Left of Black S2:E30 | Remembering the LA Uprising: A Digital Mix

Left of Black S2:E30 | April 30, 2012

Remembering the LA Uprising: A Digital Mix

April 29^th marks the 20^thAnniversary of the week-long civil unrest popularly known as the LA Riots.  Violence erupted throughout the city of Los Angeles in the aftermath of the acquittal of four LAPD officers who were accused of beating African American motorist Rodney King.  The beating was famously captured on a held-held video device. 

In this special episode of Left of Black, scholars, activists and artists reflect on the 20^thAnniversary of the LA Riots including Marc Lamont Hill,  Lynne d Johnson, Kimberly C. Ellis, Allison Clark, Kim Pearson, Moya Bailey,  Blair LM Kelley, Christopher Martin(Play of Kid N’ Play), Treva Lindsey, Jasiri X, Michelle Ferrier,  Jay Smooth and host Mark Anthony Neal. 

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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Episodes of Left of Blackare also available for free download in HD @ iTunes U

Can We All…Get It Right?: Remembering the LA Uprising

Can We All…Get It Right?: Remembering the LA Uprising

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

There are few days in life where you can say without a doubt, “I know what I was doing 20 years ago today.”  This is the case today, on the 20^th anniversary of the start of the Los Angeles Uprising. 

Having dropped out of the University of Oregon after 2 quarters, I was living in Los Angeles working and taking two classes at UCLA.  Like many middle-class white youth I presume, I paused when the verdict was delivered and noted the injustice that spurred my outrage before getting back to my life.  I was angry, like many others, because a jury of THEIR peers concluded that 4 police officers did nothing wrong in beating Rodney King 56 times, but the anger lasted only for that second.  That was the reaction from many in West Los Angeles.  “That’s outrageous, can I get a cold beverage”; “what an injustice, is the mall open yet?”    

I remember thinking little about the case  after hearing the verdict,. I headed to work and then to my class at UCLA.  Driving to my class, through the wealth of West Los Angeles, all was calm.  Entering class, an introduction to sociology course that focused on inequality systemic racism and privileges, it was clear that the verdict changed little.  Class was planned as usual.  Yet, before long, with news reports of violence breaking out in South Central, Los Angeles, our professor announced the end of class out of concern for OUR safety.  In a city immensely segregated, defined by systemic divisions that thwart interaction all while enacting violence on its residents of color, it is immensely telling that the Rodney King Verdicts/LA Uprisings became meaningful, if not visible, when people thought the riots were going to cross La Brea or other markers dividing the two LAs.

For the rest of that night and next day, I was paralyzed, watching television almost endlessly.  In retrospect, for myself, and maybe others, the LA Uprising put a crack in the walls of segregation.  Although living less than 15 minutes from South Central, Los Angeles, it might as well have been 10,000 miles away.  That is the specter of segregation in Los Angeles.  Even the media reporting then, and the ways that the verdicts and LA Uprising were being talked about demonstrated this fact as people continued to talk about what was happening “over there” concerned that it might “migrate here.”  I was uncomfortable with the detached feeling paralyzing me so I decided to leave the state-protected bubble of West Los Angeles and I drove down to South Central on day 2 to donate some food, clothes, and stuffed animals to the First AME Church.   

I was most certainly driven by my desire "to help," as I imagined what that meant twenty years ago, which most certainly reflected my white privileged understanding of privilege.  Yet, I was also angered by the clear segregation of Los Angeles, not only in terms of geography, economics, and daily reality, but sentimentality and emotion.  

The lack of sadness and anger within West Los Angeles was telling because the LA Uprising was not happening in our world; it was somewhere else, happening to someone who didn’t look like “us.”  The power of race and class in eliciting not only empathy and connection, but also sentimentality and humanity, was on full-display in the days after the King Verdict.  When I told people that I was heading down to South Central, they looked at me like I was crazy, as if I was driving into a foreign land amid a war.  To them, it was a foreign land, one that they neither visited nor thought about except in moments of fear (“will the rioters come to the West Side) or heading to Lakers’ games.  Despite voiced concerns about my driving just a few miles down the 10 Freeway, it was rather “uneventful” except in how this moment transformed me. 

The drive forced me to reflect on my own assumptions and stereotypes, to think about why neighborhoods so close to my own were places I had never been (and thought of as so far away); it forced me to think about the violence and destruction that predated April 29^th and bare witness to communities that West Los Angeles had abandoned; and finally, it forced me to reflect on the power of community, to see beyond the televisual representation of South Central Los Angeles rioting, to see families collecting food, kids playing, and people coming together.  It forced me to look inward, to think about whiteness and privilege, to reflect on my stereotypes and assumptions.  Even my ability to get my car and drive to South Central Los Angeles is evidence of privilege given the levels of state violence experienced by black and Latino youth entering LA’s white enclaves in West Los Angeles.  What should have been a moment of introspection, of racial reconciliation and systemic change, instead became a moment, one that too many of us retreated as we are driving back to the “comfort” of a gated community. 

