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Columnists - Los Angeles Times
Erin Aubry Kaplan
Erin Aubry Kaplan began working full-time as a journalist in 1992 for The Times and, for a short time, for a section called City Times, where she continued covering the Crenshaw district, South Central and events affecting L.A.'s disparate black communities. She also worked for New Times Los Angeles and LA Weekly, where she wrote a column, "Cakewalk." A widely anthologized author, Kaplan's articles have appeared in the London Independent, the Guardian, Salon.com, The Crisis, Newsday, Contemporary Art Magazine, the Utne Reader and Black Enterprise. She has completed a first book, an essay collection entitled, "Views and Blues from the Edge: Dispatches from a Black Journalista.".
Erin Aubry Kaplan
Black isn't enough
June 30, 2007
THE SENSE OF triumph was almost audible in the giant banner headline that ran in last week's Los Angeles Sentinel, the city's oldest black newspaper: "Laura Richardson Wins".
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This perfume smells like mean spirit
June 2, 2007
PERFUME IS MY greatest refuge. To be blunt, it keeps the stink of the real world at bay in a way that a million other divertissements can't.
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Tell black history's ugly truth
March 23, 2007
FOR BLACK people obsessed with scrubbing the hated "n-word" clean from the American lexicon, I have another suggestion: the word "positive."
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More than just the Latinos-next-door
March 17, 2007
A LATINO FAMILY is moving onto my block.
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Making gangs good
February 7, 2007
INSPIRATION OFTEN comes from entirely unexpected places, and sometimes from the heart of trouble itself. Cle "Bone" Sloan is a veteran member of the Athens Park Bloods gang in South L.A, inducted at the age of 12. He's been shot at four times, done time in jail and figures he's buried about 100 of his friends.
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Sun hasn't set on 'sundown towns'
January 24, 2007
REMEMBER "sundown towns"? That was the picturesque-sounding name used for small cities and communities across the country that had an ugly policy of not allowing blacks on the streets after dark — or not allowing them period. Sundown towns included such unassuming enclaves as Hawthorne. And though the phrase had a distinctly Wild West overtone, for the blacks who coined the term, it was pure old South. And, as they had in the South, blacks generally followed these rules of de facto segregation — not going north of Slauson Avenue, for instance — because, as usual, they had no choice.
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Piercing black silence on immigration
January 17, 2007
Washington — IT WAS A SIGN. This city was uncharacteristically balmy last week, and L.A. was uncharacteristically frigid. Yet for some reason, it felt appropriate; although I had traveled almost 2,700 miles, it was for a conversation I should have been able to have in my hometown.
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Inglewood election update
January 3, 2007
IT'S JANUARY, and another election is already upon us. Inglewood's mayoral runoff, the first in a generation, is Tuesday. It's hardly a major election, but it's significant for what it says about leadership, accountability and civic self-determination not just in Inglewood, but in beleaguered black communities elsewhere in Southern California.
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The black leadership gap
December 6, 2006
LOS ANGELES' BLACK leadership is a microcosm of black leadership everywhere: a superficially similar but fractured collection of individuals and interest groups that can nonetheless unite in the heat of a racially controversial moment, especially if there are cameras rolling. Never has this been more evident than in the last week at the side of Tennie Pierce.
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Erin Aubry Kaplan: The end of affirmative action?
November 29, 2006
AT LEAST A dozen times in the last decade, I've read or heard that the United States is coming to the end of the affirmative action era. I don't believe it.
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Erin Aubry Kaplan: The O.J.-Kramer discrepancy
November 22, 2006
WELL, THAT was a close one.
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Erin Aubry Kaplan: Plugging immigration's drain on black employment
October 25, 2006
IN A CITY pathologically resistant to its history and permanently enamored of its future, Don Wilson is trying to bridge the gap.
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Erin Aubry Kaplan: A Measured Salute to the New Superintendent
October 18, 2006
WHEN I LEARNED that the Los Angeles school board had hired retired Navy Vice Adm. David L. Brewer III as superintendent, I confess that my initial reaction was nakedly political. Well, I thought, score one for us.
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Erin Aubry Kaplan: Juan Williams, Turncoat
October 4, 2006
OK, I'VE HAD enough. Enough of the blaming, the whining, the righteous posturing that sucks all the air from discussions of the problems of black people and what can be done about them.
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Erin Aubry Kaplan: The King/Drew Syndrome
September 27, 2006
IT'S ENOUGH TO make anyone believe in conspiracy theories. After surviving repeated rounds of bad press for 20 years, King/Drew Medical Center was finally knocked out in 2004 by a series of articles in this newspaper. According to the series, King/Drew was so frighteningly incompetent for so long, it hardly deserved to have been called a hospital at all.
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Erin Aubry Kaplan: Not So 'Hot,' Arnold
September 13, 2006
WARNING: THE column you are about to read is hot. Real hot. McDonald's-drive-through-scalding-coffee-see-you-in-court hot. Given the state of the world, which erodes almost daily because of the seemingly unlimited ineptitude of certain politicians, steamy has been my default state of mind for many years now. The latest fuel on my fire is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's tape-recorded assertion last week that Latina women with black blood are "very hot."
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