Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  Two weekends later, on the morning of March 16, Latasha Harlins was shot dead by Korean-American storekeeper Soon Ja Du at the Empire Liquor Market Deli at 9127 South Figueroa in South Central Los Angeles. Harlins had been orphaned when her mother was shot to death when she was nine. When her mother’s killer got off with a light sentence, she decided she wanted to become a lawyer. She had sprouted to a slender five foot five, and though she was now having difficulties fighting with other girls in her ninth-grade year, her aunt and grandmother doted on her.

  Harlins had spent the evening at a friend’s place, and as she walked back home, she decided to purchase a bottle of orange juice for breakfast. She put it in her backpack and went to the counter to pay for it. Du grabbed Harlins’ sweater and screamed, “You bitch, you are trying to steal my orange juice! That’s my orange juice!” Harlins yelled back, “Bitch, let me go! I’m trying to pay for it.”

  In the video, the two are pulling on the bottle of orange juice. Harlins swings at Du a few times and then backs away. The bottle falls to the floor. Du picks up a stool and throws it over the counter at Harlins. The girl ducks and reaches down to pick up the bottle. She places the bottle on the counter. Du swipes it away. She has unholstered the gun. Harlins pivots and prepares to step away. Du has raised the gun. Harlins shudders and falls out of the frame. All of this happens in under a minute.

  Du was fragile, plagued by ill health, finding comfort only in her Korean-American Presbyterian church. The hours in the liquor store were long, and she suffered from migraine headaches. Recently their son, Joseph, had been harassed by more than ten Main Street Crips, and now some of them were in police custody. The store was briefly closed for fear of Crip retaliation. It had been held up more than thirty times, including the previous Saturday. But Du’s husband, a former Korean army colonel, had worked fourteen hours the day before and that’s why Soon Ja Du was behind the counter when Latasha Harlins walked in.

  To many African Americans, the Dus were the symbol of Asian carpetbaggers. In fact, many of the liquor stores that Asian Americans bought in the area had been sold to them by African Americans, who had purchased them from Jewish owners after the Watts Uprising. This trend accelerated in 1978, when liquor prices were deregulated and profit margins plunged. Many Black owners were happy to get out of the business, even happier to sell to Korean immigrants at more than double their investment. “Seven days a week, twenty hours a day, no vacations, people stealing. That’s slave labor,” said one African-American store seller. “I wouldn’t buy another liquor store.”11

  The bigger problem was that liquor stores were poor substitutes for grocery stores. Since 1965, very few supermarkets had reopened, and even fewer were built in the area. Vons had three hundred stores in the region, but only two in South Central.12 Worse, study after study found that supermarkets in South Central were the most expensive in the county, with grocery prices up to 20 percent to 30 percent higher than those in the suburbs and exurbs.13 Politicians would not do anything about it. It was as if they figured liquor was more important to inner-city residents than food. Immigrant liquor-store entrepreneurs did not provide what people really needed, but they still filled a void that no one else was willing to.

  Unwanted, they became easy prey for local thugs. In 1986, African-American and Korean-American civil rights leaders formed the Black-Korean Alliance after four Korean merchants were killed in one bloody month. The group wanted to increase dialogue in the community through programs like youth and cultural exchanges between Black and Korean churches. Yet they were unable to stop a 1989 boycott of the Korean American–owned Slauson Swap Meet. And as the Bush recession hit Los Angeles hard in 1991, eliminating 300,000 more jobs, eleven Korean-American merchants in Los Angeles County were killed in robberies. Another fourteen were seriously wounded.

  The mainstream media largely ignored these killings, and the Harlins-Du video foreclosed any further discussion. Black and Korean-American civil rights leaders pleaded for their communities not to overreact. But before too long, events had slipped far beyond their grasp.

