Words to Live or Die By : MAPPING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE OF A SCARRED LOS ANGELES

WHEN, IN HALTING PHRASES AND ELLIPtical thoughts, Rodney G. King broke his long silence to comment on the trial of the policemen who beat him, their acquittal and the uprising that ensued, his inarticulate anguish mirrored our own.

Shaking and near tears as he stood before hordes of reporters, microphones and the click-flash of cameras, the man whose international appellation has become “the black motorist” pleaded, “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along. . . ? And just, I love--I’m neutral, I love every. . . I mean we’re all stuck here for a while, let’s, you know, let’s. . . . Let’s try to work it out.”

It will be difficult for Americans to work it out with no shared vision of the present or the future or a language with which to articulate it. We are not only “stuck here” together as King said, but stuck conceptually and rhetorically.

In the wake of the most catastrophic civil unrest in this century, we struggle to understand the social and psychological landscape of a scarred Los Angeles and a nation placed on alert. “I can’t put into words what I feel,” a 37-year-old schoolteacher told one interviewer. “It’s so frustrating. It’s beyond anger.”

Too often, we all are at a loss for the right words, applying false labels and distorted meanings. The common assessment of local news coverage of the rebellion found it to be dismal--anchorbabble informed by race and class bias. LA Weekly media writer Tom Carson called KABC’s Paul Moyer “the worst offender, flatly declaring as early as Wednesday evening that ‘this has nothing to do with the Rodney King verdict’ . . . and branding the rioters with abusive terms that were either purely rhetorical (‘thugs,’ ‘hooligans’) or as yet unsupported by any evidence (‘gangbangers’).”

Richard Schickel, critic for Time magazine, put it bluntly. Local television coverage “was roughly the equivalent of dumping raw sewage into Santa Monica Bay. In effect, intelligent life-forms--those organisms struggling to make sense of tragic chaos--found the oxygen supply to their brains cut off. . . .”

This all reflected confusion befitting, in the words of Princeton University religion Prof. Cornel West, a nation having a “nervous breakdown.”

As the death toll rose, as Korean-American merchants were burned out, as pan-ethnic protests spread to other cities with cries of “No Justice, No Peace!” and as what one Los Angeles Police Department spokesman called a “Rainbow Coalition of rioters” stormed police headquarters, public television talk-show host Charlie Rose asked West and an assortment of commentators the right question: “Is this an important moment in American history to define ourselves, to ask who we are?”

It is a watershed, said West. This multiethnic convulsion of rage forces us to recognize that many Americans “have been living a kind of lie, a lie that the criminal and legal system is just, that the economic system with its vast disparities between rich and poor is just, the lie that politicians are accountable and in some way satisfy the needs of their constituency. It is a tremendous awakening.”

After that moment of clarity, what many politicians, pundits and reporters issued in the following hours was a kind of gibberish. Actually, one had only to wait minutes. Following West, writer Stanley Crouch--echoing President Bush, presidential aspirant and columnist Patrick J. Buchanan and a cadre of print and broadcast journalists--indiscriminately described the fire this time as the act of “thugs and scum. They are the same acid (that has been) burning away our community for 25 years in every arena.”

And from every quarter one heard: “Why are they burning up their own neighborhood stores, shooting and stoning their own people?”

One senses a pervasive intellectual gridlock stemming largely from our obsession with race, which obscures issues of class and culture. At the same time, while caught in the quagmire of race as our national code for worth and worthlessness, we officially deny that racism exists. The amalgam of racism and guilt produces distress that clouds our thinking about all manner of inter-ethnic relations. A reflection of the denial is our reluctance to view those nights of rage as a revolt, not a riot.

We are confused as to whether the powerless or those in power are the racists. We are glued to the anachronism of the “melting pot” and can’t tell it from the “mosaic” or the “salad bowl” or the “patchwork quilt.” We are misled by chamber of commerce propaganda that distorts multiculturalism as gastronomic tourism, making diversity virgins out of visitors who have never swallowed a kosher burrito under smoggy L.A. skies.

We fail to comprehend the complex ways in which all forms of oppression interconnect and reinforce one another, providing models of dehumanization that turn the target of one kind of discrimination into the agent of another. No one is innocent. All of us have been hurt.

Consequently, we saw a projection of our worst selves on those apocalyptic nights that followed the acquittal of the four white policemen by a mostly white Simi Valley jury, a verdict that also ignited simmering rage over a white judge’s decision to give no jail time to a Korean-American grocer convicted of killing a black teen-ager, Latasha Harlins, just weeks after King was beaten.

