Blacks: Enraged or Empowered? : As the 25th Anniversary of the Watts Riot Approaches, Reflections on Racial Problems, Progress, New and Old

The nation, warns one expert in conflict analysis and resolution, is on the brink of “civil war.” That grim prediction doesn’t necessarily mean riots in the streets but a “combination of (individual) sociopathic behavior” and “intensified intergroup conflict.”

Indeed, Americans ignore what may seem to be minor conflicts erupting around the country between blacks and Korean immigrant merchants at the nation’s peril, says Richard Rubenstein, a doctor of law and director of the Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

The black and Korean conflicts, brought down to a simmer in Los Angeles in recent months but boiling in New York, are harbingers of the “fire next time,” Rubenstein says, alluding to James Baldwin’s 1963 collection of essays predicting the violent, inner-city response to American racism.

“Most dispute-resolution centers are set up to avoid litigation. We are an alternative to civil war,” he said in a recent phone interview. Civil war? “Yeah,” he groans, “it’s that bad.”

Although many would find his “civil war” metaphor hyperbolic, experts and community activists agree that, in Los Angeles and nationwide, there is a pervasive sense of rage and frustration in the African-American community.

As the 25th anniversary of the Watts riot approaches, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, is ending its annual convention in Los Angeles this week with police brutality against blacks cited as the most pressing concern among its members.

Much of the anger in the African-American community is and has been implosive--rage turned inward, manifesting itself in drug use, suicide and black-on-black crime, experts say.

There is also evidence that blacks, who have long struggled to extend democracy to themselves and others but still suffer from pervasive discrimination, are fed up with the failure of their traditional leaders and the government to remedy inequalities.

Nonetheless, many blacks are orchestrating individual and collective plans to better their lives, despite the chaos, African-Americans in California say, as they assess their community.

“I think there is going to be a new racism of the 1990s that is characterized by continued struggle against the hegemonic, white power structure, but also characterized by an increasing level of conflict and struggle among ethnic minority subcultures,” says Ronald K. Barrett, associate professor of social psychology at Loyola Marymount College.

“Unless ethnic minorities work together better, we will be guilty of the same things we have accused whites of being guilty of,” says Barrett, also Los Angeles district director for religion and race for the United Methodist Church.

“Unless we are sensitive to our collective kinship, and to a greater humanitarian sense of ethics where we bond together as people, see our problems as shared concerns,” he says, “each group will go for itself and it’s going to be a very, very difficult time.”

“A more militant type attitude is definitely developing in the black community,” says Rochelle Pegg, president of the South Meadowbrook Block Assn. “Reflecting on the ‘60s, I think we have learned that rioting is not the answer. Take Watts: They basically were destroying their own community. It’s taken 20 years for things to turn around there and for businesses to go back.”

Although she has led community efforts to mediate problems with Korean merchants in her neighborhood, she says boycotts are evidence of a greater sophistication in dealing with conflicts.

Rather than social chaos erupting, the African-American community is turning inward, uniting around common issues at the grass-roots level, says Pegg, 32.

Her block association, for example, has kept graffiti off neighborhood buildings, routed gang members from area parking lots, and eased tensions among residents and the local Korean-owned market, she says.

Pegg, an office administrator for a real estate firm, is married to a tree surgeon and has two sons, ages 13 and 5.

“I spend a lot of time talking with my sons,” she says. “I expose them to as many things as I can. I make a conscious effort to instill certain values, hold up role models to them. We took our children to see Nelson Mandela and explained why he was important. We told them that helping to ensure South African freedom is helping to ensure our freedom. We are only 20 years ahead of them in terms of the moves we’ve made in this country.”

In her den, two pictures hang on a wall, one of Malcolm X, the other of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Having each of them represents a balance. Malcolm had an essential ingredient that Dr. King’s (movement) was missing, that pride in self, that cultural identity.”

“I do see the potential for violence,” says Tim Riley, 38, a married auto salesman with two children. He sits in the dining room of a spacious, carefully kept, second-floor duplex he shares with his family. “I have to admit, I’ve thought many nights, and talked it over with my wife, about going over to that store and doing something violent to that guy and his property.”

The store is a market owned by a Korean immigrant merchant in Riley’s Los Angeles neighborhood.

Last year, around Thanksgiving, Riley says he bought several bags of groceries near closing time. In the rush to close, the store manager hurried him out and had a clerk take the bags to Riley’s car. When Riley found one bag missing, he took his receipt to the store the next day and asked for the merchandise.

Riley claims the store manager told him nothing was left behind, then insulted him with a racial epithet and the assertion that blacks are “always trying to get something for nothing.”

A stocky, muscular man, Riley is quiet for a few seconds, watching the sun ease below the rusty-orange horizon.

Last Christmas, he says, “we went downtown to the toy district. The sign outside the store says wholesale only. Hispanics and whites go in with no problem. As soon as we got to the door, the Asian owner rushes up to say ‘We only sell wholesale! You have to have a resale license!’ I have one. Is there a problem now?”

Riley and his wife bought two accordions, he says. They were told they cost $35 each.