  Pointing Fingers

  Who was the real enemy? Everyone had a different answer. Aubry wrote in the Los Angeles Sentinel, “The so-called Black-Korean problem reflects the pent-up frustration of both communities. And it is a problem that goes well beyond Blacks and Koreans per se; its genesis is the racist history and structure of the country which fosters social and economic inequality and leaves it to the victims to fashion solutions.”14

  On the other hand, Danny Bakewell, leader of the South Central–based organization, the Brotherhood Crusade, told the press that Blacks were tired of Koreans who would not hire community members, and who took money out of the community. He hastened to add that he was against all merchants—not just Korean ones—who were disrespectful to Blacks.

  But Latino and Asian community leaders were not so sure of Bakewell’s intentions. Bakewell was leading Black protests against construction sites that largely employed Latino workers. And when a Korean-American store owner at Chung’s Liquor Store shot and killed an African American who allegedly was attempting to rob the shop, Bakewell led a 110-day boycott. The picketers often shouted into the empty store, “Go back to Korea!”15

  The boycott soon expanded to other stores where incidents between Korean-American proprietors and Black customers had been reported. In August, Chung’s, Empire and other Korean-owned markets became targets of firebombing. In early October, Bakewell finally succeeded in brokering a deal forcing the owner of Chung’s to sell the store to an unnamed Black investor.

  Most pundits cast the crisis in terms of race—a clash of two incompatible cultures—or class—Korean entrepreneurs versus Black welfare dependents. These were flimsy interpretations based on hollow stereotypes. To K. W. Lee, the pioneering Asian-American journalist and the publisher of the Korea Times, the mainstream media—which by now was broadcasting the Harlins videotape as often as the King videotape—was manufacturing a “race war in which Korean-American newcomers were singled out for destruction as a convenient scapegoat for the structural and racial injustices that had long afflicted the inner city of Los Angeles.”

  He wrote, “In L.A.’s huge cutthroat media market, a racial incident was tailor-made for TV ratings, especially when it involved Koreans. Every time the ‘Black-Korean conflict’ barked in headlines and sound bites, the Korean merchants caught deadly gunfire and firebombs.” Years of dogged efforts to improve African- and Korean-American relations had been crushed under the wheels of a news cycle that Lee said found a “win-win-win formula of race, crime and violence.”16

  In a press conference called to denounce violence against store owners, Korean-American civil rights and business leaders refused to be baited into pointing fingers at African Americans. “Cultural differences do exist. But at the very heart of the so-called racial conflict is a devastating economic struggle,” said Gary Kim, the president of the Korean American Coalition. “We are not here today to compare or to say that Korean Americans suffer the same oppression as African Americans. However, we do face many of the same problems.”17

  Instead, they pleaded to African Americans for some equanimity. “When Koreans and Blacks are involved in a crime, and we have a Black victim, it’s almost automatically shown as a racially motivated incident,” Kim said. “When there’s a Korean victim involved, they’re quick to say that it’s not a racially motivated incident. And I don’t think we’re playing the game fair here.”18

  Two weeks later, Death Certificate hit the streets.

  The Limits of Gangstacentrism

  The album marked a pregnant pause before the April 29, 1992, explosion. It came when headlines were unrevealing, names and dates were loaded symbols, and questions overwhelmed the possibility of answers. The moment swirled with confusion, waiting for a rowdy, foul-mouthed twenty-two-year-old to try to sort it all out.

  If Nation of Millions had signaled the end of the civil rights era, Death Certificate’s p
rimary impulse was to dance on the grave. Cube still took a coarse anarchic joy in exploding propriety. But having played a central role in defining the gangsta aesthetic, he was also trying to find a politics of gangstacentricism, perhaps the most impassioned attempt to speak to the young guns of South Central since Bunchy Carter had left the Slausons for the Panthers. On the cover of the album, he stood next to a white body on a coroner’s gurney, covered with a flag, a tag reading UNCLE SAM hanging from its toe. The Death Side would be “a mirror image of where we are today.” The Life Side would be “a vision of where we need to go.”

  Confident now in his understanding of both the “street nigga” and the conscious Black, he positioned himself in the middle. On the record sleeve, he stood between his Lench Mob—loose, unformed, staring in all directions defensively—and the Fruit of Islam—aligned in crisp formation ready for war—reading a copy of The Final Call, whose headline read UNITE OR PERISH.

