Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  In 1966, James Baldwin had written, “The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer.”52 Nearly a half-century later, the Zimmerman verdict suggested hopelessness. You could try to change the images people saw, but how could you change the images people already held of you in their minds?

  But through a twist of history, Ryan Coogler’s film Fruitvale Station—an affecting portrait of an Oakland youth, Oscar Grant, shot dead in the back on New Year’s Day 2009 by BART policeman Johannes Mehserle—had opened the day before the verdict. Coogler presented Grant as a young man often given over to his demons yet struggling to quell them, cut down before he could find his redemption. That Sunday, thousands gathered in the darkness of the movie houses to make sense of Grant’s and Martin’s brutally foreshortened lives and what they meant for all those still living.

  And as the new week began, young people would step out with a renewed determination—not to burn this time, but to challenge and provoke, to ask difficult questions. In 1968, the Memphis sanitation workers had raised placards that read, “I Am a Man.” Now, around the country, young boys of color raised picket signs that read, “Am I Next?” As they grew into their world, they asked, would that world grow toward them? The crisis of inclusion had become a crisis of mutuality.

  Three days after the verdict, about five weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a nine-year-old child stepped into Florida governor Rick Scott’s office. Hundreds of people—Black, Latino, and white, mostly young but some with graying hair—followed him, starting what would become a monthlong, around-the-clock occupation.

  The youths were urging Governor Scott and the Florida legislature to pass a piece of legislation they called the Trayvon Martin Civil Rights Act. It would repeal Stand Your Ground laws and school zero-tolerance policies; require law enforcement agencies to define, prohibit, and train their officers around racial profiling; and promote youth restorative justice programs.

  They called themselves the Dream Defenders. In their manifesto they declared:

  Our America is bewitched by labels: Black, Brown, White, Gay, Criminal, Illegal, Monster, Vigilante, Nigger, Cracker. These labels cover us. They conceal our similarities. They divide us. They have rendered us inhumane. They have allowed us to turn the murder of one of our brothers by one of our brothers, into a media spectacle. We can no longer see ourselves in others. We can no longer believe in each other. We are afraid to connect. We are bewildered by difference. We are fearful of all things foreign. The murder of a child before they’ve seen womanhood or manhood should shake each of us to the core of our being. A society that convinces a man or woman to live in fear of that child should leave us all baffled and heartbroken.…

  They expect us to riot; to torch cities and burn bridges. They expect us to disperse; to wait for the next ambulance. But we challenge you to build. Real Power. We challenge you to channel your anger, your confusion, and your angst into a passion for positive action. We challenge you to question your truths. We challenge you to organize. We challenge you to see this case for what it truly is: a beginning.53

  Six days after the verdict, Obama surprised reporters in the White House Briefing Room. He wanted to say something about Trayvon Martin. He explained that he, too, had been racially profiled many times in his life. It was part of the reason he had sponsored legislation in Illinois to collect data and support police training around the problem. It was also the reason, he said, that the African American community was now responding to the verdict with anguish and pain.

  “When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago,” he said. “Now the question for me, at least, and I think, for a lot of folks is, where do we take this?”

  Obama dismissed the notion of having another grand conversation on race. “They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into positions they already have,” he said. “On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there’s a possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you can ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character?”

  He concluded on a note of hope. “Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean that we’re in a post-racial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are. They’re better than we were on these issues.”54

  But back at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, where Sanford police had been deployed to surround the gates the night Zimmerman was set free, the community inside seemed to be coming apart. Some stockpiled guns. Young males of color were still being profiled. Mothers and fathers locked their dark-skinned boys in when the sun began to set and worried over what they should advise them to do if they were ever confronted.54

  In the warm easing dusk, when the lakes of Central Florida reflected an endless sky unfurling in torsade strands of orange and purple, the green lawn where the kids used to play football with Trayvon Martin sat silent and empty.