Like me driving back to my middle-class world, much of Los Angeles quickly returned to its protected bubble and instead of focusing on self and policy, inequality and state violence, used the LA Uprising to justify persistent segregation I recall, for example, when teaching nursery school that summer, a child, upon seeing broken glass on the ground, told me “look what the black people did.”  Although I did offer a critical intervention, I should have responded by saying “Actually, look what the white people did and while we are talking, remember the LA Uprising, the white people also did that.”  To me, this moment encapsulates the last 20 years, whereupon the injustices and violence, the inequality and segregation that produced the Los Angeles Uprising are both denied and erased amid efforts to blame communities of color.  I know, for myself, the Rodney King verdict/LA Uprising forever changed me.  On this anniversary, given how racism remains the problem of the twenty-first century, I find myself thinking about what I witnessed during my drive to South Central and what I witnessed upon my return to the Westside.  I am reminded about the extensive work required in West Los Angeles and other whitopias to challenge white privilege and systemic inequality, I am reminded of the importance of not just “getting along” but more importantly “getting it right.”   

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the just published After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.

'Now Dig' Kellie Jones Talking About Art and Black Los Angeles

Now Dig Kellie Jones Talking About Art and Black Los Angeles

by Tukufu Zuberi | HuffPost BlackVoices

I recently visited an art exhibit chronicling the legacy of art in Black Los Angeles. The show is at the UCLA Hammer Museum and is called "Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980." I sat down to speak with the curator of the exhibit. Kellie Jones is associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her writings have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and journals. Her critically acclaimed book EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke University Press 2011) has been named one of the top art books of 2011 by Publishers Weekly. Her project "Taming the Freeway and Other Acts of Urban HIP-notism: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s" is forthcoming from The MIT Press. Stay tuned for the rest of my interview with Kellie Jones tomorrow in my next post.

 

Your latest show is at the UCLA Hammer Museum, "Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980." Talk to me about the conceptual background of this show.

Well, the show came about because I was doing research on a book on African-American artists in Los Angeles. I was in Los Angeles and I ran into a friend who happened to be the chief curator of the Hammer Museum at the time, Gary Garrels. He said, "What are you working on?" I told him I was working on this book about L.A. And he said, "Oh, are you planning to do a show?" I told him, "One day, in the future." Two weeks later, he calls me and he says, "How about now?" So it turned out, there was this great opportunity with the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute. They were offering seed money over a two to three-year period to do research on aspects of Southern California art. And would I like to put a proposal together to do a show based on my own research? I was already scheduled to go to the Getty to do an oral history for them with some of these artists, who ended up being in the show and are also in my book. So I said, "Great! Let's get going on this!" 

Several of the works that you highlight in "Now Dig This!" come from the storage rooms of some of the major museums of art in the United States. In what way is this exhibition a philosophical shift from the typical show we might see at a museum of art?

I don't think it's that far off the mark of typical shows. I think what's different is that people are kind of shocked about all these artists that we didn't know about. And they happen to be African-American. This type of research goes into shows, generally, at certain institutions. If you look at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Museum of Modern Art, these shows are based on a lot of research. The only difference then is that the focus is on African-American artists and what they were making at the time and how their work elucidates that time period. It's just another way to frame history.

Now, in your show, you've placed some of these artists in relation to the development of art in the United States more generally. For example, you placed David Hammons and Maren Hassinger and others in conversation with the experiments in multimedia and post-minimalism. Do you think the artists in your show were rebelling against the Western aesthetic tradition?

Yes and no. I mean, they're part of that tradition. They all went to art school, so they all have part of that. Minimalism was this kind of, more industrial, kind of cold, modernist thing. Generally in this kind of practice no sorts of extra meaning would come into the work outside the meaning of the materials themselves. But what post-minimalism did was that you could have materials that actually signified different things. So for David Hammons to use the greasy bag, for him, it meant places where people picked up chicken and the grease was running in the bag. And so, there you go. You know, for him, with hair, he thought he had found his perfect object. It was a black object. Yes, he thought this was a racial object. He used black hair, from black barbershops, and it was non-gendered. That's what he liked. So it didn't have to be about men or women. It could just be this black object. He also thought grease was a black object. Something that, you know, your mama tells you to grease your body up so you don't look ashy. So that these materials signified people's lives in history. For Senga Nengudi -- you didn't mention her, but she's also one of the people in that post-minimalist room -- she used pantyhose to talk about women's bodies. So we have a certain feminist idea. And then the sand. They're in L.A. You got a lot of sand at the beach. So you can get some sand. And that gave it a certain kind of volume, a certain kind of shape. Maren, now see Maren, she's interesting because she's using materials that are part of a minimalist canon -- that is steel, steel wire, rope -- but then she's making them into these kind of verdant forms. Of all the artists in the show, her work is not signifying something that would be "black," that would be considered "black art". But her performative practice does bring in African dance styles. They are working within a kind of canonical post-minimalism, but then at a certain point -- particularly Hammons -- they're bringing in things that are saying, this is about African-American life. This is about another side of life that you hadn't really considered, and that these kinds of materials allow us to think about.

