Today’s Agenda

What’s in a word? Too much, says Scott Hartford of Northridge, when the words are weighted with all the baggage of “political correctness.” Hartford, a white American, describes in Community Essay being treated as a thoroughly second-class citizen because of his race when he lived in Japan. Why, then, is he excluded from discussions touching on race with the phrase, “You couldn’t possibly understand”?

PC also stifles debate on what happened in Los Angeles last spring, he says. For instance, Hartford finds it “ludicrous” to call such general lawlessness in the streets an uprising.

That word alone is often a linguistic dividing line in and around the city. And its defenders are as passionate as its detractors.

“I am personally most comfortable with uprising,” says Mazisi Kunene, professor of African languages and literature in the UCLA department of linguistics. “ Uprising says there was a form and a reason for the reaction, and it was much more important than the mere inconvenience implied by disturbance, which also charges those who did the disturbing with causing the disorder.

“ Riot is also the wrong term, but at least a riot can be against something, against injustice. Uprising, though, is more persistent, widespread and long-term.”

Kunene, like so many people, blames the media for the picture of unalloyed lawlessness that most people saw, particularly on television. “Television is concerned with spectacle and sensation. They’re looking for things to satisfy those demands,” he says. “There was not even comment on the horrified reaction as far away as Europe to the (first Rodney King) verdict itself.

“African-Americans in Los Angeles insist on uprising to correct the idea that it was just chaotic looting, or just wild animalism. Uprising implies a sense of will on the part of those who revolt to change their situation by direct action,” says Kunene, and that’s what was happening in Los Angeles.

What enormous burdens on a single word.

The outsider’s image of Orange County is still of a collection of sunny bedroom communities with a largely homogeneous population. Totally wrong, says Jean Forbath, a founder of the nonprofit social welfare organization Share Our Selves, with headquarters in Costa Mesa. There are thousands of homeless, plenty of desperately poor people and, even more invisible, “a very large blue-collar community that just hangs on by their fingernails to live and survive here because they can’t afford the high cost of housing,” Forbath says in Testimony. “Clerks in our stores, the people who mow our lawns . . . people in lower-paying jobs really have a hard time, but what would we do without them?”

The bottom line in Orange County, says Forbath, is that “we can’t have the lifestyle that we’re trying to maintain without the people who we resent.” And that’s why, she says, the county has to face up to needs for such things as low-cost housing and social services.