The Riots Helped No One--Except the Well-Placed Few

Damien wasn’t doing much better than the last time I saw him. He and his wife are still struggling to hold their family together in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. The furniture looks as worn as ever.

Jobs are still hard to come by. Damien works part time as security guard, the same position he held when I met him two years ago. He had hoped for better by now, but his training at a technical school hasn’t really drawn anything.

I met Damien, who is 22, shortly after the riot/rebellion/uprising. It was my job to interview people who had actually participated in the riots, which erupted exactly two years ago today. In their rage, Damien and a friend had burned down a liquor store on West Boulevard near the corner of Hyde Park Boulevard.

I had stopped by his apartment to thank him for helping me become a columnist.

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Sitting in offices across the city are black and brown people who have been promoted, rewarded or had their stature elevated because folks like Damien hurled a bottle through a window, burned down a building, looted a store or otherwise wreaked havoc on the city.

It is a cruel paradox, summed up most aptly in that old Billie Holiday lyric: “Them that got shall get.”

The recipients are smart people, talented men and women who have already achieved a measure of success based on skill, education and drive. Ask them about the riots, about the violence and they will condemn it. Nothing good, they will tell you, can come out of such acts.

And yet, there they sit, new titles, new job responsibilities, fatter paychecks because brothers got crazy and tried to burn down the town. And because they lit a match, white folks got nervous (and perhaps conscious and compassionate) and they figured they needed to change their way of doing business. So, they found us.

Take Joe Naphier for example. Two years ago, Joe Naphier, then a human resources manager on a McDonnell Douglas commercial airline project, stood on the executive floors with company President Robert Hood and watched the city burn. Hood was disturbed by what he saw. He wanted to do something.

The two men talked. Two months later, Naphier, who had been with the company for 14 years and was then the only black general manager, was named to head a diversity committee. Four months later, he was promoted to ombudsman, a position last held by a company vice president. He got a nice raise as the first black face ever in that sensitive position at the company. Naphier has no problems telling you that the riots are the reason he’s there.

Then there’s Bernard Kinsey, recently departed co-chairman of Rebuild L.A. Kinsey was no slouch before he got to RLA. He had been a Xerox vice president for 10 years, supervising some 3,000 employees before he left to start his own company.

But outside of a relatively small arena, he was little known. Thanks to RLA, Kinsey has become a player, hobnobbing with all the town’s decision makers. Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and others asked him to write opinion pieces. He was a guest of the governments of Germany, England and France to discuss matters of race. Plus he got paid to the tune of $150,000.

“It’s been an unbelievable experience,” he says.

At The Times, George Ramos, a Latino reporter, and I were approached to become columnists a few months after the riots. The editor thought the paper could use some new voices--particularly black and Latino. There’s also a bunch of minority reporters over at The Times’ new, weekly City Times section who can thank the riots for their positions. That section had been on hold for 12 years.

Benjamin A. Holden says that he was hired as a reporter by the Wall Street Journal “as a direct result of the riots.” He says he had applied there a year before the unrest and was told nothing was available. After the riots, however, the paper created a special beat for him covering race relations.

And what has come to those who felt so alienated that they took to the streets? Very little.

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“It’s part of the unfortunate reality,” says Danny Bakewell, president of Brotherhood Crusade and another recipient. “The people who needed something haven’t been the ones to get the benefits.

“Instead, it’s people like myself, (the Rev.) Chip Murray, Maxine (Waters), the people at Rebuild L.A., we’ve all benefited. It’s not that we didn’t have some persona before, but all these things empowered us even more. The question is, what do you do with that? What have you done for the brothers lately?

“The problem is that a lot of people won’t even acknowledge that they owe those people a debt of gratitude. Many of them will say that I was always Mr. Wonderful, I was always going to become a columnist.

“The challenge,” Bakewell says, “is to have the people on the street become more of a beneficiary. That is the challenge for us all. Unless people come to grips with that, it’s going to breed more and more of what we’ve already been through.”