Posted on 02/02/2007 8:25:57 AM PST by dead
America's long battle with racism has taken a nasty new twist on the mean streets of Los Angeles. Peter Huck reports.
It was a Halloween fright fest that went horribly wrong for three young women. Shortly after they left a "haunted house" in a middle class area of Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, on October 31, a teenage mob set upon the women.
Even by the savage conditions that often prevail on Los Angeles's mean streets, what followed was a vicious assault. The women were surrounded by a group of kicking and punching teenagers. One victim suffered multiple fractures to her face and needs surgery to reposition an eye that was smashed in. Another was knocked unconscious by a skateboard. The third has a bruised lung.
But for the intervention of a passer-by, the victims believe the mob - estimated by witnesses as about 30 strong - would have killed them. Last week, after an emotional trial fraught with legal histrionics and claims of witness intimidation, eight girls, age 13 to 18, and one 18-year-old male were found guilty of hate crimes, while a 12-year-old girl was acquitted. Two other boys were subsequently charged and await trial.
Long Beach is used to violence. Gangs are endemic. Murder frequent. But the Halloween case has had a big impact.
All the defendants were black. Their victims were white. Not only that, but the defendants, who chanted "F--- white people!" and other racial epithets during the melee, were charged with hate crimes, a charge traditionally seen in white-on-black crimes.
"I think the case has the potential to have a much wider impact," says Tracy Manzer, who covered the story for the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Few would disagree.
Yet apart from the Press-Telegram and, belatedly, the Los Angeles Times, plus heated radio commentary, national press coverage was scant, partly due to uncertainties about how to report a black-on-white hate crime. The Times agonised that laws designed to prosecute hate crimes - defined by Congress in 1992 as "motivated by hatred, bias or prejudice, based on the actual or perceived race, colour, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity of another individual or group of individuals" - might end up "punishing blacks".
This touched a deep nerve that goes back to America's still unresolved racial baggage from the slavery and segregation eras. When white members of a lacrosse team from Duke University in North Carolina were accused of raping a black stripper at a party last year, the case attracted saturation coverage and touched off a national firestorm. Seinfeld's Michael Richards was castigated for saying "nigger" - so insulting it cannot be used in US media - while ranting at hecklers in a Los Angeles club.
So the media's comparative silence on the Long Beach case has been deafening. David Mills, a black screenwriter and former reporter for The Washington Post, told the Romenesko blog: "You don't have to be a card-carrying Klansman to point out that the LA Times surely would be treating this story differently if three black women had been attacked by 30 white teenagers hurling words like 'F--- black people'."
Did the press back off because it was worried it might seem racist? "It's like walking on eggshells," says Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black columnist in Los Angeles. He believes the media's inability to get a handle on a story that reversed stereotypes is perhaps as important as fears of appearing racist. And, as Manzer dryly points out: no one died.
Nonetheless, the Long Beach assaults reflect a disturbing trend. The Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, which collects statistics, says hate crimes rose 34 per cent during 2005 (the latest available figure). "The intriguing thing is the hate crimes they're talking about are not the old white-on-black, or bashing Jews, gays and Muslims," Hutchinson says. "The majority of hate crimes in LA County are committed by Latinos and blacks, on each other, or whites."
In the Ku Klux Klan era, hate crimes involved straightforward racism. Now the issue is entangled with other woes. The Long Beach case echoes the 1989 New York "wilding" incident, when black teenagers beat and raped a woman [before hate crime laws], and has led to hand wringing about why children commit senseless violence, a can of worms given its glorification by popular culture.
"Group beatings are extremely common in juvenile crimes," Manzer says. "Kids get caught up in it. It's like a spectator sport."
They also get caught up in gang glorification. The prosecution tried and failed to show the male defendant had links to the Baby Insane Crips, after references to the notorious black gang were found on his MySpace account. The Crips are suspected of intimidating witnesses: one had her car trashed, while the passer-by who broke up the melee later refused to identify any suspects.
