COLUMN LEFT : Wallpapering Over Inequality : Bush’s veto means black Americans continue to be shafted by the system.

The substantial number of black Americans in the gulf facing war and maybe death hear that their commander in chief and President has vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990.

Black Americans already nurture considerable doubts about the wisdom of President Bush’s seeming rush to war. In one poll taken a month ago nearly half of those polled disagreed with the huge deployment to the gulf. As one black community leader put it, his people have been fighting a war for 10 years already, against the economic onslaught launched by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Politicians (and pundits) are now discovering to their immense surprise just how angry Americans are at the way the nation’s affairs have been conducted in recent years. Amid this surprise the anger of black Americans is probably less of a shock, if only because Bush and before him Reagan zealously taunted them for years, busily bootlicking the white conservative voter. Political Washington and its flunkys in the academies have invented a whole language to get round the simple fact that black Americans are being shafted by the system. The essential message in this language is that blacks have only themselves to blame, and if only they had proper families and didn’t smoke crack, all would be well.

I was in South-Central Los Angeles last week, visiting the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. A guest curator, Sophie Spalding, has mounted a photographic exhibition of the Watts rebellion whose 25th anniversary fell on August 11. Where the library now stands at 6120 So. Vermont there was once an appliance store. In those mid-August days of 1965 two black Americans were killed by either the LAPD or the National Guard in front of a store later burned out.

What was particularly striking in the news clips and photo spreads on the library walls and in display cases was its emphasis on the irrationality of the rising across South-Central. Both journalists and cartoonists depicted the rioters as a bunch of simian drunks betraying the high purpose of such leaders as Martin Luther King. President Johnson took the same tack, saying the uprising bore no relation to the orderly struggle for civil rights.

The almost reflexive stratagems of overdog propaganda were also indicated in the photos and captions of the Aug. 30, 1965, Life magazine. Here again the message of utter irrationality was strongly and often subtly stated. Life’s cover showed a black man carrying furniture, with the caption “Los Angeles resident flees his home set afire in the riot.” Implication: The rioters burned out their own people. But the rebellion was a response to years of brutality and commercial exploitation. The targets were therefore the police and businesses that South-Central folk knew had been ripping them off for years. Scarcely any homes were burned.

Another Life photograph showed national guardsmen bending over a Mexican-American in an attitude of concern. The caption said he had been wounded by a black mob. Implication: blacks against whites and browns. It’s possible the episode occurred, though there’s no record of it. Records do show Mexican-Americans killed by the LAPD or the National Guard.

When the peril had passed, came “understanding.” On Aug. 19, 1965, the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial quoting the analysis of a “respected Negro psychiatrist,” said analysis commencing with “Breakdown of Negro family life.” Thus, making their appearance were two props of concerned editorialists pondering black rage at injustice: the helpful (and always “respected”) black psychiatrist and the disintegrating black family, as explanatory pathology launched by Daniel Patrick Moynihan at exactly that time.

In the wake of the rebellion there were, naturally, promises to rehab the area, address the grievances. Twenty years later Watts got a fortified shopping mall. Instead of Police Chief William Parker who said the rioters were like monkeys in a zoo, the city has Parker’s former driver, Daryl Gates, who says casual drug users should be taken out and shot. In black communities the signs of poverty mount, in figures for infant mortality and kindred indexes. Once again there’s a fake language to deal with such statistics and occlude the truth that blacks are being shafted. There’s decorous talk about the “lack of prenatal care” and kindred verbal wallpaper over the ugly structure of inequality.

Bush vetoed the civil-rights act and the Senate sustained him because they thought they could get away with it. Chief Parker’s men beat up blacks 25 years ago because they thought they could get away with it. Politics is partly the business of knowing when you can’t get away with it any more, and this is where President Bush may have misjudged his decade.