  Except for the Lench Mob and the Nation of Islam, everyone—whites, bourgeois Blacks, women, gays, gang-bangers, dope pushers, Korean shopkeepers, Japanese capitalists, the American army, President Bush, Darryl Gates, Jesse Jackson, Jerry Heller, MC Ren, Dr. Dre, Eazy E, the list went on—seemed to be enemies. It was as if Cube had taken Public Enemy’s gunsight off the young Black male, and was waving the weapon from target to target, at each and all of those lined up around and against him.

  On the Death Side, the same rapper who once condemned Pan-Africanists with the line, “Put ‘em overseas they’ll be begging to come back,” became a polemicist. Tales of corner-hustling were now set within a context of national politics. On “A Bird in the Hand,” Cube’s crack-dealer raged over a moody loop from B. B. King’s meditation on slavery, “Chains and Things”: “Do I gotta sell me a whole lotta crack for decent shelter and clothes on my back? Or should I just wait for help from Bush or Jesse Jackson and Operation PUSH?” Fuck keeping hope alive. On these streets, “Man’s Best Friend” was a gat.

  In gripping, often funny moral parables, Cube pushed the characters of Amerikkka’s Most Wanted toward their grim ends. On “My Summer Vacation,” the narrator of “Amerikkka’s Most Wanted” exported his gang-banging, crack-slanging business to a new frontier, St. Louis. “Some of them are even looking up to us, wearing our colors and talking that gang fuss, giving up much love, dying for a street that they ain’t even heard of,” Cube’s character mused.

  But by the end, his friend was dead at the hands of local bangers and he was heading to prison for life. “It’s illegal business, niggas still can’t stick together,” Cube rapped as if it were the character’s epitaph. The song closed with cops launching a bloody crackdown on the streets. Cube was inverting the real-life FBI accusations he had encountered on tour with NWA, and slyly commenting on gangsta chic’s move into the mainstream. There was also a lesson here: unite or perish.

  The horny narrator of “Once Upon a Time in the Projects” returned to visit a suburban girl in “Givin’ Up the Nappy Dugout.” When he encountered her bougie father, he delighted in graphically describing all the things he and his crew were doing to his daughter. By “Look Who’s Burnin’ ” he was paying the price at the free clinic. But when he spots an around-the-way girl who dissed him for a college boy, he has a laugh at her wannabe expense. Cube’s enemies now included race traitors, especially those who had forsaken their ghetto roots.

  He further refined his take on the Dopeman, replacing glamour with grit and layering the inevitable bloody end with telling details. On “Alive on Arrival,” the low-level pusher of “A Bird in the Hand” is shot on a street corner while trying to make a sale. At King-Drew Hospital, the emergency ward is as crowded as the county jail dayroom, and although the pusher is bleeding buckets, he attracts more attention from LAPD than the MDs. “I don’t bang I rock the good rhymes,” he protests once again, before adding ironically, “and I’m a victim of neighborhood crime.” The character dies while waiting for treatment. The song indicted both butcher-shop health care and drug-dealing nihilism.

  Dr. Khallid Abdul Muhammad closed the Death Side. “Look the goddamn white man in his cold blue eyes. Devil, don’t even try. Bebe’s kids, we don’t die, we multiply,” Muhammad said, flipping the Crip slogan into a call for solidarity. “You’ve heard the Death Side, open your Black eyes for the rebirth, resurrection and rise.”

  On the Life Side, Cube revisited the themes of the Death Side in explicitly nationalist critiques. “I Wanna Kill Sam,” written in the context of the Persian Gulf War, ripped into military recruiting by comparing the United States to a rapacious slave-master. “True to the Game” condemned sellout Blacks: “Trying to be a white or a Jew, but ask yourself, who are they to be equal to?” “Doin’ Dumb Shit” and “Us” were Cube’s most personal tracks, handing listeners the proper way to interpret the stories of the Death Side. “Us” was the closest he would ever come to a manifesto, chastising the Black community for its disunity, materialism, violence, indolence and indulgence.

