HOLLOW AT THE CORE : Multiculturalism With No Diversity

SAN FRANCISCO —  Los Angeles has broken apart. People shake their heads, wring their hands; they say the city has fractured. But what L.A. gave America for decades was precisely a notion of a city of separate lives.

Here was a place of individual houses, individual lawns, behind good Protestant fences. Los Angeles became a verb. A threat, a joke, a protest against the notion of a city anchored by a center of spires. People elsewhere in America mocked Los Angeles for having no center, but the point of Los Angeles was democratic. The horizontal city that was nowhere the city was everywhere a city. L.A. gave metropolitan stature to the suburban, it reconciled individuality (separate houses) with a large civic ideal.

The most important gathering place for L.A. in recent decades has been Venice Beach--Sundays in summer--where people came from all parts of the city, each to “do his own thing.”

But then the palm trees burned. And now, after the Rodney G. King riots, everything seems changed. Los Angeles will never quite be the same.

There on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” the other day was some vision of the new Los Angeles. Those of us who watch L.A. from a distance are accustomed to seeing L.A. present itself as a happy, sunny place. A blond city. Usually, when someone like Oprah Winfrey leaves gray Chicago for L.A., it is for the purpose of interviewing movie stars.

Not this time. The audience was dark. Black faces, of course. Gang members; screaming black women; ministers. There were whites (a minority in this new Los Angeles), some weeping white women. There were also Korean faces and Mexican faces.

We Californians have recognized our “multiculturalism” for several years now. We have “recognized” it, though only after years of not acknowledging it. My (Mexican-American) cousin who has lived for years in Altadena says that recently one of her neighbors rushed over to tell her “the news.” “Some Mexicans are moving into the neighborhood.”

Twenty-five years ago, after riots in Watts and Detroit and Newark, the collective wisdom of institutional America was bound up and presented to the nation as “the Kerner report.” Its most famous conclusion was that America was dividing into two nations--one black, the other white.

If that conclusion seems a bit simplistic from the distance of two decades and from multicultural California, it remains, nonetheless, an important idea for many white liberals. I notice, for example, in my neighborhood bookstore the widely reviewed new book by Andrew Hacker, with its antique title--”Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.”

In the aftermath of the King riots, African-American newspaper columnists and activists speak of “black rage.” But in the Los Angeles of 1992 it is crucial to remember that the majority of looters who were arrested have turned out to be Latino.

The King riots were appropriately multiracial in this multicultural capital of America. We cannot settle for black and white conclusions when one of the most important conflicts was the tension between Koreans and African-Americans.

To say that Los Angeles has complicated our sense of racial relations should not, I think, deny black Americans their special place on the American stage. For a long time, as a Latino, I have been disturbed by the tendency of various civil-rights movements to describe their plight by analogy to black Americans. I have heard white middle-class feminists and Latinos and senior citizens (gray panthers) and homosexuals, and many others, compare their suffering to that of blacks.

My fear is that multiculturalism is going to trivialize further the distinct predicament of black Americans--most especially the plight of the young black male. There are two stories in American history that are singular and of such extraordinary magnitude that they should never be casually compared to the experiences of other Americans. One is the story of the American Indian; the other is the story of the black slave.

Black Americans have been generous, at least publicly, if also privately bemused, at the spectacle of so many Americans jumping onto the black civil- rights movement for their own political benefit. Alternately, black leaders, with the notable exception of Jesse Jackson, seem extraordinarily provincial in how they envision America. Listen to the major black civil-rights leaders and you will hear mainly references to white and black America.

A black leadership might emerge in L.A. different from any other in America. In L.A., African-Americans must live within a new kind of national complexity, alongside Russian Jews, Syrians, Mexicans, Armenians and Vietnamese.

In this most famous horizontal city, solutions will need to be horizontal. Peace will come as people from different neighborhoods negotiate with one another. Peace will not be dispensed from a mythical center. The key to saving Los Angeles will come immediately from a Korean-black dialogue.

A few years ago, L.A. officially celebrated its multiculturalism with a festival. I remember watching Peter Sellars, the festival organizer, on TV explaining to Bill Moyers the diversity of L.A. Was I the only person watching who found it odd that the multicultural city was being defined by a white man?

Sellars brought to the city troops of Indonesian dancers and Salvadoran craftsmen and Chinese acrobats. But maybe the multicultural reality will turn out to be more complicated and mixed: white American Protestants worshiping at a Salvadoran evangelical church.

The fact is that multiculturalism has, thus far, been a feel-good term that has trivialized the reality it trumpets. There are politicians and academics and think-tank types in L.A. who go on and on about multiculturalism, but they usually settle for improbable terms like “Asian” and “Latino,” lumping together diverse populations. Thus does the white Latino TV producer get categorized with a Guatemalan immigrant just arrived and the third-generation tattooed Chicano who runs with Crips.

There is true diversity in the multicultural city, but often those who talk about it most are the least prepared to make room for it. The fact is, the academics at UCLA or the City Hall types and all those famous leaders in those “100 most important people in L.A.” articles do not determine the variety of L.A. Los Angeles has no center!

But neither is the point, simply, as we had always thought, that L.A. is a collection of separate neighborhoods. The fact is that people, living alongside one another, driving the same freeways are bound to influence one another. In the midst of the chaos last week, the city was melting. Black rage led Latinos to loot their own minimall, which, in turn, encouraged white teen-agers to loot the sporting-goods store on Melrose.

The most pessimistic conclusion one hears now is that the city has fractured. But when was this city anything but a city constructed on separateness?

In fact, Los Angeles learned something very important and contrary during the darkest hours of fire and smoke. The idea came within terror: The riot in South Los Angeles was spreading, it couldn’t be contained. Soon there were flames blocks away and then miles away.

Here was a race riot that had no border, a race riot without nationality. And, for the first time, everyone in the city realized--if only in fear--that they were related to one another. And not simply was Westwood related in danger to Watts; the effect of L.A. in flames was looting in Atlanta and Las Vegas and San Francisco and Toronto.

The irony is this: L.A. was constructed for most of this century as a place, a paradoxical city of separateness. This was its optimism, the source of its youthful indifference. Now the city has lost its childish innocence with the realization that lives are related.

From this knowledge, this idea born in the middle of the night, fed by flames, from this knowledge of tragedy, L.A. may find its redeeming maturity.