.
Getting home from school required military strategy. To get to Dorsey High School, he had to walk through Crip territory. He couldn’t use the school bus because the vast majority of the riders were Crips too. Cameron never finished high school and went to a juvenile detention center for stealing cars, serving six years in jail and two years in prison.
Wandering in Strange Lands Page 22