While gang involvement in the Long Beach case is contentious, hate crimes committed by gangs - sometimes against non-gang members - are rising, although most gang crime is intraracial. In one chilling example, four members of the Avenues Latino gang were convicted of "ethnic cleansing" of blacks - two were murdered - in Los Angeles. In December two Latino gangsters shot 14-year-old Cheryl Green as she talked with friends. Police said the men were looking to kill blacks who strayed onto their turf. Locals say it was payback for the killing of a Mexican male a week earlier.
The Green case has become a cause celebre, as Los Angeles struggles to counter spiralling gang crime. Last year the city's 720 gangs, with membership estimated at 39,000, were blamed for 56 per cent of the city's 478 murders.
The gang epidemic "is largely immune to general declines in crime", says a recent report by the Advancement Project. It also found that gang crime was spreading to middle-class districts, although residents in the bleaker parts of South Central are 36 times more likely to be murdered than those in the upmarket West Side. Gangs were "public enemy No. 1", thundered the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. Flanked by police chiefs, he pledged war. Days later a black man was wounded by Latino gunmen who chased his two daughters.
"Los Angeles is a city of immigrant marches, black-brown violence, gentrification tension and arguments over the movie Crash," the commentator Ruben Martinez wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times. Yet, given the city's ethnic diversity, most people get along. The exception tends to be those struggling to survive in poor areas affected by rapidly changing demographics.
The most obvious friction is between blacks and Latinos. The former are in decline, while Latinos constituted 49 per cent of Los Angeles's population in 2005. Often Latinos and blacks compete at the bottom of the economic ladder. Prejudice crosses borders. "Dirty" blacks have "messed up" the area, say some Latinos in the Harbour Gateway area.
"When we talk about black-on-Latino or Latino-on-black hate crimes, I think the same rules apply as when we talk about white-on-black crimes," Hutchinson says. "The same fears, the same tensions, the same hostilities."
The Advancement Project believes $US1 billion ($1.3 billion) is needed to create jobs, or improve education and public health in areas where 300,000 youngsters are at risk of joining gangs. Quite how Los Angeles, already pressed to fix its crumbling infrastructure, will find the money is unsure.
Until the Cheryl Green and Long Beach cases forced the city to confront race hatred in inner-city areas, officials had shied away from the issue, fearful of inflaming the sort of tensions that helped fuel race riots in 1965 and 1992. Now the issue is out in the open. Yet, given an intractable gang problem and deep-seated social problems that will take far more than $US1 billion to erase, can it be solved?
Back in Long Beach the verdicts have raised more questions than answers. Why did "regular" children, several with promising sports careers - one had already represented the US in China - and no criminal records or, it would seem, gang affiliations, find themselves accused of hate crimes? "Today is not a happy day," the Long Beach District Attorney said after the verdict. "There are no winners."
With their children facing possible jail time, the parents expressed disbelief in the outcome, insisting the wrong people were tried. While one of the victim's mobile phones was found on one defendant and another had bloodstains on her clothes, there is contention about evidence from the chief witness, who saw events at night, in her rear-view mirror, from 50 to 100 metres. The parents intend to appeal.
Reading to the court from prepared statements on Wednesday, the victims asked the judge to hand down "the harshest punishment possible".
One victim, Loren Hyman, who is 21 and part Latino and part Jewish, told the court. "I couldn't believe my ears when I heard them yell, 'I hate … white people'." Her friend, Laura Schneider, 19, added: "I can't tell you what it did to me to see people get such pleasure from hurting us."
It is hard to know if this ugly episode will hurt race relations. Ultimately, the case raises the spectre of race hatred so deep it still pervades society, crossing race lines and incubating even its youngest members.
"I think the case will redefine how Americans look at hate crimes," Hutchinson says. "Traditionally, African-Americans were victims. Now they're not. It's a new twist in America's racial dynamic." America's long racial nightmare is far from over.
Thanks.
Savages. I'm sick of people telling me I should feel guilty for being white. You don't see whites forming gangs of 30 and killing, raping and mauling blacks. No, it's the other way around these days. The black community as a whole should be ashamed of themselves and grow the hell up.
Amen to you sir!!!!!!!!!!!
Both the media and the government have made it easy for blacks to hate whites; there is no reason to think that some of that might not manifest itself as violence.
Whites will do what they have done since 1965; move farther away. When that isn't far enough, they'll move again.
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