  I am here

  No more fear

  No more dark shadows

  Let it come

  Let me talk to you

  See the face of your future

  —Savages, “I Am Here,” Silence Yourself

  I AM HERE

  Snapshots of Lancaster, November 2008. Photos by B+ for mochilla.com.

  EPILOGUE

  DREAMING AMERICA

  I

  Seventy miles north and twenty-five hundred feet above Los Angeles, the image-producing capital of the world, stands the invisible city of Lancaster. It is set at the western edge of the high Mojave Desert where the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains meet, in a valley named for the running antelope that were hunted to extinction over a century ago. Its residents like to refer to Lancaster as “Up Here” and to LA as “Down Below.” Up Here, an unseen town built upon American dreaming.

  It is the winter of 2008, two weeks after Obama’s election and nine since the implosion of Lehman Brothers set off the markets’ domino fall. At dawn the lawns of Lancaster suddenly burst with hissing sprinkler heads crisscrossing the fescue at six-inch gaps. Each blade of grass is bathed thrice. Sidewalks and curbs run dark with water.

  Green grass is a point of civic pride—mandated, even—for Lancaster’s remaining residents. Yet on every block there are homes where wild parched cotton clings to its branch in the morning gust, where grass splays yellow like a silent protest, where tumbleweeds gather in the thin shadow of lonely doorways. Taped official city notices warn against entry. Cards hang on mailboxes—“Do Not Place Mail in This Box VACANT.” Sometimes these reminders come four or five houses in a row.

  Here on the west side of the city, signs point the way to abandoned developments, blue arrows emblazoned with names of real estate companies like KB Home, Pacific Communities, American Premiere, and K. Hovnanian. At the peak of the boom twenty-four long months before, young families used them like the aisle signs in Walmart, guides through the wide streets to promising new subdivisions hidden behind cinderblock walls. Now they seemed like gravesite memorials to the city’s failed private planners.

  Developers had been building new subdivisions on all sides of Lancaster’s grand monument to 1990s government largesse—the six hundred acres that include the Challenger Memorial Youth Center, the county’s largest juvenile detention center; the Mira Loma Detention Center, an immigrant jail; High Desert Health, the county health clinic; and the California State Prison. The prison alone accounts for more jobs than the school district. Steel concertina fences have become just another feature of suburban life.
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br />   Agustin Rodriguez, working in his garage, appears to be the last person in this brand new subdivision across the road from the prison complex. An immigrant from Durango, Mexico, he had come six months ago up the Antelope Valley Freeway from the San Fernando Valley. When his masonry skills were no longer in demand, he helped people move out of their foreclosed homes. Many of his friends had returned to Mexico. Now that there is no work, he says, the only good thing is that he can finally afford to rent a new five-bedroom house.

  At this point in 2008, 5,500 homes—over 10 percent of Lancaster’s entire housing stock—are in foreclosure. The median home price has plunged from a peak of $340,000 to $202,000, and the bottom is not near. In the coming months, the price will continue to slide to the low hundred thousands. Hundreds more homes, worth less than their mortgages, have simply been abandoned. In real estate parlance, they are “underwater,” desert homes submerged.

  Dreams were supposed to have bloomed Up Here, rising from the arid sediment of the centuries. But as Ishmael Reed once wrote, “Deserts are for visions not materialists.” In the 1800s Spanish missionaries removed the four indigenous peoples—the Serrano, Kitanemuk, Tataviam, and Kawaiisu—to their missions, leaving behind only traces of the rich exchanges along this Indian trading route to the coast. The Southern Pacific Railroad retraced these routes in 1876. Within a decade, half of the three thousand laborers in the area were Chinese, and Lancaster had its own Chinatown built of tents.1

  The railroad began selling plots of land to grand schemers from as far away as Mississippi and England.2 One ad, published in London, promised field plots as fertile as those in the San Fernando Valley. Another offered free land with newspaper subscriptions. An investment group wanted to export paper made of desert flora back to the Daily Telegraph in London, and procured Chinese laborers laid off by the railroad or fleeing the white mobs of Los Angeles, San Francisco, or the Sierras to clear the steel-sharp yucca and Joshua trees.3 The business failed quickly and miserably, and both the nascent globalizers and their immigrant work force vanished. By then the town had built its first jail.

