Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : LOS ANGELES : Los Angeles is still being born. Every birth is painful.

In the fall of 1965, six weeks after the Watts riots, I was given a magazine assignment to go down to Watts to see how women were getting along. I had had lunch with two sweet editors and given them every idea in my head, and finally, remembering that a close friend of mine was a social worker in the area, said that I’d be happy to go down to Watts, that I wanted to do it. What that translated to was that I was so desperate to become a “writer,” to get out of my own terrible living conditions, that I was willing to die for it.

I drove down to Watts from Topanga with a friend from the Valley and felt there in the smoked-out ramshackle buildings and somnolent melancholy a state of mind that seemed almost exactly to match my own feelings. My husband was about to leave me and my friend’s husband had left her, and we spent our first day visiting women who had already been left. Some seemed to take it pretty well. They riffled through movie magazines and whacked their infants on their backs to bring up burps.

To my mind, these women had looked the great fears of gender smack in the face--poverty, abandonment, the hard facts of being unloved and discounted--and they had shrugged their shoulders and opened up a magazine. You couldn’t, I thought, with astonishing naivete, hurt people who absolutely refused to be hurt.

The evening after my first day in Watts, I was summoned by my mother to a family evening. I was feeling pretty perky. I was in that state some writers are in when they can feel their luck turn. I would not end my life in a trailer. I wore an orange dress, green shoes. I was an intrepid girl reporter, and, in spite of various dissenting family opinions, I was ready to fly.

The party was for us to meet my cousin’s new fiance. He was blond, stocky. His flesh pushed up from his neck to his forehead. His whole body looked ready to pop. This guy was a cop. When I found myself in front of him, I said that I had spent the day in Watts.

“Down there with those niggers?” he grunted. “I hate niggers!”

All the hatred that I had felt for the humiliations I had already suffered in my life, and hatred for my poor cousin who was bringing this oinker into the family, and all the embarrassments I was ever going to feel being “a woman alone” in the coming years, and all the terrible sights I was going to see in the next week down in Watts (the woman with a walleye who lived in a windowless garage with three sick children, afraid to go out)--all, all of that focused on this thick stoat of a man who had taken part in the Watts riots, not for pay or glory, but--by his own later words--because he “hated niggers.”

It had not been a black “riot.” It had been a deadly massacre, fought in Watts against blacks because at least some whites thought they could do it and get away with it and talk about it at parties.. And here is a big truth, in my opinion. There are still plenty of uneducated whites--the kind my Texan dad used to call “white trash”--who would do all that again, for the pure fun of it, if they could get away with it.

But I look on the bright side. Our world has changed in 27 years. I see the riot we’ve had just now as a war, not a massacre. I see the whites who raided Gelsons in Encino and Pacific Palisades--some people might call it looting with a checkbook--as motivated by healthy fear as well as shame. I see in the Korean-Americans who used bags of rice to make bunkers a wonderful refusal to be “victims.” And in the chorus of multiethnic voices--irate black women armed with master’s degrees yelling at white women at a nonprofit organization who nod and try to take the information in, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) pitching a tizzy fit on television because President Bush came by but forgot to call her--in all this, I can’t help it, I see good signs.

Los Angeles is still being born. Every birth is painful. The thick-necked bullies still exist, and sometimes they get off scot-free and sometimes they don’t. Remember my cousin’s horrid fiance? He’s the one living alone now, holed up somewhere out of state in a trailer.