In the smoke that rose from incinerated flesh and bones and wood and steel was an image of America so shameful that perhaps it was inevitable that most of our attempts to explain it were reduced to what the apostle Paul called the unutterable groaning of the spirit within.

But words are important, and if we are not using terms that adequately describe who we are and where we are as a nation, we may need a new social lexicon. At the least, we need to better understand and employ the language we do have. However, we have to analyze the reality before we can name it.

“When you understand what a phenomenon is, and can put language to it, provide a structure for it, a model, you can better understand how that phenomenon can be broken and change it,” says Lillian Roybal Rose, an ethnic-relations consultant.

Surveying the devastated neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles, Jack Kemp, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said the carnage was the product of inner-city “hopelessness.” He was right, and his analysis fit the requisite sound-bite length for the evening newscasts. Yet hopelessness does not fully explain the complex manifestations of what we saw during those nights of rage: the acting out of internalized oppression.

“Wherever you have oppression of people, you will also have internalized oppression,” says Roybal Rose. “It’s just rage that always goes either against ourselves or against members of our own group. We see this in South Africa.” This anger, she says, is “the other side of the oppression itself. It is not something that happens in isolation.”

WHETHER IT IS BASED ON SEX, CLASS OR RACE, OPPRESSION instills feelings of self-abnegation in its targets. It devalues their humanity by direct verbal assaults as well as through the social, economic and political conditions in which they live. As a result, oppressed people deal with their pain and anger by engaging in self-destructive behavior: alcohol and drug abuse. Or they direct their rage toward those over whom they have some degree of control: spouses, children, the elderly. They make targets of vulnerable members of their own group: very dark-skinned or very light-skinned people within the African-American community. They take it out on other oppressed groups with whom they have contact and who are similarly marginalized: African-Americans and Korean immigrant merchants.

Given no socially sanctioned place to express their despair over the injustice of the system, they release their distress where they can. And where they can is not Simi Valley because it’s a long way by foot; even if they had a ride, how far would the police let them get?

Part of the despair of internalized oppression is not only a sense of being a victim but a chronic sense of being disappointed in members of one’s own group. People start to blame each other. Why can’t we get ourselves together?

For example, a black woman, internalizing the rhetoric of the political right, stood up on Oprah Winfrey’s television show and said the cause of the civil unrest in Los Angeles was black people’s lack of “family values.”

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when economic declines led to widespread unemployment of whites, news broadcasts were full of stories about these Middle American families suffering the effects of economic dislocation--stress-related illness, domestic violence, alcohol abuse. Yet no one said these white families lacked values. People said, and the context of these news reports showed, that these people were stressed out by economic problems. Black people, however, who have suffered the consequences of unemployment and underemployment for generations, are seen as having an intrinsically pathological culture. How can this be?

A majority of white people perceive, as Andrew Hacker writes in his recently published book, “Two Nations,” that black people are biologically different, morally and intellectually inferior. If you think that’s an overstatement, consider these statistics from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. A 1990 national survey of approximately 1,400 adults found that 78% of the whites thought blacks more likely to prefer living on welfare than working; 53% thought blacks less intelligent. Our current conception of race evolved from such ideological racism, and it infects every aspect of American life.

The Christopher Commission, which investigated the LAPD in the aftermath of the videotaped King beating, reported a pattern of racism and bias in the use of excessive force. As widely reported, transcripts of communications between officers revealed that some used racial slurs, referring to blacks as “Gorillas in the Mist,” “monkey” and “rabbits.”

In Miami, another city infamous for its “riots,” police once routinely assigned the initials “NHI” to black crime victims, Miami attorney H. T. Smith told CBS News. NHI, he explained, meant “no human involved.”

In fact, our continued use of the scientifically bogus term race perpetuates the mistaken notion that physical appearance provides a basis for meaningful biological, intellectual and moral differences. Culture, history and class are far more important indicators of individual and group identity. Perhaps we should drop race from our vocabulary and use ethnicity to refer to variations among Homo sapiens. That’s the term now used by some social scientists to encompass shared genetic traits, culture and history--real or perceived.

Changing a word does not change the reality on which it is based. But the psychological and political implications of language are profound. The women’s liberation movement showed us the importance of challenging sexism through language. Its attacks on sexist nomenclature raised the nation’s awareness, changing perceptions of gender roles and creating a social climate that has helped to balance power relationships between men and women.

