Dozens of L.A. Gatherings Discuss Violence, Fear

The little group had been struggling with words for more than an hour and Vivian Lincoln still wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. She began slowly:

“I grew up in Harlem. . . . When I got out into outer society, I became angry because of prejudice, because of being treated unfairly because of my color. It took me a long time to understand it.

“Racism and violence,” the 49-year-old Mission Hills woman said, “sort of go hand in hand,” one fueling the other.

Those around her began to nod.

Lincoln and 20 others were talking at the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles on Friday in the third citywide “Days of Dialogue.” This time the topic at nearly three dozen sites was supposed to be violence. But often the debate focused on overcoming fear: fear that community is fraying. Fear of people who are different. Most of all, fear that speaking honestly is no longer possible.

Almost a year after the first Day of Dialogue, organized amid the fallout of the O.J. Simpson verdicts, groups of strangers gathered to put into words what they said is often too hard to voice.

In a session at the Pacoima Multipurpose Center, a handful of troubled teens joined more than a dozen adults to discuss youth violence.

The youths, who are serving sentences at Phoenix House, a halfway residence for juvenile offenders in Lake View Terrace, explained some of the reasons they were drawn to gangs and drugs, including self-esteem problems, the desire for money and peer pressure. The adults told the youths that they were terrified to even drive through the teens’ neighborhoods.

“The youths get a chance to understand and be understood,” said organizer Carol G. McClure. Such discussions “help bridge the gap between communities and races,” she said.

“I see all of us losing the knack for honest, open, intimate contact,” said Regan DuCasse of West Hollywood, speaking at the Museum of Tolerance. “It’s leading to the violence, the disaffection. When people have no intimacy, when they are peripheral, they are not going to worry about each other when harm comes into the community.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, whose motion a year ago launched the Days of Dialogue program, spent the day shuttling around the city to eight different discussion groups.

“I wonder if there’s enough outrage in our city, in our nation, in our society in general, about the level of violence we experience,” he said at a morning session in City Hall with members of a program that attempts to keep children safe as they walk to and from school. “I wonder what it means about a city, call it a society, that has dropped to a level of indifference, maybe numbness.”

In discussions ranging from urban crime to domestic abuse, many of Friday’s participants said the social divisions splitting Los Angeles make the city’s violence seem like an unpreventable epidemic.

Rick Settle, a public affairs employee of the Auto Club, said the recent spate of vehicle windows being shattered on local freeways has chilled him.

“It gives you this odd feeling; it’s extremely random. . . . The people I interact with in this city every day are great. But there’s somebody, somewhere, making me uncomfortable. I can’t see them, but they’re there,” Settle said at the City Hall session.

“Violence surrounds you so much that you can become used to it,” said Frank Miranda of Montebello, who grew up at the Maravilla public housing project in East L.A., during a session held on the Eastside.

Participants said Friday’s meetings, which will be followed by another 20 in the following weeks, created a safe place to talk honestly.

Ang Wasef, a 21-year-old student at Santa Monica College, told the Museum of Tolerance group about her frustration in explaining to her Egyptian-born parents the complex issues that caused racial violence to escalate on her high school campus.

“It’s just so hard,” she sighed. “Where do you start?”

Times staff writer Eric Slater and correspondent Monica Valencia contributed to this story.