Tukufu Zuberi is Chair and Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania; host, PBS’ 'History Detectives'

Ice Cube Celebrates the Eames | Pacific Standard Time

From Pacific Standard Time:

Ice Cube drives Inglewood blvd. describing the Los Angeles that he knows. He talks of landmarks like The Forum, Five Torches, Cockatoo Inn, Brolly Hut, and Watts Towers. He refers to the 110 as "Gangsta Highway". Cube says coming from South Central LA teaches you how to be resourceful. The video cuts to Cube walking the Eames House perimeter, through the Eames living room, and sitting in the Eames lounge chair. 

He brings us back to his NWA years when he studied architectural drafting before launching his rap career. One thing he learned that translates is to always have a plan. Cube describes the modern, green and resourceful building design of Charles and Ray Eames. Visionaries of connecting nature and structure. Cube ends by saying "Who are these people who got a problem with LA? Maybe they mad cuz they don't live here."

LOS ANGELES: Hate On Valentine's Day

special to NewBlackMan

LOS ANGELES: Hate On Valentine's Day
by Kevin Powell

Those of you who know me or my work know that I am anti- all forms of hatred and bigotry, be it racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, classism, homophobia, religious intolerance, or a reckless disregard for the disabled or handicapped. That at this stage in my life, and for the rest of my life, I am a firm believer in nonviolence, love, and forgiveness, even of those who have wronged us in some way. That, as evidenced by my life journey as an activist, writer, and public speaker, I truly do love all people. And mean it—

Nor do I believe in ever viewing myself solely as a victim these days, either, because of my race, or my past class background of poverty. I am with bringing people together, with our communicating with each other through our differences, with our healing that which separates us due to our differences, whenever and however possible.

So it takes a lot for me to write a blog asking people not to support a business. But in the early morning of February 14, 2011, after leaving an amazing post-Grammy party with two female friends, we waited for the available shuttle service to get us from the top of the canyon to the middle of it where we and other party attendees had to park our vehicles.

We remembered the long walk from there to the event and opted to use the shuttle service one of the security personnel suggested we wait for. We were under the assumption the shuttle van would take us and other passengers to wherever our cars were parked along the canyon route. Instead the driver, a very young man, did not announce until the van was in motion that he would not stop until we were at the Beverly Hilton Hotel (fyi, I am not staying at that hotel, but one in West Hollywood). This meant many of the passengers, including the three of us, would have to pay for taxis to get to our cars back in the canyon.

When we got to the hotel's parking lot, we asked the driver if he could take us back up the hill, since he was returning to get more passengers anyhow, so we could retrieve our car. He refused. I attempted to reason with the driver but he would not budge. At that moment a tall (about six feet two inches) man, with thick jet-black hair combed backwards and wearing all black, stepped to the shuttle van's driver's door, spoke in a language I did not understand, then rudely told the two women and I that he was the owner of the company, that we had to get out of the van, that there would be no ride back up the canyon route. I attempted to explain our situation to this gentleman, who said he was the owner of the company, but he cut me off repeatedly, and threatened to physically remove and harm me if I did not get out. Not once did I raise my voice, curse, or disrespect this man in any way. He went a step further, coming around to the passenger side once the women were already out, saying that I "should go back to the jungle" (a reference to one of L.A.'s poorest and most violent communities of color), that he didn't like my people, and that he was a real African (I would learn later the man is from Tunisia, the northernmost country in Africa and is essentially an African Arab). It did not matter who or what I was, not that I am into status or anything of the sort. But it was clear this man had a deep disdain for Black people, and he had immediately reduced me, in his mind, to the worst imaginable stereotypes without even so much as allowing me to complete a full sentence.

Thus in the matter of just a couple of minutes I was physically threatened and racially insulted a few times as my women friends witnessed very clearly. Still, no raising of my voice, cursing, or disrespect towards this man. I told him I was going to call the police to deal with this matter and his hyper-masculine attitude kicked in with the response "I don't care, call them." So I did. And about 15 minutes later two Los Angeles-area officers, a female cop and a male cop, and I were walking from the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hilton to the parking lot to have a talk with this gentleman. I did this because I wanted to obtain, with the help of the officers, his name and the name of his company:


Moncef Said Abbou
President, M&S Valet Parking
Los Angeles, CA
www.msvaletparking.com


And because it was my hope that with the police officers there as mediators, I would not need to file a complaint or write a blog, even. But Mr. Abbou could barely contain his venom and arrogance even in the presence of the police officers: he lied to the male cop who pulled him aside about what happened, and walked away and returned to his car when the officers asked him to listen to what I had to say one final time. This from an individual who runs a business that is completely dependent on its interactions with other human beings. And this behavior to a person, me, who will always have a need to hire or refer companies like his, since I do business in Los Angeles, which is quite a bit.

