COLUMN ONE : U.S. Racial Slumber Ends in Jolt : For almost 20 years, simmering urban tension and bias have been ignored by much of the country. Nation must now decide whether to resume the efforts at equality begun in the ‘60s.

Like the wail of a police siren in the night, the searing image of the nation’s second-largest city in flames has jolted America awake, forcing people all across the country to look at realities of race and urban tension that have been all but ignored for almost 20 years.

The country now faces a historic decision: whether Americans want to stop ignoring the anger and despair and social disintegration that many see as the root causes of urban and racial strife and instead resume the effort begun in the late 1960s to find solutions.

“I think in America right now we have to have a serious dialogue on the whole question of race,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a veteran of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. “The powerful thing about the civil rights movement is that it had the ability, had the power to bring all the dirt, all the filth out from under the rug so we could see it.

“We need to talk about it, bring it out in the open,” Lewis said. “We need leadership to bring people back together. We need moral leadership.”

Unquestionably, the riots put issues of poverty and race “on the front burner, the front page,” said pollster Daniel Yankelovich. “The race issue is not one that the majority of Americans want to focus on. So what it does is force it to public attention.”

Yet while crises have a way of shaping the American agenda, merely forcing the issue forward does not determine what the response will be. How people, individually and together, react to what they have seen may profoundly shape the course the nation follows for the rest of the decade.

And the vastly different ways that white and minority communities view the problems, the difficulty of the problems themselves and the reluctance of political leaders to grapple with urban issues each form a high barrier to serious progress.

As the violent reaction to the Rodney King trial itself demonstrated, white and black Americans look at their society’s problems and at each other across a wide chasm of apprehension, mistrust and fear. Often, people of different races profoundly disagree even about what the issues are.

Many black Americans view the events in Los Angeles as primarily a case of justice denied, as one more manifestation of a system that habitually brutalizes all blacks--regardless of background. Many whites see the primary problem as the social decay of the inner cities, and some view the situation through less than sympathetic eyes.

One group sees primarily problems of racial oppression, another primarily problems of social pathology--with more than a few whites viewing that pathology largely in terms of personal responsibility, even blame.

Nonetheless, for some the path ahead is clear.

Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), who has made a series of Senate speeches on racial issues, is one. The Rev. Edward V. Hill, pastor of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Los Angeles, who met with President Bush Friday, is another.

“If we as a nation continue to ignore the racial reality of our times, tiptoe around it, demagogue it or flee from it, we’re going to pay an enormous price,” said Bradley. “Maybe out of this horrible set of events that’s saddened me terribly will come some healing, some coming together, some commitment.”

Hill said he had urged Bush to give the whole race relations problem the same emphasis he has given to the drug war and the Soviet Union. “No other problem is as great,” he said.

To Lewis, Bradley, Hill and those who share their view, the worst urban disorder in a generation has demonstrated in unmistakable terms the cost of society’s neglect.

To others, however, the violence has reinforced the belief that the greatest problem society faces is not urban decay, but violent disorder. In their eyes, the solution lies not in new government social programs, but in stronger law enforcement.

Conservative commentator and presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan spoke for that view Friday when he criticized officials for not moving swiftly enough to quell the riots and demanded that the government use “whatever force is needed to save innocent people and private property.”

That view of the problem, the idea that the central issue is physical control, is a significant element in the frustration and rage that wells up in many blacks even as they deplore the violence and rioting. And the focal point of that frustration among blacks all across the country as they react to the King verdict is the police:

“No matter how hard we strive for peace with the white race, we have a problem because they don’t consider us as even being human beings. I think it’s a shame,” said Sharyl Harris, a 36-year-old black secretary in Denver.

K. B. Turner, a black former Omaha policeman who now teaches criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, said the King case dramatizes the hostility felt by large numbers of white police officers toward the minority communities they are supposed to protect and serve.

“The police department in Los Angeles or anywhere else is simply a reflection of the community. Those attitudes prevail in the larger community as well,” Turner said.

“This whole fiasco is consistent with the proposition that an African-American life is of less value,” said the mournful ex-cop. “I don’t know where we go from here.”

Former Black Panther founder Bobby Seale, now a community liaison worker for Temple University in Philadelphia, voiced the same sentiment in even stronger terms. “The racist police brutality visited upon Rodney King just opened the door to the covert racist activity that was going on anyway,” Seale said. Toward blacks, he said, government officials have adopted a policy of “lock ‘em up and throw away the key.”

Many blacks bridle as well at a perception held by many white Americans that as a result of affirmative action and other programs, equality and fairness between the races has been reached. Instead, they insist, both statistical studies and the relentless experience of daily life demonstrate the opposite.

“Those who live in the cities know the deal. The American Dream may be alive and well in some parts of the country, but they feel it is dead in South-Central Los Angeles and other urban areas,” said Russell Owens, director of the national policy institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank in Washington.

In this particular case, the vivid and widely seen specifics of the King beating have given many white Americans a new sense of the daily reality blacks experience.

The “white conviction that the criminal justice system was fair to both blacks and whites has been shaken because of the unique circumstances of seeing the tape and then hearing the verdict,” pollster Yankelovich said.

