If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Janigian's perceptive and sometimes gripping novel brings together some of LA's many tribes -- African-American, WASP, Korean, Armenian, Jewish -- into an emotional and intellectual conflagration that mirrors the burning and looting that the city suffered.
The thing that's always struck me is that the shooting starts without warning and ends with even less. I never ducked, dropped to the street or hit the floor in my own home. You have no time to react. Gunshots, boom, somebody dead, over.
How can Michael Connelly get better at his craft of writing! Just when you think he has reached the pinnacle of his career with a certain novel he comes along with a new one that is even better. Such is the case with The Black Box, a crime thriller that is pretty near perfection.
Rodney King told me he wanted the 1991 incident to serve as an example so that people everywhere, regardless of creed, color or sexual orientation could all get along. He stared right into my eyes as he talked never looking away once.
He didn't speak from a written speech or from some political soapbox. He didn't employ a deep vocabulary. He just asked a question. Something that would never occur to someone carrying a smoldering TV.
What brings about positive change -- especially for the poor and working class -- is the slow, gradual, difficult work of union organizing, community organizing, and participation in electoral politics. The 1992 LA civil unrest was a wake-up call.
As we reflect on the 20th anniversary of one of the most significant human events in recent history, many are asking if we are better off now than just two decades before. While I understand the impetus for this kind of thinking, the question is far too simplistic.
By the end of the riots, people had reduced the spotless idyllic alters of the City of Angeles to cinders. But there are still lessons in those ashes.
The news stories marking the 20th anniversary of the riots have given L.A. a well-deserved pat on the back. But journalists haven't explored how one vital sector of L.A. may be less able to handle the city's racial complexities than it was 20 years ago.
From an apartment in Biloxi, Miss., I watched on TV as Los Angeles burned, rioted and turned itself inside out on April 29, 1992.
The impact of the Los Angeles riots still resonates 20 years on. Here's an audio take on the experience of the chaos -- all the pain, the fear, the search for healing amid relentless destruction, and the hope for redemption rising from the ashes.
The L.A. disturbances weren't inevitable, but you could see why they happened. Looking deeper, it all makes sense.
As I watched the advancing columns of smoke as the marauders shifted from points south toward Hollywood -- burning, looting and killing along the way -- it became clear that we were in the crosshairs and there was no one to call.
As a community activist and local professor, we are first-person witnesses to the undeniable reality that poverty and economic distress -- not race -- were the primary factors in the upheaval in Los Angeles twenty years ago.
I assumed that the wounds left by the riots would fester for a lifetime. I thought of myself and my family as permanently disfigured. But here we are, 20 years later, and we are still alive.
Does the anger of the L.A. riots still seethe in the minds and emotions of even those who were merely children on April 29, 1992?