According to its company website, M&S Valet Parking provides these services: parking management, valet parking services, and shuttle service. And its very prominent quote reads

"We pride ourselves on upholding the highest standards of customer service and efficiency."

Yet even with the police present the man was rude, because he knew the police could not do anything to him other than say I could file a civil complaint against his business. And I can tell people like you, who frequently rent or lease these types of companies in Los Angeles (or know people and companies who do) that you should not support such a company or its owner any further. I am not seeking nor want an apology. And I’ve already forgiven the man in my mind and heart. But if he talked to me in this manner, imagine how many past, or future, passengers have experienced similar behavior from this gentleman because of his bigotry and lack of humanity.

Furthermore, as you can see, I am writing this piece in the wee hours of the morning, because the incident occurred around 4AM PST.

So I have not gotten to sleep as yet. But I feel very strongly that people who express this kind of hatred toward another human being should be exposed and their businesses should not be supported. I happen to be a writer, a public speaker, and a very well-connected political person, so I have a platform. But imagine the people who do not.

And outside my hometown of New York City, Los Angeles is one of the most culturally diverse communities in America. Like every other American city I know L.A. has its share of racial divides and prejudices, in spite of its great multiculturalism, and it is, like New York, still very segregated in many ways. But I think the least we can expect after a Los Angeles-Hollywood awards ceremony such as the Grammys, where people from varied backgrounds perform and are honored (with the Grammys creatively connecting artists who usually do not share the same stage), is a basic level of respect and civility by companies shuttling us from one place to another.

This incident is especially ironic for me for a few reasons. One, long before the party my day had begun with my very first visit to Los Angeles’ Agape International Spiritual Center, a church, led by the brilliant Rev. Michael Beckwith, famous for its message of love, inclusion, and diversity. And that is exactly what I received from the service on this day, and from a short private meeting with Rev. Beckwith afterwards. Indeed, he talked about people like me, who he calls “social ministers,” who must have consistent spiritual paths given all the slings and arrows we deal with in our daily interactions with people, as activists, as community leaders, as agents for change.

I thought of Dr. Beckwith and Agape, for sure, as Mr. Abbou was insulting me inside and outside of his van. I thought, in a very quick instance, all I had to lose if I responded with the same kind of ugliness being hurled my way. I thought of Egypt, another nation with African Arabs, one where Mr. Abbou could have easily been from, and one that many Americans, including Black Americans, are very much supporting at this time of change. And I thought, later, how what transpired between Mr. Abbou and I is so remarkably similar to what far too many Black males, myself included, have experienced from Middle Eastern or African Arab cab, car, and shuttle drivers in my beloved New York City. That is the reason, in fact, so many years ago, I made a conscious decision to rarely take yellow cabs in New York, to just roll with private car service when necessary, because who is going to tolerate being humiliated, disrespected, lied to and lied on, simply because of someone else’s fear and ignorance? Suffice to say, I will never use a shuttle service in Los Angeles again—

And this sort of thing will go on if we allow it to go on, if we do not use our individual and collective voices to say enough, once and for all, and to say, loudly, ain’t I a human, too?

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Kevin Powell is a nationally acclaimed public speaker, activist, and the award-winning author or editor of 10 books. He resides in New York City, the borough of Brooklyn, and was a 2010 Democratic candidate for Congress there. Follow him on Twitter @kevin_powell

Do we need a body count to count?: Notes on the serial murders of Black women

Do we need a body count to count?:
Notes on the serial murders of Black women
by The Crunk Feminist Collective

Debra Jackson. Click. Henrietta Wright. Click. Barbara Ware. Click. These are some names of Black women who were sexually assaulted, drugged, murdered, and dumped in LA alleys and the backstreets by a former city trash collector. As news broke about a serial killer dubbed the Grim Sleeper, I found myself at the computer clicking on the still images of 180 nameless, numbered Black women and girls published by the LA Times. I sat with each photo picturing each life—and remembering the life of my aunt who was murdered years ago.

For women who are poor, who are Black, who are substance abusers, who are single/mothers, who are sex workers, and for women who possess no Olan Mills yearbook portrait like that of Natalee Holloway, how do we make sense of their lives? Do we see them?

Read the Full Essay @ The Crunk Feminist Collective