  For “Colorblind,” a song about gang-banging, Cube brought in a crew of rappers who had lived the life. DJ Pooh and the Boogiemen hooked up an appropriately N’awlins-fried track—the Meters’ “Pungee”—for these sons of once-hopeful Southern migrants now walking through the graveyard of their future. Cube stayed on message, delivering a verse in which he backs down from a stoplight confrontation. But he looked like Jesse Jackson next to the other rappers—WC, Coolio, Kam, Threat, and King Tee.

  “Niggas in the ‘hood ain’t changed,” King Tee rapped, “and I finally figured out that we’re not in the same gang.” Threat was even more pessimistic. “Killa Cali, the state where they kill over colors, ‘cause brothers don’t know the deal,” he rapped. “But every nigga on my block can’t stop and he won’t stop and he don’t stop.” Here was the famous Crip motto, and its get-mine-while-I-still-can cynicism overwhelmed Cube’s idealism.

  Cube’s gangstacentricity proceeded from the assumption that one had to be tougher than tough, that life itself was a front. But of all of its problems—its dismissal of history, its victimization of women and gays and its we-against-the-world enemy-making—none would be more fatal than its inability to imagine an alternative that felt harder, more compelling than that single tragic slice of Crip wisdom.

  Fear of a Non-Black Planet

  Angela Davis asked Cube to clarify whom he thought was his audience: “Many people assume that when you are rapping, your words reflect your own beliefs and values. For example when you talk about ‘bitches’ and ‘ho’s’ the assumption is that you believe women are bitches and ho’s. Are you saying that this is the accepted language in some circles in the community?”

  “Of course,” Cube answered, “People who say Ice Cube thinks all women are bitches and ho’s are not listening to the lyrics. They ain’t listening to the situations. They really are not. I don’t think they really get past the profanity. Parents say, ‘Oh, oh, I can’t hear this.’ But we learned it from our parents, from TV. This isn’t something new that just popped up.”

  “What do you think about all the efforts over the years to transform the language we use to refer to ourselves as Black people and specifically as Black women?” Davis asked. “How do you think progressive African Americans of my generation [feel] when we hear all over again—especially in hip-hop culture—‘nigger nigger nigger’ . . . How do you think Black feminists like myself and younger women as well respond to the word ‘bitch’?”

  Ice Cube avoided a direct answer: “Since the sixties, and even before that, we’ve moved. But we still ain’t gained. We are still in the same situation as before, as far as getting a piece of the rock is concerned. The language of the streets is the only language I can use to communicate with the streets.”19

  The conversation between Davis and Cube not only pointed to fissures around gender and generation, but class and education. Davis’s formative years in California had been the late 1960s, when the Black Panthers were calling for a united front of a
ll oppressed peoples and the Third World Liberation Front was launching the movement for ethnic studies programs at San Francisco State and U.C. Berkeley. Back then, students of color were still rare, and so it was natural for them to find racial solidarity across class lines.

  Two decades later, affirmative action had turned the state’s public universities into the nation’s most diverse campuses, reflecting the massive demographic change the state itself had undergone. But Black, Latino and American Indian enrollments were still largely economically segregated, with mainly middle-class students attending the highly selective University of California system and working-class students going to the California State Universities and Community College. Retention rates for students of color were also troubling, with less than half of Blacks and Latinos matriculating at some University of California campuses. And with the steep fee increases prompted by the state’s budget crisis and a gathering affirmative action backlash led by Black neocon Ward Connerly, a golden era of access was drawing to a close.

  As prominent leaders like L.A. mayor Tom Bradley and assembly speaker Willie Brown were at the apex of their political power, many of California’s African Americans felt that they were losing economic, political and social ground to the emerging Chicano, Latino and Asian-American communities. In strictly representational terms, they were correct. Seventy-five thousand middle-class Blacks had left South Central and Compton for San Bernardino and Riverside during the 1980s, and reverse migration to the New South, particularly the shining Mecca of Atlanta, was under way. Waves of new immigrants replaced them in the inner city. In 1965, the area was 81 percent Black. By 1991, one in three living in South Central were foreign born, and Latinos were about to surpass Blacks as the numerical majority.