UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS / PART 3 : WITNESS TO RAGE : ‘I thought, this cannot be real.’

I got to school at about 8:30 Thursday and found over a hundred students in class, absolutely traumatized. Two students from South Africa came up to me in tears and said, “We never thought that we would see this in Los Angeles, in the United States. We lived through this in South Africa. We lived through this kind of brutality inflicted on people because of the color of their skin. But we never, ever, thought . . .” And their question to me was, “How can we let our fellow classmates who are brown and black know that we are like this?”

In the midst of this, one of my students learned a family member’s home was burning. My business officer is an Asian-American. His father’s grocery store burned to the ground. And the grocery store, which is in a South-Central community, is next door to where he lived. He became so upset, he had an attack of some sort and had to be rushed to UCLA.

About 2:00, I closed the campus. By that time there were reports that there were more and more fires in this area and so two of us just followed each other home. We said, “We can’t go up Crenshaw and we can’t go up La Brea, so we’ll go up La Cienega--not realizing that at that precise moment when we exited the freeway they had set Fedco on fire and were looting. The traffic was horrendous and the smoke was everywhere and all the way down the freeway it was like I was in a movie of the last day.

All along the freeway from Crenshaw to La Cienega there was just one fire after another, no matter where you looked. And so we got off the freeway and were still following one another almost like two children playing except we were in two separate cars and if I made one step, she made one step and vice-versa. When got around Fedco, it was absolute pandemonium.

I thought, “This cannot be real.” People were putting washing machines on top of their cars, strapping them . . . sofa beds. There were children walking around. I thought “Who has their children?” I was shocked. I could not believe what I was watching, on one level. And on another level, I could believe it.

My take on it was that people were saying, “You can screw us over, so can we do the same thing.”

That night there was a huge fire right here in View Park. I could see the flames were right on the other side of the roof of this house. And I said to Pete, “If it gets an inch closer we need to get out of here.” I’ve talked to other friends of mine that live in the area and they went through a series of ritualistic behaviors like packing and unpacking. Pete slept in his clothes on Wednesday night because he wasn’t sure if we were going to have to get up and get out of here when it became clear that it was going. And I kept being afraid because it was so close to here. I mean, the helicopters, I can’t tell you, and the fire alarms. The kids did not sleep, they were getting up at like 5 in the morning. And I’m a hugger anyhow and I’m very affectionate with the kids. But I found that like over the days they were like clinging a lot, needing reassurance and wanting to be hugged and wanting to be kissed and wanting to be told that everything was all right. Inside, I was falling apart myself.

I think maybe I was in denial. I’ve been in this work for a long time and I’ve been talking about issues like racism and oppression for a very long time. And I’ve been talking about individual differences and respecting them and learning from them and using them as a source of strength. And I guess that you know you get caught up in saying these kinds of things and you want to believe that every time you give a lecture and every time you help people see the connection between people and not the connection that sets people apart that you’re making a difference.

It kills me to see the news media slowing down the videos of the riots so they can identify looters. That’s not the problem. But that’s what we’re doing to deal with it. Let’s see if we can flood our courts even more.

How about pictures of our lawmakers and policymakers that aren’t fighting for things to be different? What’s their responsibility? It’s not acceptable to go into Fedco and get diapers. Toys for the children. But you can raid these banks and you can steal from a large corporation because after all, that’s business. Well I bet you the people that were looting Fedco think that was business, too.