To foster a similar awareness of racism in a country that denies its pervasiveness, perhaps the media should italicize or place in quotes the word race to signal that the term is problematic and to encourage us to discuss the origins of race as a concept, racism as an ideology and the false reality they create in our daily lives. Were the media to challenge our a priori acceptance of race, it might contribute significantly to what must become a holistic attack on the national illness of racism.

BUT THE KEY TO DE-STIGMATIZING RACE REMAINS changing the reality that shapes our perceptions of it. Otherwise, people will just “pile on euphemism after euphemism,” changing nothing, says Pierre L. van den Berghe, author of numerous studies comparing race and ethnic relations in the United States, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico.

“I have taken the position for a very long time that the less said about race the better,” asserts Van den Berghe, a professor at the University of Washington. “The less recognition given to race officially in the form of race-based affirmative action . . . race-based busing--all those race-based supposed remedies--the better also.” Affirmative action should be based on class, he says. “Governmental authority, at all levels, should stop taking race into account--period. It should not be asked on the census, it should simply be obliterated from the official nomenclature.”

How, then, would we identify ourselves? One woman asked me straight-faced: “Whose festivals would we go to?”

Don Will, a professor of peace studies at Chapman University in Orange County, echoes Van den Berghe in saying people should identify themselves by what they really are: Afro-Cuban, Italian-American, Chinese-Jamaican-American, Mexican-Filipino. And for white people who don’t know the specifics of their ancestry, or who feel far removed from it, the generic “Euro-American” can suffice, Will says; that’s what he calls himself. Describing ourselves as these endlessly hyphenated Americans would drive the census people crazy, of course, but it would provide a more accurate picture of who we are as a nation, which is what the census is for.

Says Van den Berghe: “The United States is never going to get over its fixation on race if it continues to use race as a proxy for class.” He contends that race-based affirmative action is a “profoundly conservative, if not reactionary policy” that has benefited relatively privileged African-Americans but done little for poor blacks. The class cleavage that is partly a consequence of this was evident when black folks in cars were stoned by those on foot during the unrest, and when, apparently frustrated with black leaders, crowds burned down the offices of black City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters.

Van den Berghe, Will and others have argued that South Africa has made more progress in challenging racism than has the United States, and suggest that Americans might learn something from the African National Congress’ efforts to dismantle apartheid.

The goal of the ANC is “monumental: to turn one of the most racially divided societies into a non-racial one,” Will said in a speech this year. “The course they seem to be charting is, first of all, to eschew the racial categories inherited from apartheid, to establish a universal franchise, but still ensure that the economic deprivation generated by racist distinctions is overcome.”

The fact that the oppressed group in South Africa is the black majority has forced a national discussion of racism among whites and others that simply has not occurred here. But the time has come, and part of such a discussion requires that we define our terms. Are, for example, African-Americans who appeared to systematically burn Korean-American businesses “racist,” as commentator George Will asked on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley”?

To answer that depends on how one defines racism, and on this social scientists differ. Perhaps the widely accepted definition offered by the racial justice working group of the National Council of Churches provides the best explanation: Racism is racial prejudice plus power:

“Both consciously and unconsciously,” the council declared, “racism is enforced and maintained by the legal, cultural, religious, educational, economic, political, environmental and military institutions of societies. Racism is more than just a personal attitude; it is the institutionalized form of that attitude.”

To understand who a racist is, “one needs to make a distinction between prejudice and discrimination as an individual phenomenon and racism as a historical product,” says Edna Bonacich, a UC Riverside sociologist. “Usually when people talk about race prejudice they mean anybody can hold it and it has happened at all times in all places where people have not liked each other,” she says. “But what I mean by racism is what emerged when Europe became imperialistic and colonized the rest of the world. Out of that grew an ideology of superiority and inferiority that was taken to extremes never seen before. One in which other people were seen as not even human.”

Despite this historical context for understanding racism, it is troubling to see the disingenuous way in which people of color often use the prejudice-plus-power equation to avoid admitting that they, too, can be bigots.

Whatever we ultimately label the apparent targeting of Korean-American merchants by black arsonists, we must first call it wrong. That the arson and bigotry are expressions of internalized oppression, however, is equally clear. And in the sometimes deadly conflict between blacks and Korean-American merchants who play the role of middleman entrepreneurs in poor neighborhoods, we need a much clearer analysis than the ones we’ve generally heard.

