Understanding the Riots--Six Months Later :...

LESLIE IVIE, 16, is a senior at Harvard-Westlake School, a private college preparatory school in North Hollywood. The granddaughter of Dr. Charles Drew, for whom the Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center is named, Leslie was co-president of her class last year and is a youth leader of an interracial project sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. She hopes to attend law school.

At my school, no one is even talking about what happened last spring. Not that there was ever much discussion. But now, six months later, it’s like it never happened, which is partly what caused it to happen in the first place. It’s always “them” and “their problems.” It’s never “us” and “our problems.” And yet these are problems that we all have to figure out how to solve.

There needs to be more direct contact between those who are privileged and those who are not. There are too many people in this city who don’t have the basic human necessities. And there are even more people who turn their heads and pretend problems doesn’t exist. I’m guilty of that too. Just now, just before we started talking, I saw a homeless man on the street. Here is a man who doesn’t even have a place to live, and I do nothing to help him. As individuals, we need to stop what we are doing and help. And we need to start demanding that our government address these problems.

There should be some place where people can discuss problems. I know when I’m angry and have no place to channel my feelings, I get even angrier. It’s logical that when large groups of people get really frustrated and don’t have a place to channel those feelings, those feelings will erupt in violence. I’d like to see arenas in which people like the governor, the mayor, the City Council and the police have direct contact with the people they serve.

We need more jobs and better health care. And we need better education, better multicultural education.

There’s something that my women’s studies teacher at school said recently that I think is relevant: “The cure to cancer, the cure to AIDS,” she said, “are probably locked up in the mind of a 6-year-old girl who is either black or Latina living in South-Central Los Angeles.”

If we don’t get to that 6-year-old girl, if we don’t make certain she becomes a full, contributing member of society, then we all lose, don’t we? Our problems go beyond beyond race relations. They have to do basic rights and human potential.