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Erin Aubry Kaplan |
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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".
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.
FOR BLACK people obsessed with scrubbing the hated "n-word" clean from the American lexicon, I have another suggestion: the word "positive."
A LATINO FAMILY is moving onto my block.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.