On a recent broadcast of NBC’s “Today” show dealing with the “riot” and Korean-American and African-American tensions, co-host Katherine Couric earnestly introduced the segment as an examination of the “clash between two cultures.” She jumped into the subject, saying, “The image of a city in flames has forced people across the country to look at the ugly realities of life in an urban melting pot.” And she went on to describe the people of Asian heritage in the story as “Koreans.”

Let’s work up the scale of semantic misstatements by the show’s writers:

1) This is not Korea. People born in Korea who live here should either be called Korean immigrants or Korean-Americans--certainly the latter if they are citizens or were born here.

2) If our urban centers were really melting pots, they wouldn’t be the contentious places they are. The melting pot is a metaphor for a process of assimilation that has as its end product a homogenized American--you know, the same Big Mac you get here, you get in Oshkosh.

3) Culture has little to do with the clash between some African-Americans and some Korean-American merchants in impoverished neighborhoods. Rather, the fundamental issue is class.

The tensions between African-Americans and Korean-American merchants amount to the politics of distraction, Bonacich says. She has written extensively about middleman minorities around the world and sees this conflict as part of a syndrome. “The larger problem is the way capitalism works.” Korean-American merchants are, in a sense, “foot soldiers of internal colonialism.” They’re the buffer between the white power structure, represented by corporate-owned businesses, and their poor black customers. These merchants “bear the brunt of the anger the African-American community has against the larger system of oppression.” Korean-Americans end up being both victims and beneficiaries of the system.

One rarely finds that analysis in the media. Even American scholars are reluctant to use the “middleman” model, says Van den Berghe, because Americans avoid thinking in terms of class.

WHILE WE SEEM HELLBENT ON obscuring the class dimensions of our social problems, it seems that habit, racism and ignorance lead to confusion about our cultural identity.

The lived American culture--as opposed to what usually gets funded by public television--has been shaped by many groups and at its base is European, African and Indian--not the Eurocentric artifact that Buchanan, for example, has extolled during campaign speeches for the Republican presidential nomination. Jazz, the only uniquely American music, represents the cultural synergy that is the best aspect of the melting-pot metaphor, but the aspect least celebrated. What we embrace as “high” culture is European. The all-American social identity that we celebrate is the ethnic smelter’s homogenized end product: Jimmy Stewart in 1940, Kevin Costner today.

The New World synergy that produced jazz and tap, as well as the essentially Creolized African-American and the mestizo-California culture, seldom seems understood by the creators of tourist propaganda. They present “multicultural” Los Angeles as either a paradise of separate but harmonious ethnic groups or, in an updated version of Anglo-dominated assimilation, a zesty tossed salad served on the American flag.

Yet, we are more bound to each other than the metaphor of a mosaic, for instance, suggests. We seem more a tapestry with a series of patterns, some more dominant than others. As we weigh the factors that led to L.A.’s recent social explosion, consider the continued cultural marginalization of African-Americans, whose music, literature, dance and struggle to extend democracy have been central to the American tapestry.

While the official culture pretends otherwise, we all know what Elvis was about, Fred Astaire, too. And in white suburbia, people still watch “Moonlighting” in reruns and smile approvingly at a favored American male image: Bruce Willis’ hip white/black man.

Willis’ stylistic co-optation simultaneously masked (isn’t imitation the highest form of flattery?) and underscored (why didn’t they just hire a black man?) the predictions of the Kerner Commission report in the aftermath of the “riots” of 1967: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.”

Are we now two nations? asked Jim Lehrer on PBS’ “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour” on the second night of the uprising. Yes, said many of the usual roundup of editorial writers on the show. Then Richard Rodriguez, of the Pacific News Service (not, unfortunately, a regular voice on the show), challenged the old binary view of American society.

“We are not in the 1960s anymore in America. Certainly not in multiracial Los Angeles. To talk about America falling into two halves again ignores the enormous complexity of what America has become in the last 30 years.”

Los Angeles is a Mexican city, he said, “the second largest in the world. It is increasingly Asian.” And the violence directed against Asian-immigrant businesses and Korean-American merchants in particular “is a very important component of this story.” The presence of Latinos among the looters is a significant part of the story as well, he said.

Further, the concerns expressed by middle- and upper-class Latinos and blacks, who feared as much for their lives as whites during the uprising, point to glaring class divisions, argued Rodriguez.

Finally, with an eloquence that should set the tone for the nation, he offered a potent distillation of what Americans need to understand if we are to think clearly about what now confronts us. “I really would insist,” he said, “that we see this not simply in the old black-and-white dichotomy, but in more serious ways. As a more profound rupture of the American fabric.”

Words to live or die by.