His wife asked a Latino woman who had just bought the same items how much they cost her. “The woman told my wife $19 each. Why is there a difference? The only difference is my black face.”

Riley’s answer to the unpleasantness is to move his family to Atlanta--soon: “Black people are in the majority there.” That won’t make it perfect, he admits, “but I’d rather take my chances in a place where black people are in power. I don’t think a multicultural place like Los Angeles is good for black people.”

Rage and frustration are not new phenomena in the African-American community, but Reaganism fueled much of the current anger and disillusionment, says Andrew Robinson Gaither, 38, pastor of Faith United Methodist Church in South-Central Los Angeles.

“The past decade has been one where African-Americans have felt left out of the national agenda, have felt that business will go on as usual regardless of their needs, that the nation needn’t worry about them. The Democrats have, for years, taken the black vote for granted. That’s why I am not a Democrat,” he says. “I am a registered independent.”

While the “frustration level is definitely there in the African-American community,” he doubts whether it will be felt outside of the community. “Unfortunately, we are taking it out on each other because we can’t take it out on white folks.”

It’s a “misnomer,” says Rubenstein, the mediation expert, to term clashes among African- and Asian-Americans “intercultural” conflicts. Culture plays a role, but it is relatively minor.

The notion that the conflicts are intercultural also assumes the problem is one of communication, he says, adding, “ ‘If communication was better, all this stuff would just go away,’ people say. It won’t go away.”

Conflict occurs when “basic human needs are not met--the need for identity, recognition, development and security,” Rubenstein says. People resort to “hot” or “cold” behavior when those needs are not met. They have not been met in the African-American community, he asserts.

He explains that experts see boycotts and aggressive behavior, in general, on the hot side; there are “withdrawal, apathy, self-destructive and sociopathic behavior on the cold side.”

Barrett, the social psychologist, has documented this behavior in a recent study of homicide and suicide rates in 1988 among ethnic minority males in Los Angeles County.

Male and female “ethnic minorities in Los Angeles County accounted for 79% of all homicides in 1988, with African-Americans having the highest rate, 41%,” Barrett says.

“Looking at white male homicide rates, the group 35 and over constituted 49% of white male homicides recorded” in 1988. Curiously, he says, the homicide rate for black males tends to peak earlier, between ages 15 and 35. The homicide rate in 1988 for black males in that age group was 70%, he says.

Suicide rates, he points out, “tend to increase with age when you look at the larger studies that have been done on whites. However, for African-American males, there is a peaking in late adolescence; 60% of black male suicides occur within the 15-35 age range.”

The incidence of suicide among African-Americans decreases with age, however. Unlike whites, “it is not typical that elderly African- Americans take their own lives.”

Barrett, whose expertise is in “thanatology”--death and dying--has a theory to explain this self-destructive behavior: “I call the dynamic at work here the ‘loss effectance perspective.’ ”

At the very time males should be coming into a sense of “mastery and personal fulfillment, a realization of their goals, that’s the time at which it appears African-American males are self-destructing. Perhaps because they are confronted with systemic constraints, which let them know that they will not be effective; that their chances are less than average, and the reality of racism, poverty and mis-education and wage inequities tend to create a tremendous sense of loss of opportunities, loss of possibilities.”

He adds: “When a male, who has been socialized to be aggressive . . . to be manipulative of his environment, to take charge, comes to an age in which he is physically able and expected to realize those potentials,” but is confronted by the reality that he cannot, “he responds with great rage. He lashes out, often at himself, rather than at the system, which is the real cause of many of these limiting factors.”

Might it not be individual inadequacy, rather than systemic discrimination, that fuels this despair?

A 1983 study of black and white high school graduates in New Jersey indicates “something systemic is going on,” says Troy Duster, director of the Institute for Social Change at UC Berkeley.

The argument long has been that, if blacks had the proper education, they could compete equally for jobs, Duster says. If blacks were expected to do the equivalent of “tote that barge, lift that bale,” as they were in the manufacturing sector, there were opportunities for equal employment, he says.

But that appears not to be true in the “tertiary sector of the economy, the service sector,” he says.

He cites the New Jersey study of “matched pairs of black and white kids leaving high school. They had the same educational level, the same grade-point averages. They had equal chances of employment in the manufacturing sector. But in the service sector, despite the same level of education, whites were “four times as likely to be employed.”

Duster believes that tells much about American society. The nation is “moving into the (service) sector almost completely.”

In San Francisco, for example, “92% of jobs” are in the service sector, he says. “If you go to Fishermen’s Wharf or down to Pier 39,” what replaces jobs held by longshoremen, 75% of whom were black, he asks? “Boutiques have replaced them. Whose in those boutiques? A few blacks holding security or custodial jobs. But the people working behind the counter and the managers in retail trades are either Asians or whites.”

In a steel mill in Gary, Ind., “you don’t care whether the person shoveling steel is black or white. Retail sales, however, are about service. Here, employers may be much more vulnerable to stereotypic versions of what the public wants in a service person--whether it’s the hotel desk clerk or the restaurant in your hotel, you name it. The service sector may have much more endemic potential for racism than the (manufacturing) sector” ever did.

