Rejecting Race as an Identity

Why can’t Los Angeles be more like Joe R. Hicks?

Hicks himself is wondering.

The 57-year-old executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission has transformed himself over the years from a gun-toting black nationalist living in Watts to an advocate of multiculturalism, married to a Jewish woman and raising two girls in the Hollywood Hills.

“My shift was from a place where race defined all, a very simplistic view,” he said. “I reject race. I challenge the idea that racial identity should define how you view the world.”

Now, he says, it’s the city’s turn.

Hicks is on a mission to transform the balkanized thinking of Angelenos, arguably the most ethnically diverse population in the world.

He heads a city agency that was created as a defense against the violent strains of race relations, but that under the best of circumstances is limited in its power to heal divisions created by income, language and color differences.

Still, Hicks believes in the power to change, and cites himself as an example.

“I understand why people identify with identity politics,” he said. “I lived it. That was me. I just believe we’ve got to move beyond that. As Martin Luther King said, ‘We can either live apart as fools or together as brothers.’ ”

Hicks, who was appointed to his $83,000-a-year post slightly more than a year ago by Mayor Richard Riordan, doesn’t see Los Angeles as a city of fools. He sees a 21st century metropolis where race-baiting is rejected, where Latinos, Korean Americans and African Americans support political candidates based on issues and charisma, not race.

And in neighborhoods, he sees a network of advocates easing tensions among ethnic groups, averting the troubles that contributed to the city’s 1992 riots.

But Hicks’ sermons on multiculturalism aren’t universally applauded.

Some old guard civil rights activists in Los Angeles believe that the former black nationalist abandoned the African American community and is now trying to water down its political clout in the city.

“Joe Hicks was a star in this community,” said Frank Holoman, a former state assemblyman and owner of the Boulevard Cafe in South-Central Los Angeles. “Now he’s just doing what the mayor tells him to do. He’s got to do his job, I guess, but he doesn’t have the best interest of our community at heart.”

And in some neighborhoods, Hicks’ message is barely being heard. In Pacoima and South-Central, for example, tensions between blacks and Latinos are boiling. The groups have clashed in hallways of schools in the two neighborhoods, and black parents are angry about school meetings conducted largely in Spanish.

Meanwhile, the pulpit from which Hicks speaks--the Human Relations Commission--is shaky and was, until recently, on the verge of collapse.

Commision Is Underfunded

Historically, the commission has been among the city’s most underfunded agencies. It receives less than $1 million a year, placing it well behind more aggressive programs in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles County.

A USC study recently reported that the commission has failed to improve race relations--its mission when it was created in 1966, a year after the Watts riots. According to the study, the commission in the past three decades has accomplished little more than producing an annual community calendar and a student essay contest.

Larry Aubry, a former consultant to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, said successful commissions foster communications and community organizing. But to do that, he said, they need adequate funding.

City Councilmen Mark Ridley-Thomas and Mike Feuer have tried to persuade their colleagues to allocate more money to the commission. But so far, it has not been a council priority.

“Politically, council members want to control their turf,” Aubry said. “They think they can do the job better. I think that’s been to the detriment of the city.”

Bong-Hwan Kim, interim director of the Multi-Cultural Alliance--founded by Hicks to ease tensions between African Americans and Korean Americans after the 1992 riots--said the Human Relations Commission is underfunded because the city’s “political leadership just doesn’t get it when it comes to being proactive in race relations.”

Feuer said, “I think there’s a general understanding in the city of the importance of human relations,” but Hicks must undertake “concrete projects which get people working together” in order to get more funding.

Philip Ethington, a coauthor of the USC report, said racial trouble is one of the few things that guarantees more human relations resources.

“A very sad and dispiriting observation we made is there’s always a predictable flurry of activity after a major disruption like a riot,” he said.

“Those reactive responses eventually taper off,” he said. “They only last as long as the memory and outrage about the event does.”

The USC report recommended that the commission be given at least enough money to hire a fieldworker for each of the council’s 15 districts. As it stands, the commission employs only five field representatives out of a staff of 13.

The field representatives are in effect community organizers, putting together programs that try to bridge cultural gaps. For example, one program called Shoulder to Shoulder organizes children for such activities as painting murals. The goal is for the youngsters to learn more about each other through group work.

Eve Fischer, the commission’s interim deputy director, said the agency was in shambles when she was hired early last year.

“We had to do a complete overhaul,” she said. “We had to make sure some people moved on to other positions in the city.”

Fischer said she found staff secretaries running errands for commissioners, an abuse of their position. The practice so outraged Hicks that he asked Riordan to decline reappointments to half of his 11 commissioners, and the mayor complied.

Before Riordan began spending money on the commission two years ago, it ranked near the bottom of the state’s 64 municipal human relations organizations in staff and budget, according to the California Assn. of Human Relations Organizations. The commission’s budget for 1996-97 was $490,000. For much of the 1970s and 1980s the budget was $20,000 to $30,000, according to the USC report.

Other big cities have invested far more. The New York Commission on Human Rights has a $7-million annual budget and 142 workers, including lawyers and social workers. Field representatives are based in the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan.

