COLUMN ONE : When Loving L.A. Turns to Heartache : A woman who came of age during the Watts Rebellion sees years of disrespect explode in anger and frustration.

In August, 1965, I was 10 years old, a then-Negro girl spending the week with her aunt, who lived near 116th and San Pedro. The Watts Rebellion--black people often deliberately call it that, not a riot--erupted nearby while I was there.

On the day after the trouble began, my aunt sent me to a store down the street to stock up on bread, meat and canned goods. “Soul Brother” signs were being nailed to stores along the way, and many of the stores were already shuttered. I didn’t think much of it. I figured some people--I wasn’t sure who--were just mad at each other and had gotten into a fight. I could see that everyone was nervous, though.

Soon, my parents came and picked us up. We headed home, to 75th Street near Crenshaw Boulevard, well away from the fighting and looting that was taking place to the south. We would be safe there; there would be no violence anywhere near our neat working-class neighborhood.

But there was a curfew in the riot area--and to my surprise it was being imposed on us, too. Why? Why were they treating us as if we had done something wrong?

“Janet, you are so lame,” my 17-year-old sister informed me. “Why is there a curfew on us? Look in the mirror.”

In fact, the curfew was imposed virtually everywhere in the city where black people lived. That’s when I began to hear in my head what my Uncle Ray B used to say during Friday night political discussions in our dining room, when the adults always thought the kids were safely away, glued to the TV.

“What does the white man call a Negro with a Ph.D.?” My uncle would always pause for effect, and then draw out the answer. “A n-----. Maybe Dr . n-----”

Disrespect. A woman I talked to last week used that as a reason why she, a normally law-abiding citizen, walked into the rubble of a torched liquor store on Western Avenue and picked up a box of cigars. She said she couldn’t stand the Korean-American owner. I asked her why.

“Because the first time I walked into the store he didn’t say ‘Hi,’ or ‘Good morning.’ He said ‘Hey, Ma-ma’--trying to talk as if he thought that’s how black people talk. How dare he! He thought so little of me, thought so little of my community that he didn’t even bother to find out the most basic things about us. He took his cue, I guess, from the white people who run this country and dis’ us daily. So he can take this cue: I didn’t start anything at his store. But when I saw all those people in there, when I saw it was going on, I went in there and grabbed some cigars. I don’t even smoke them, but somebody’s gonna have a smoke on Mr. ‘Hey, Mama.’ ”

Sounds like a petty reason to gloat over a man’s lost business? In isolation, it is. Except nothing is in isolation. This woman is unemployed. She is, as she described it, “pissed off a lot.” There is something about not having money, and not having any legitimate prospects for getting it, that makes you mad, irritable, resentful. There’s nothing race-specific about that.

But there is something race-specific about other little hurts and indignities that can pile up on African-Americans. Although many Americans really don’t believe blacks still suffer prejudice, people who study these things say we do--and in consistently virulent ways. It plays out in most cities as cabbies zoom by us to pick up white passengers; as store clerks often assume we are thieves; as many whites cross the street or clutch their bags when they see a black man walking toward them.

I’m reminded of the time Condoleeza Rice, a top Soviet adviser to President Bush and a black woman, was shoved and shooed away by government agents who assumed she was a threat to visiting then-President Gorbachev. I can just hear it: “Oops! You mean you’re with the Prez? Sorry! Here’s your dignity back!”

Here in Los Angeles, the land of image-is-all and air kisses, insults are also disguised as compliments: “Gee,” say astonished first-time visitors to West Adams, Baldwin Hills, View Park, Leimert Park, Inglewood, Compton, “your house is actually quite nice!” Or, the personal favorite of my husband and me: “You two are so articulate! You speak so well!” Would any of this be surprising, or merit special comment, if two white college-educated people lived in a nice house and spoke proper English?

Under normal circumstances, thoughtless remarks are ignored. Most people don’t make a big deal of it. But last week, every slight, every rudeness, every wrong added up to be a very big deal indeed.

My niece, Angel, 23, had been watching TV coverage for hours and was fed up with it. She started shouting at the news anchor as if the two were in the same room.

“Encroach!” she said angrily. “This woman says the riots are ‘encroaching on the Westside.’ Give me a dictionary! Encroach means intrude. So it (the riot) belongs in our part of town, not hers. Well, forget that, lady.”

What’s this got to do with last week’s riots? It’s not just the verdicts in the Rodney King or Latasha Harlins cases that make African-Americans in Los Angeles, and elsewhere, feel so violated and disrespected. It’s the everydayness of racism and the pretense that it is mainly a thing of the past, not of the present. Everybody loves Magic Johnson, a man few really know personally--but few want to even drive in the lane next to a car full of young black men who, in many basic ways, are much like Earvin Johnson.

Of course, a lot of African-Americans in Los Angeles don’t really care whether a white person wants to drive near them, or live near them. As a matter of fact, many blacks prefer to live in areas where they can recycle black dollars to black businesses and where their children can see black authority figures--teachers, ministers, doctors, lawyers--who will set positive examples and push them to excel. That’s why many blacks who could afford to live in other areas of Southern California don’t move from South-Central and southwest Los Angeles.

The “Black-Owned” signs that went up on businesses last week expressed more than the current version of 1965’s “Soul Brother” signs. Black-owned is an assertion of 1990s “black power” with the emphasis now on economic power.

Last week, after I passed by the rubble at Vermont and Vernon, I had to wonder: Why, in effect, burn down our own community and hurt ourselves just because the system--again--hurt us? Why turn the anger back on ourselves, destructively? Why commit economic suicide?

“Haven’t you ever been so mad you hit your own hand and hurt it?” a friend replied. “Why is that so hard for people to understand? It’s like a man who is belittled and put down by his boss constantly, and then comes home and takes it out on his wife and family. It’s not right, but there’s a lot of self-hate involved.”

Of course that man in the example doesn’t gain power by coming home and abusing his family. He gets it by finding legitimate ways to better his situation. So I felt somewhat encouraged when I saw South-Central residents--and people from other parts of the city--working together to sweep up debris Saturday.

And there’s serious talk of organizing to create legitimate money-making opportunities, linking people and communities separated by the Santa Monica Freeway Divide. Dare we all hope this isn’t just another feel-good trendy thing to do in politically correct and privately paranoid L.A.?

When I was 10 and the riots hit, I never dreamed that as an adult I would relive so much of what my parents thought they were escaping when they left Texas and Louisiana. I never dreamed that schools I attended in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1970s would be better integrated than the L.A. schools that will be available to my 3-year-old daughter. I never dreamed that Los Angeles would re-segregate as it has. And, I never thought that I would again see my mother scrub as she’s been scrubbing this past week.

I’ve seen her do it before; cleaning and gardening are her ways of keeping herself busy when she is upset or anxious. Gladioli sprouted in record numbers the spring after my father died; this week her seeding is furious, and she can’t seem to use enough ammonia on the kitchen floor.