[On April 29th, 1992,
civil unrest erupted
in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video
were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and
other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special
weekend post on the narrative
of “race riots” itself.]
On an ethnic and
communal space that became complicatedly part of the King riots.
At the 2018 New
England American Studies Association conference at UMass Lowell, one of the
best papers I heard was on the subject of 1980s Korean grocery stores as a
potent American Studies myth and symbol. Babson
College Professor Paul Schmitz balanced specific details from the histories
and stories of that cultural and communal space with broader analyses of the narratives
and images associated with it, convincingly arguing that both the Korean
grocers and their families and external media and social forces worked to shape
this space and role into a complex but inspiring symbol of community, success,
and the American Dream. There are many layers to those histories and realities,
those images and their meanings, those different sides to this American space;
but one particularly complex side is that for various social and economic
reasons these Korean grocery stores are often located
in (or at least in close proximity to) neighborhoods that feature sizeable
African American, Latino, or other minority communities.
As that
hyperlinked New York Times article from
1990 illustrates, those geographic details had become a significant story (not
only in cities like New York and Los Angeles, but nationally) in the years
immediately preceding the Rodney King verdict and riots, and would become a
focal point of the riots themselves. As this 25th
anniversary CNN story notes, roughly half of the $1 billion in property
damage inflicted in the course of the riots was sustained by Korean businesses,
as the riots spilled over from predominantly African American neighborhoods
into the adjacent
area known as Koreatown. Images of Korean business owners and their friends
and families patrolling the neighborhood’s streets and rooftops with weapons
became fraught and frightening symbols of the riots and the war-like conditions
they produced throughout much of Central LA. As the CNN story reflects, these
horrors affected the LA (and national) Korean American community in multiple
tragic ways: not only creating deep and enduring divisions with the city’s
African American community; but also, thanks to the near-complete
lack of law enforcement response to the unfolding horrors, leading Korean
Americans to a recognition of their status as second-class citizens in the eyes
of the city’s power structures.
Those shifts in
perspective and community have continued to unfold in the quarter-century since
the riots, and likely will remain complex and evolving in the years to come. But
what does better remembering these histories contribute to our perspective on
the riots themselves? For one thing, they remind us that the fault lines in
American history and community are never as simple as the white
supremacist/Americans of color divisions I highlighted through yesterday’s LAPD
histories and controversies; while it would be delightful if all Americans of
color (or of course all Americans period) consistently operated in solidarity,
life is never that one-sided or straightforward. And for another thing, they
remind us of one of the most frustrating limits of exclusionary or white
supremacist visions of American identity: that those visions not only exclude
so many different foundational and longstanding communities, but make it
impossible to do justice to the complex histories and stories of all those
communities, individually and in relationship to one another. Which is to say,
even when American history is at its darkest (and things got very dark during
the King riots), it still and crucially reflects the truly inclusive and
diverse community that has always defined us.
Next King
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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