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"It's impossible for white people to feel what we feel," the black bishop said. Really? Fact: I have yet to meet a single white Angeleno (except one Austrian immigrant), including the most conservative San Fernando Republicans and Canyon Country rifle-in-the-rack pickup-driving NRA members, who was not nauseated and outraged by the Simi Valley verdict. Few whites seem to have changed their minds as a result of the deadly post-verdict violence. There is a fantastic amount of goodwill toward the afflicted area and its residents by Southern Californians of all politics and species. The morning after the riots some scorched streets had more outsiders cleaning up than locals. (On that Saturday morning, I did see truckloads of Revolutionary Communist Party stalwarts race through South-Central, red flags flying in the smoke-soiled breeze. Unlike the guilt-stricken petit bourgeois volunteers with their palliative, reformist Band Aid solutions who streamed, by the hundreds, into the areas around Florence and Normandie the RCP-ers carried no brooms and shovels, only leaflets proclaiming that the riots proved capitalism did not work.)
South Los Angeles suffers. It is in pain. It is caused by something over and above the statistics about the loss of blue-collar industry, the "black flight" of upwardly mobile African-Americans, the (sometimes justified, often not) "proning out" of young black men, double-standard "race justice," dropout rates, discomfort at the growing presence of alien "Hispanics" and hatred toward "Orientals" (Koreans) who cheerfully return the compliment.
To the culture of violence, which the incoming police chief Willie L. Williams has identified as a core fact of life in South-Central precincts, we must add Los Angeles' widespread culture of disappointment.
The violence that blacks and Latinos act out on the streets is the physical equivalent of an inner violence, of disappointed hopes and embarrassment at our inability to measure up to L.A.'s impossible promise, felt not only by minorities, as a result of social indices we know only too well, but by many whites who come West for a rebirth of self. It is hard for outsiders to comprehend how many Angelenos really believe they were fated to star or work in movies. The "American Dream" here becomes a Hollywood Nightmare that poisons as it enlivens our peculiar, celebrity-driven ethos. Star-envy, which paralyzes...