Duster doesn’t think Rubenstein’s “civil war” metaphor suits the social landscape he sees. But the difference in what they envision seems only a matter of semantics.

There will be “flare-ups, flashes of conflict--like the (much-publicized, violence-ridden New York) Korean boycott--and then it will die down,” Duster says. “I can’t imagine it being sustained because that’s negativity. People have to find a way to affirm what they want to do. Boycotting or scapegoating Korean merchants isn’t going to achieve that.”

It’s clear, Rubenstein says, “that the black-Asian conflict won’t get resolved by Koreans being more polite to black people. Without restructuring the inner city, without an economic revitalization of the African-American community, jobs for black people, giving black people an opportunity to get ahead,” the problem won’t go away.

If that suggests that an economic restructuring of America is in order, he says, “that’s right. With the loss of manufacturing jobs in America--historically, the sector that employed the most blacks--African-Americans “are being told to go to work for Wendy’s and shut up.”

They are not going to shut up, he says.

But Pegg, the neighborhood activist, says, “personally, I feel it’s not an economic issue for me. It’s the personal aggravation involved when you have to deal with constant rudeness on the part of Korean merchants. It’s just one more thing to add to the stress, the day-to-day thing we have to go through just to survive.”

People should not dismiss the cultural misperceptions that fuel black and Korean antagonisms, argues Pat Glenn, New York regional director for the U.S. Justice Department’s Community Relations Service. The service is trying to mediate the black-Korean conflict in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Blacks are not just “scapegoating” Koreans, she says. They feel they have real grievances. But long-range fears of civil war are an “exaggeration.”

The conflicts are “very serious to the people involved in them,” she says, adding that she is loathe to claim they should be viewed as a weather vane for impending, widespread social rebellion. But, the government official says cautiously, the problem should not be viewed “as an isolated incident.”

In New York, ongoing government efforts to mediate a black boycott of two Korean grocers in Brooklyn have been unavailing.

In Los Angeles, mediation efforts undertaken by Pegg’s block group and an embryonic grass-roots association of community activists, OMNI (Organization of Mutual Neighborhood Interest), have eased tensions between blacks and some local Korean merchants.

If mediation does not work, “I’m not opposed to boycotting,” Pegg says. “But I don’t think mediation is just a Band-Aid approach,” to what some see as an economic problem. “I think it has more clout than that.”

Jan Sunoo, a federal labor mediator and chairman of the dispute-resolution task force of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, says, “enlightened leadership from Mayor Tom Bradley and the Korean business community, as well as the willingness of grass-roots black activists to negotiate in good faith,” have brought the black-Korean conflict down to a simmer.

In March, Sunoo, a former clinical psychologist, conducted the first in a series of quarterly sessions designed to train other dispute resolution workers in intercultural mediation.

Bradley established the Black Korean Alliance, part of the city’s Human Relations Commission, in 1986 after the slayings of three Korean merchants by blacks in South-Central Los Angles.

While many in the black community say they have not heard of the alliance, it was successful in alerting Korean merchants to the seriousness of the conflict and the need to take remedial action, says Sunoo, 46.

OMNI, nonetheless, did stage a successful boycott last November and December against two Korean-owned swap meets.

Once the boycott brought attention to their concerns, the group’s leaders sat down with the manager of the stores and presented a specific list of demands.

OMNI was well-organized, spoke with one voice and had clear proposals to improve business relations: a customer service complaints system, the hiring of a black customer representative and a clearly posted 72-hour return-and-exchange policy. The management representatives also agreed to provide English as a second language training for Korean merchants and to recruit black youth for employment.

“What they did was right out of textbook mediation,” and a good model for similar conflicts, Sunoo says. “The two sides looked at each other and moved forward in ways that served the interest of both communities.”

The underlying philosophy of mediation, says Sunoo is that “given the proper conditions, people have the power to resolve their own problems, rather than the police or a judge.”

That sense of empowerment is growing in the African-American community, Barrett argues. Despite the rage, the frustration, no community is a monolith of attitudes and actions.

“There is evidence of positive political movement,” says the social psychologist who, among his other activities, directs a basketball league for youths at risk for gang and drug involvement. “I think the new rise in Afro-centric consciousness, as evidenced by the rap artists, as well as the African medallions that youth are wearing and the tremendous identification with South Africa and Nelson Mandela, is very, very encouraging.

“The youth of the present generation, who were not around when the civil rights movement peaked,” he says, “are definitely identifying with Malcolm X, identifying with traditional black leaders and reflecting that in art, music, and forms of dress.”

All this is happening on a “very significant scale--New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta--it’s a consistent pattern.”

In Washington, D.C., he says, former Roman Catholic priest George Stallings’ break with the church to form an African-American-centered religious organization with a black style of worship “is going to have an impact on most mainline religious denominations. It’s causing systems to be more accountable to the needs of their ethnic constituency.”

This type of consciousness has a political impact, he believes. “I don’t think David Dinkins would have been elected in New York unless blacks in that part of the country had a sense of their self-worth,” and translated that into social action. That’s what consciousness does, move people into social and political advocacy and change.”