  Two decades after the railroad tracks were first laid, amid a punishing drought, the city had been all but abandoned—dust to dust—until discoveries of borax and gold ensured Lancaster’s survival into the twentieth century. But fires raged through the heart of the town center regularly, taking down saloons, hotels, and the newspaper.4 It was as if Lancaster had no need for those needing respite or passing through, nor for the tellers of tales. There was only hard work for the devoted and the fast.

  The desert floor was a blank canvas, suitable for socialist utopians and space travelers, high-flying top guns and hard-eyed dreamers. As Mike Davis noted in his classic study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, a short-lived socialist “garden city” called Llano del Rio opened in 1914 and thrived until the river plain ran dry when its colonists lost access to water through political intrigue and geological drift.5 The stone ruins of the Great Assembly Hall still stand against the sweep of tan and percylite.

  Lancaster has known booms. At the height of the Great Depression the air force moved in and on a bright morning in 1947, Chuck Yeager flew out of Muroc Air Force Base and through the sound barrier. The first sonic boom echoed across the desert floor, the sound of militarist Keynesianism and Cold War triumphalism in a place that thought itself exceptionally American. The city grew quickly afterward. In the center of the modest downtown area, a decommissioned airplane was mounted at an angle of rocketing ascent. A plaque marking an “Aerospace Walk of Honor” celebrated the town’s values: “Imagination Reason Skill.”

  By the 1980s, the combination of urban unrest, prison expansion, grinding under-employment, and inner-city gentrification pushed a new generation of diverse families out of Los Angeles. Lancaster was working-class aspirational, offering sizable homes for purchase or rent at a fraction of the cost. In 1980, it was 86% white. Three decades later, the city is 34% white. It is also 38% Latino and 21% Black. Lancaster’s elected officials are almost all white, Republican, and tend to be related to each other.

  At the dawn of Reagan’s morning, Muroc—long since renamed Edwards Air Force Base—was chosen as the landing site for the space shuttle. But the bust soon followed, when feds shifted aerospace money to Texas and Florida. In 1990, California’s first Walmart opened in Lancaster. The huge prison complex soon sprouted, a razor link between urban poverty (the prisoners) and a suburban middle class (the guards). Finally there was all of that pent-up housing demand. Retail, prisons, and construction were the future.6

  The hitch to living in Lancaster is that you must commute three-plus hours down the freeway to Los Angeles and back up each day. “If you can get a job it is cheaper and easier to live here,” says resident Shannon Clairemont. “If you can get a job here.” In November 2008, the local unemployment rate is 12.5 percent, almost double the national rate. In a year, it will rise to 17.7 percent, still almost double the national rate.7 One in five Lancaster residents will be living under the poverty line.

  Across from Amargosa Creek Middle School, in a neighborhood of American flags, Ford F-150 pickups, and camper-trailers, four two-story homes out of a John Hughes film are for sale. “I’m Gorgeous Inside,” reads one sign. Bill Westover and his son Eddie are edging the lawn on one of the homes. Work has slowed in the ski resort town of Big Bear Lake, so they have come back to clean and winterize all the unsold homes, homes where the tenants departed in a hurry, leaving half-finished food on the counters and DVD cases strewn across the room, garages filled with motorcycles and toolboxes.

  They have eight pages of addresses that need work, including many in the well-to-do section of Quartz Hill. “It’s hitting people on all levels,” Bill says. To the banks and reconveyance companies, Bill and Eddie—with their antifreeze cans and their grass blowers—are the last men standing against broken windows, squatters, and thieves.