But for what may be a broader group of whites, the reaction has been far more ambivalent. “Many white Americans are ashamed of the verdict, but don’t know what to do,” said Andrew Hacker, a professor of political science at Queens College in New York and a specialist on race relations.

“White peoples’ reactions to the rioting ranges from outrage to disgust,” Hacker said. Many blacks share the same feelings, he said. “But what bothers white people most is that ‘ they ‘ are out of control.”

Conservative scholar Charles Murray of Washington’s American Enterprise Institute agrees.

“The fundamental difference between the riots this time and the riots of the 1960s is that the reservoir of sympathy for blacks on the part of whites just isn’t there anymore,” Murray said.

“Whites by and large are afraid of black crime, and they are none too pleased with what they see as inner-city lifestyles, and they do not accept the premise that blacks are still unfairly disadvantaged,” Murray said. As a result, he added, white voters have given scant support to measures designed to resolve urban and minority problems.

“I don’t think an increased call for social programs is going to be the outcome at all,” Murray said. “What I see coming out of this could be a backlash that is pretty nasty.”

But even if broad public support could be mobilized, and even if the country could form a consensus about what to tackle first, none of the underlying problems of inner-city blacks have simple solutions, including the task of assuring proper restraint among police forces that must deal with extremely high levels of violence, disorder and danger. That is a key reason why the last wave of national attention to urban issues eventually ebbed.

Problems such as the persistent joblessness and welfare dependency of the urban underclass, the high crime rates in American cities and the stubborn persistence of drug addiction have seemed to many Americans to defy not only solution, but even incremental progress.

That sense of despair about solutions has, all by itself, discouraged efforts to address racial and urban problems, said Tom Kingsley, director of the Center for Public Finance and Housing at Washington’s Urban Institute.

“A lot of people, including a lot of policy intellectuals, suggest, or seem to suggest, that the problems are intractable,” Kingsley said.

In fact, that perception exaggerates the difficulty of urban problems, he and other experts believe. The problems are serious, and “the solutions are not just standing out there,” Kingsley conceded. But scattered small initiatives across the country have shown that progress in combatting social ills can be made.

“There is an opportunity if there were real leadership out there,” he said.

Finding that leadership constitutes a third major hurdle. Powerful reasons continue to discourage national political leaders from even talking for long about the problems of tensions between the police and minority communities, urban blight and the social despair of many city neighborhoods.

Democrats, who depend on multiracial coalitions to win elections in most states, often have found that talking about the problems of race only creates divisions among those they need to unite. Republicans depend primarily on suburban constituencies who in the past have attempted to isolate themselves from cities and their potentially expensive problems.

At least in the short term, pollsters and political strategists say, the riots are likely to increase polarization among races. That is what occurred in 1968, when urban riots helped boost Richard M. Nixon toward the presidency by undermining the black-white coalition on which Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey had counted.

“Those pictures of white drivers getting pulled out of their cars and beaten at Normandie and Florence set up the rawest kind of tribal conflict,” said John Petrocik, a pollster and UCLA political science professor.

In that sort of atmosphere, appeals for new efforts to solve the problems of the cities could well fall on deaf ears.

In addition, the widespread cynicism about the political system evident in minority communities undermines support for political action.

“People rioting in the streets have no hope and they see no alternatives,” said the Rev. Romie Lilly, director of African American Male Watch, a community advocacy group to promote the achievements of young black men in Los Angeles.

Because of that, community leaders “can’t tell them to pray and to vote and to be nonviolent because those people in the streets don’t see where participating in the political process would have any impact or would change their lives. They don’t see any effectiveness in being socially responsible.”

Against all those reasons for despair, at least some political analysts said they believe the images of violence over the last several days could galvanize popular support for a new effort to attack urban and racial problems.

“I think people want to make racial progress,” said pollster Stanley Greenberg, who has extensively studied the attitudes of whites who fled cities in the 1970s and 1980s to escape urban violence and decay.

“I think the question is, if you appeal to the instinct to rise above it, does that have stronger appeal than those who want to exploit violence to bring out racial divisions,” said Greenberg, who now works for Democratic candidate Bill Clinton. “I honestly think people want to go forward rather than move back.”

In the end, the potential for meaningful improvement in race relations stemming from the events of the last week “depends on what people focus on,” said Edwin Dorn, a senior staff member at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

“If the nation focuses on the King beating, then maybe it will force all of us to deal with race in America.”

On the other hand, if the focus is on “the burning of Los Angeles, not that beating, then Americans will be repulsed, and they will lose sight of the King beating, or assume it was justified or necessary.”

By this logic, he said, “white and black Americans will not be inclined to help rebuild the city or (act on) racial problems across the country because ‘ they are burning down their own neighborhoods. So why should I pay to rebuild them.’ ”

So while the dramatic sights of burned buildings and looted stores are prodding many citizens into asking themselves questions about problems they have preferred to avoid, there is a real possibility that the scenes of violence may only heighten the barriers.

If that happens, the result is likely to be yet a further intensification of what a study of the last wave of urban riots described as the grim future of America: “two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.”

Times staff writers Robert Shogan in New Orleans, David Treadwell in New York, Douglas Jehl and John Broder in Washington and researcher Ann Rovin in Denver contributed to this story.