Mutual Disregard Is Destroying Los Angeles : Race: Blacks and whites, Latinos and Asians, have to put aside group identity.

After the release last month of a study by the Multicultural Collaborative, a coalition formed after the 1992 riots, the NAACP’s Constance L. Rice said: “Unless we begin to take race relations and human relations seriously, Los Angeles could become nearly unfit for inhabitance.”

I know whole families in and around Los Angeles who will testify that their neighborhoods have long since become “unfit for inhabitance.” But there are too many of us who don’t want to accept that.

By the year 2000, the city of Los Angeles will not have any ethnic majority. We will be a city of equals in numbers and unequals in economic and political power. And because it is the quixotic quirk (the Achilles’ heel! the original sin!) of the human race to deny responsibility, the violent and completely unnecessary destruction of Los Angeles will be everyone’s fault.

Denial has a long history among humans. Eve blamed the snake and Adam blamed Eve. Goliath was only following orders. Judas was tricked. Brutus was just trying to save the republic. Benedict Arnold was a victim of his ego. Stalin was under a lot of stress and Charles Manson had a most difficult childhood.

Denial thrives in today’s Los Angeles. The Euro-American community still refuses to accept that the U.S. is not simply a nation of white people endowed with a divine right to rule. The usually more politically savvy African American community pouts about its courageous civil rights leadership being encroached upon by other peoples of color; instead of building a truly unstoppable “rainbow coalition,” too many black leaders are too involved with maintaining a petulant pecking order. The Latino community’s own throat is being cut by the numerical majority of its members who refuse to embrace the responsibility (and the clout) of citizenship--who refuse even to try to learn English; its Mexican members themselves passed Proposition 187 when they marched by the thousands through L.A. streets carrying the flag of Mexico. Asians take comfort in their homeland cultures, ancient and rich in tradition and wisdom, but the time has come for Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Saigon and the rest to become “our town.” East has to meet and mingle with West; tolerant coexistence ultimately is not healthy. If we do not mutually pollinate our many cultures, mutual anger will decimate them.

The basic reason we Angelenos live in fear and paranoia of one another is because we do not know one another. We do not understand our different practices and cultures because we have not told each other what they mean to us. Prejudice (ethnic, racial, religious) is the misbegotten child of ignorance, and there is categorically no reason for this ignorance to persist. We are a communications lion, and yet when we go into labor we give birth to a ridiculous mouse. This ignorance is indeed a mortal sin because it is deliberate, chosen and willful.

If we do not seize responsibility for knowing and understanding each other right now, when we discover that we have become lifeless fossils, it will too late to say mea culpa.