  The predatory capitalism of the boom is being replaced by the vulture capitalism of the bust. Lenders are now real estate companies. Real estate agents are now short-sellers. Everyday folks are trying to figure out the new hustle.

  During the boom, Shannon Clairemont made a decent living sewing window curtains. Now she and her husband, Dave, a carpenter, are trying their hand at short-selling as well. They have discovered quickly it’s a world of deceptions and lies. They point down the block to a group of homes where lawn signs read “Sold.” “Those signs went up four months ago,” Clairemont says. “No one has moved in.”

  It’s about appearances. City leaders—largely rubber-stamping development in the earlier free-market frenzy—are now spending $8 million to buy vacant homes, refurbish them, and resell them at low cost. These flipped homes will not likely show up on HGTV.

  And as in other desert cities, city leaders have found a useful scapegoat for their woes. At the same moment falling rents are allowing low-income renters of color to improve their housing conditions, they are aggressively deploying sheriff’s deputies and county housing agents to investigate low-income renters of color for Section 8 “compliance abuse,” such as keeping extra tenants. They argue that these renters are turning Lancaster into a “dumping ground” for the dregs of Down Below.

  “It is a problem that is crushing our community,” Mayor R. Rex Parrish says. He has nothing to say of the developers who have overpromised, overbuilt, and skipped town.8 The NAACP will soon file a lawsuit challenging what it calls the criminalization of low-income Black and Brown residents, and the unfair termination of the Section 8 rental assistance vouchers.

  Driving east through downtown, sprawling buildings and their vast parking lots stand empty. Once they had been lively retail storefronts selling furniture or carpeting or mattresses. Now their windows display lonely scrawls against dark interiors: “Sale!” “Sale!” “Sale!” “Why Wait?” Another promises “GOODWILL Coming Soon,” but there is no one around to register disbelief.

  There is no street art in Lancaster. In an older sectio
n east of downtown, aggressive tags are scrawled across an abandoned house in a quiet cul-de-sac. Someone has built a skate ramp from particleboard panels ripped from the house’s broken windows. Youth continues.

  This neighborhood of modest ranch homes—some featuring cabled driveways that once covered Ford Fairlanes—were built in the real estate boom following Yeager’s sonic boom, Ruscha’s California. Standing on a corner shaded by mature oaks, Rafael Villanueva points out the empty houses. The yellow one across the street has been deserted for months. Two more down that block are also empty. The blue one across the street, with a large felled tree branch uncleared from the last storm, has been foreclosed.

  Thieves had broken into the yellow house and ripped out the copper piping and wiring. Some had even tried to climb over his fence to steal his recycled cans and bottles before he scared them away. One morning he watched a woman and a man fight over the block’s weekly harvest of glass and aluminum. “This is my turf,” the man told her.

  Villanueva had come up from Santa Clarita to drive a cement mixer in Lancaster. “When I moved here, it was empty. Then it was full, it was a boom town,” he says. In 2004, he was working six days and sometimes more than sixty-five hours a week. “Now it’s empty again.”

  A few blocks away the neighborhood changes again, into broad-fronted homes where there are fewer trees, but with yards that are better tended, and bushes and fences that rise much higher. Andy Jowyk steps into the morning heat for his daily walk in high tan shorts and Reeboks. He is a Ukrainian immigrant who had come through Bremen to New York City, he says, in clogs, “knowing two words of English: yes and no.” He had since, he proudly adds, been shot at by commies in Vietnam and Laos.

  This neighborhood, he says, waving his hand, was full of air force retirees like himself, people who worked at Edwards during the boom years. The economic crisis remains a popular topic among his friends. “You look at the top. How in the hell can they give billions to AIG and go have a party? What kind of shit is that? Pardon my language,” he says. “But you know what? You never borrow more than you can pay. The worse thing I see is: they don’t just lose a home, they destroy the thing.”