UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS - SIX MONTHS LATER : Separate Lives / DEALING WITH RACE IN L.A. : Q & A : Donald Bakeer, <i> Teacher at Washington High School</i>

Donald Bakeer has taught literature and drama at South-Central Los Angeles high schools for more than 20 years. A father figure to many of his Washington High School students, Bakeer, 48, wrote “Crips,” a self-published novel recently released as the movie “South-Central.” It is the story of a gang member who is transformed in prison after becoming a Muslim and later tries to keep his son away from gangs.

Q: What are the prospects for racial peace here?

A: As far as race relations between blacks and Latinos, I think we’re at a dangerous point. The unrest was a benchmark. I thought it would bring us closer together, but it seemed to have created a lot of jealousy and one-upmanship, a lot of competition for jobs and resources.

The problem is blacks and Latinos are the majority in South-Central but they have only a small percentage of the pie. So you’re going to have conflict among people competing for a small amount of resources.

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Q: How do you overcome this?

A: You have to focus on the whole pie. People who own most of the businesses in South-Central are absentee. There’s a need for a realistic land grant or low interest loan program, a way for blacks and Latinos to get ownership in society.

Black leaders need to stop looking at Latinos as a threat. More needs to be done with coalition than conflict. We need to work together in school boards or at City Hall. This is a real challenge for the black community. If blacks and Latinos came together we could accomplish a great deal. We’d be a majority.

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Q: And if no progress is made?

A: We could see on the streets what’s happening in prisons where blacks and Latinos are at each other’s throats. We’re just beginning to see that now in the gangs and in the problems at some high schools.

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Q: How do you view the future of black-Korean relations?

A: Koreans need to get out of the liquor store business if they want to create good faith in black community. Liquor stores are seen as part of the problem in South-Central. These liquor stores have a lot of people strung out.

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Q: In the last 27 years, Los Angeles has been the site of two of the countries most destructive urban riots. How do we prevent a third?

A: Not with the traditional methods. The traditional ways are to criminalize, to persecute, to prosecute and to incarcerate. We need a new approach to deal with younger people.

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Q: For example?

A: Take tagging. We have a whole slew of kids who are into this. But the only approach we have is to prosecute and criminalize them. Many of them are artists, so we need schools that can cultivate and refine their artistic abilities and steer them into college.

The spiritual nature of many of these kids has gone uncultivated. It’s become a tradition, for the first time in our community, where youths are not taught any religious values. No Ten Commandments, no catechism, no Koran. We have to reach out to them spiritually. We have to cultivate them with things that are valuable to them.

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Q: In what ways?

A: We should cultivate them with movies that are realistic, that come close to their experience, that teach values we want to perpetuate. Rather than coming at them with “Under Siege” and “Rambo” and “Terminator,” where they kill 3,000 people per minute. Then we expect them to go outside the door and act like they came out of a tea party.

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Q: After the Watts Riots, there was a renewed focus on the inner city, but in the end nothing much was changed. Will it be different this time?

A: I think so. People in South-Central have more ability today to make changes and sophistication as to how the system works.

There are totally unique things going on now, compared to what was going on prior to April 29. We’ve got gangs transcending into legitimate businesses. We’ve got Crips going into tennis shoe businesses with Koreans, T-shirt businesses, cultural dress businesses. People are communing with each other again. Neighborhoods are closer.

I don’t run into the hopelessness that I did pre-April. And part of it’s catharsis. The kids feel there was a catharsis that came with the rebellion. A lot of kids had been slapped around for years by the police and a lot of them felt, vicariously, that they were able to hit the police back. Now, on the other side of the catharsis, there’s not the hatred for legitimate society that there was before. There’s a belief on the part of many people that things are going to change.