UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS / PART 3 : WITNESS TO RAGE : ‘The television news that Wednesday night was a nightmare.’

The verdict appalled me.

That night my wife, who works in a social service agency called the Little Tokyo Service Center, went to the First AME Church to be part of the community response to the verdict. I went to pick up my daughter and went home to watch what was unfolding on television. Then, when my wife came back from First AME, I heard from her firsthand accounts of the fires burning on Western and Adams.

We live near Pico and Fairfax. It is a very integrated neighborhood--whites, blacks and Asians. But I never had the slightest fear of hostility from my neighbors. I wasn’t personally apprehensive. But I was deeply concerned. Long before these events, I’d become concerned about racial polarization in the city and about the growing economic disparities in the country.

I think that the TV news that Wednesday night was a nightmare for everyone who watched it. I’m deeply concerned about the relations between African-Americans and Asian-Americans and the need for those communities to understand each other’s histories.

I think Asian-Americans have to recognize that their advances in the last 40 years are directly attributable to Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Malcolm X and the struggle of African-Americans. I also believe that the history and culture of different Asian and Pacific Islander groups should be understood by the broader community. White Americans have no sense of these things, either.

For example, African-Americans’ experience of slavery obviously was unique. So, there’s a fundamental difference between immigrant groups who come to America with hope and the black community, which has been deprived of hope in the most vicious ways. The legacies of slavery, racism and segregation endure in ways that I don’t think anybody fully understands.

I certainly can empathize, for instance, with the bitterness, fear and outrage of Asian-American merchants whose lives and livelihoods were trashed.

But I cannot imagine the depth of sorrow an African-American merchant must feel when that sort of loss is inflicted on them by people in their own community. That must create an inexpressible loneliness.