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The corner of 7th St. and Union Ave., a building is ablaze during the Los Angeles Uprising, 1992; Photo by Ted Soqui, 1992. Courtesy the artist. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ted Soqui from the California African American Museum exhibit.
Thirty years ago I was a senior in high school and had just turned eighteen. Our choir group took a trip to San Diego for a competition and to visit Sea World, Disneyland, and Knott's Berry Farm. As we drove back home and past Los Angeles, the city quietly awaited the Rodney King verdict. By the time the acquittals sparked the LA uprising, I was back in Bend, Oregon nearly a thousand miles away.
Now, I call Los Angeles home and on the night of the 30th anniversary, I sat in a soccer stadium near the USC campus watching a women's professional soccer game where almost all of the players took a knee after speaking about their support for racial equality in America. I've been thinking a lot about how much I've changed and how much the world has changed in the past thirty years and how much has remained the same. Here is an excerpt from I Tried: Tales of an Emerging High School Feminist about that day when the news that LA was on fire arrived in Bend. And here is a recent article if you want to learn more about the '92 uprising.
can we get along?
After that all-night bus trip and a couple of hours of sleep, I make my way into the kitchen where Mom makes oven pancakes for a late-birthday breakfast. She has NPR on, and I hear LA is burning. Rodney King. Police officers acquitted. Riots. Looting. Violence.
I try to remember LA. Wasn’t I just there, just a few hours ago? No, we were in San Diego, and then we drove up the coast. I can’t recall seeing much of anything I recognized of the valley where Mom’s family lives, or Baldwin Hills where Dad’s brother’s home looks out at the Hollywood sign. Then, I remember the grainy footage of a man being beaten and photos of his swollen, bruised face. I remember the race of the officers (white) and the race of Rodney King (Black), the use of the n-word, and the excuses people gave for why the beating was justified, “He was on drugs,” “He tried to attack them,” “He deserved it.”
I remember, two summers ago, seeing Do the Right Thing at the mall a few weeks after it’s release. Some theatres didn’t want to screen it. They feared riots in the streets. Now, there is rioting in LA.
I drive to school beneath clear blue skies, far away from black smoke rising into haze above the Hollywood sign, Dodger Stadium, and the LA skyline. I arrive at school, and no one talks about the uprising. My classmates haven’t heard about it, or they aren’t interested in discussing it, particularly with me. After all, our school already experienced its own loss this week, it’s prom season, and our teachers want to get a few more assignments out of us before senioritis sets in even further. No one mentions that school is cancelled in LA, that people are dying in the streets, and fires burn in neighborhoods a thousand miles away.
I think about saying something, starting the conversation. After all, everyone already sees me as a liberal, and a feminist, and a woman of color, but as I sit there in Mrs. Hurley’s class, I wonder if any of the personal stands I take change anyone or anything.
In the fall, as the Atlanta Braves made their post-season run, I told anyone who would listen that doing the tomahawk chop during volleyball matches was super offensive. People still did it.
When I heard about a new girl who just moved here from Vietnam, I passed by her on the way out of B Hall sitting on the floor by herself, but I said nothing. What could I say? She barely spoke English.
When rumors spread about a middle school friend being hit by her boyfriend, I did nothing.
When South Seas rolled around again, I didn’t say how offensive it was to come in black face, and even though Jamal Finley, the junior who replaced Chad Paulson as the only Black kid at Mountain View, hung a sign in the commons asking if he should wear white-face to South Seas, and nothing changed.
When the Wrangler-wearing boys scrawled KKK slogans across their binders, I said nothing.
When people said, “That’s so gay,” or when the football guys called each other fags, I said nothing.
When rumors spread about the girl who slept with him, and him, and him, or talked about the girl who threw up in the bathroom everyday at lunch, or the girl who got drunk and had sex with two guys, I never defended them or talked about what was going on.
I haven’t changed this town at all, and sometimes I didn’t even try.
On the day of Rodney King uprising, once again, I say nothing, and the disappointment and anger of my silence simmers inside me. I assume my classmates say nothing because they don’t know or don’t care. That is their privilege. They don’t think about race because why would they? Their families chose Bend. They fled cities, just like my parents did, to live in this utopia far away from urban spaces where cops beat Black men and Korean shop owners defend their markets. This is where I sit in my safe classroom, far from streets where cars are upturned and stores are looted.
Mrs. Hurley turns on a movie, and in the dark, I fold my arms along the cool surface of my desk, and rest my head on my arms. I’m so tired, but when I close my eyes I see Uncle Yosh and Auntie Suma’s house in Baldwin Hills, just above the fray where columns of black smoke rise up outside their picture window. I remember driving down Crenshaw where Mom always got so nervous, as if someone might attack our car as we drove down the street. I imagine the strip mall we drove past when we went to LA for mochi-tsuki. The view of Los Angeles burning has to be unbelievable from Uncle Yosh and Auntie Suma’s back yard.
What about my parents, this interracial couple leaving Southern California: what possessed my Japanese American dad and white mom to pick this mountain town in the middle of nowhere? The story goes that it was skiing. The proximity of this town to Mt. Bachelor saved their marriage, but I wonder if it was also easier for them to be away from their families. When I’m with Mom’s family, with their blonde hair and blue eyes, living near Simi Valley where most of the jurors for this Rodney King trial live, I feel like an outsider, like at any moment a cousin or Grandpa might say something totally offensive about “those Mexicans” or “those Chinks.” What did they say about us when we weren’t around?
Then, there’s Dad’s family. We are so white in comparison, because we are only half and live in Bend, void of any Asian community at all. Maybe staying in LA would have been much more complicated.
If our family had stayed in LA, what could have become of us? Maybe we would be closer to our cousins, to Traci on Mom’s side who already has a baby, or Craigor who is in jail. Maybe we would be closer to the cousins on Dad’s side, Ron and Pam, who were band kids, or John and Rich who played tennis. We would never know, because Mom and Dad kept us from these possibilities and raised us a thousand miles away.
When I get home from school, Mom is watching the news. There is footage from earlier in the day, shop owners in Korea Town, an area I’ve never heard of, holding guns and defending their shops.
President Bush announces, “Anarchy will not be tolerated,” but the footage tells a different story.
“Why aren’t they stopping it?” I ask, and Mom shakes her head.
“I think it’s too big,” she says, but I don’t understand it. How can people go so crazy? Why are they so angry?
Mom doesn’t understand either. She grew up white, in the valley, far from the streets we’re seeing on TV.
I’m unable to comprehend the anger and frustration that fills
the TV screen, but I want to. I want to understand what it feels like to be so enraged. My internal clock is ticking. My days in this town are numbered, and I know once I leave and make my way over the mountains and onto a university campus, I will never come back.
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