In California, the Los Angeles commission is now the third largest--in budget and size--behind the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, which operates on a $3-million budget, and the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, with a budget approaching $2 million.

Hicks recently asked Riordan to provide him enough money in the new budget to hire a permanent deputy director, as well as someone to raise private funds. Riordan accepted Hicks’ request, recommending in his proposed budget this week that the commission receive $1.09 million for the new fiscal year, beginning in July.

A Transformation Over the Years

Hicks is seeking to copy fund-raising efforts by the Orange County commission, which operates a successful foundation supported with $1 million in corporate donations. Its 20 workers provide racial mediation services to county schools and businesses for a fee.

Hicks eventually would like to establish a more formal relationship with such organizations as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Hicks’ activism was triggered more than three decades ago, during the 1965 Watts riots.

He recalled sitting on his family’s porch, watching buildings burn during the turmoil. He watched as a National Guard jeep stopped outside his house.

“Hey, you,” the guardsman yelled. “Get in the house.” Hicks ignored the order and was still on his porch when the jeep circled back. The guardsman, using a racial epithet, said, “Didn’t I tell you to get in the house?”

Hicks said another soldier grabbed a .30-caliber machine gun mounted on the back of the jeep and pointed it at him. He wisely backed into the house. “I wasn’t going to argue with a machine gun,” Hicks said.

But he didn’t back down either. He joined a black cultural nationalist movement founded by Ron Karenga, the creator of the Kwanzaa holiday. Hicks carried a gun and feared both the police and the Black Panthers, which had frequent disputes with Karenga’s group.

But by 1974, Hicks and his first wife, Lynette, had abandoned the nationalist movement because of its misogynistic views, he said.

Hicks joined the Communist Party and became one of its few black voices. But he was not a happy man. His marriage ended, and he was disenchanted with the party’s rhetoric and the lack of black members.

With all that he had embraced crumbling around him, Hicks turned to the writings of King and began to embrace nonviolent, multicultural views. While helping with an affirmative action project in 1978, Hicks met Elizabeth Ackerman, who had returned to Los Angeles after attending school in Santa Cruz.

“It was love at first sight for me,” said Elizabeth Hicks, who married Joe in 1980.

In him she saw “a truthful person who takes time to think things through. That’s the way he transforms himself all the time.

“He’s willing to question things,” she said. “A lot of people around him do not.”

Along his trajectory from black nationalism to communism to multiculturalism, Hicks became an activist in the 1980s, working for the Service Employees International Union Local 660 and the American Civil Liberties Union.

In the early 1990s, he became the executive director of the local Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He left that organization in 1995 to co-found the Multicultural Collaborative.

Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) called Hicks “one of the more preeminent human relations advocates in the city.”

Gary Greenebaum, Western regional director of the American Jewish Committee, said, “Joe Hicks is doing everything in his power to transform the city Human Relations Commission. I don’t think he’s had time to do that. I don’t think he’s had sufficient resources to do that.”

Others such as Holoman, the cafe owner, and Barbara Boudreaux, a black civil rights activist facing a June runoff for her Los Angeles school board seat, believe that black multiculturalists like Hicks are being used to aid the eventual displacement of the city’s black power structure by Latinos.

Hicks dismissed such criticism.

“When you don’t speak with the language of racial unity, then out comes the shopworn, dusty, rusty old concept of the Uncle Tom,” he said. “What is an Uncle Tom? What does that mean in 1999?”

Not All Issues Are Black and White

Some Latinos haven’t warmed to Hicks either. Critics cite the recent racial flare-up in the San Fernando Valley, where Latino parents demanded that a Spanish-speaking Latino replace a white principal at Burton Elementary School. The principal reported being beaten up at the school by assailants who have not been caught.

Hicks responded to the incident by saying, “We can’t have people deciding who their principal’s going to be” based on skin color.

One human relations specialist said Hicks’ public comments probably didn’t help the negotiations between parents and school officials being coordinated by the commission.

“I think Joe’s going to have to learn that he has to be a lot more measured about what he says,” said the specialist, who did not want to be identified. “Race is an issue that’s full of land mines.”

Hicks gets plenty of practice handling racially sensitive issues, even at home.

When his eldest daughter, Katarina, was 9, she heard a basketball announcer refer to Michael Jordan as black.

“I didn’t know Michael Jordan was black,” the girl said. Hicks replied that, yes, he is black. “But he looks kind of brown,” Katarina said.

Hicks thought hard about his answer because he expected that his daughter, who has black and white ancestry, would remember it for a lifetime.

So he explained that black people come in a range of colors and that even adults label people incorrectly. He gave Katarina a white tissue and told her to hold it up next to her mom.

The girl ran back into the room yelling, “Daddy, she’s not white.”

Hicks said he has much more explaining to do to Katarina, and to Los Angeles. He wants others to believe that differentiating people by color and race is as outdated as human sacrifice.

“Back in the old days, I was a dogmatic, pistol-packing fool,” he said. “I was a dangerous guy. Not only would I disagree with you, but I would hurt you.

“I had no idea about the complexities of the world,” Hicks said, noting that his life is only one small measure of the distance that must be traveled.