The Antelope Valley’s Bad Rap Over Race

The tales rang true because they seemed so familiar. Racist thugs in Palmdale and Lancaster scrawled swastikas on a synagogue, pummeled an African American teenager walking home from school and shot a black man strolling near his home.

The news reports last month were the latest in a barrage of sensational stories that in recent years have cast the Antelope Valley as a hate crime hotbed.

But this time the hysteria was short-lived. Within days, authorities learned that the man who was shot probably was wounded during a drug deal, not a neighborhood walk. The teenager admitted that he had actually brawled with black schoolmates and said that, to avoid punishment at home, he lied about being attacked by skinheads “because it was believable.”

Although those bogus allegations unraveled, many Antelope Valley residents say that the stigma lingers.

People in this High Desert community say that they are winning their battle against hate crimes. A more vexing problem, they say, is the condescending view of their area.

“People in L.A. think the Antelope Valley is full of rednecks and yahoos,” said Alan Henkin, rabbi of the synagogue that was tagged by Nazi graffiti in the only one of the three recent hate crimes to be substantiated.

Henkin resents the synagogue vandals, who he suspects are misguided youths, less than he does his fellow Los Angeles rabbis when they ask him how he lives amid cross burnings and trucks with gun racks.

Overall, Henkin and others say, race relations in the Antelope Valley are no worse than most and arguably better than in some Southland communities. That picture may not make news, but it is apparent to anyone who visits a neighborhood, shopping mall or school in the area.

Data Don’t Support the Negative Image

Although the valley has been the site of some gruesome events, such as the 1995 slaying of a homeless black man by three skinheads, law enforcement statistics appear to support that position.

Scholars who study hate crimes and law enforcement officials caution that hate crime data are often unreliable because of shoddy reporting. But the data that exist support the claim by residents that the Antelope Valley does not deserve its stigma.

Lancaster, with a population of more than 120,000, reported 11 hate crimes in 1998, according to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. West Hollywood, a city of 39,000, logged 23 hate crimes that year, and the San Fernando Valley tallied more hate crimes per capita than the Antelope Valley.

Los Angeles County reports about twice as many hate crimes per capita as the nation, according to the commission. With such a high countywide rate, it is difficult to brand a single area as the hate crime epicenter, experts say.

The valley resembles other western suburbs. Approaching it from the freeway, clusters of tile-roofed houses orbiting big-box stores like Home Depot appear to spring from the desert, as they do outside Las Vegas, Riverside and Phoenix.

Some residents think Antelope Valley hate crimes are amplified because, unlike much of Los Angeles, they receive big play in the local newspaper. That makes it easier for the stories to spread to local television stations and Los Angeles newspapers, which on occasion can turn them into national and international news.

A spate of hate crimes in the mid-1990s snowballed into a 1997 New Yorker magazine story that focused for 19 pages on the area’s Nazi youths, and defined the area for many journalists. Many locals believe that the New Yorker piece and other media accounts have given outsiders the impression that skinheads are not a subculture, but the area’s mainstream.

Nancy Kelso, a Palmdale lawyer who represents juveniles, said that even among marginalized teenagers, skinheads are a minority. Kelso, who was quoted in the New Yorker article, said she seldom sees skinheads in the court system, and learned most of what she knows about Nazi teenagers from the New Yorker writer who interviewed her.

John MacDonald, who teaches African American history at Antelope Valley Community College, says that the media have focused “a microscope” on hate crimes. MacDonald thinks with similar scrutiny “you would probably find the same thing” in other areas.

Vicious hate crimes have in fact gone unnoticed in Los Angeles communities without local newspapers. Between 1995 and 1997, Hawaiian Gardens was hit by what some experts regard as the county’s worst hate crime spree.

In that southeastern Los Angeles County city, Latino gang members repeatedly attacked African American residents, and murdered three in as many months.

The crimes were virtually ignored by newspapers and broadcast media.

Karen Umemoto, a University of Hawaii professor, conducted a study that found hate crime problems across the county. According to human relations commission statistics, the north county area, which includes the Antelope Valley, had fewer hate crimes than several regions, including the Westside of Los Angeles and the west San Gabriel Valley.

The most important task for these areas, Umemoto said, is fighting the crimes aggressively. “How [localities] deal with hate crimes is the real issue,” she said.

Even those who in the past accused officials of downplaying hate crimes now say that the community has been vocal and aggressive in combating the problem.

Among the most successful measures, by many accounts, has been the creation in 1996 of the Antelope Valley Human Relations Task Force, a 40-member coalition of residents, religious leaders, sheriff’s deputies and school officials. The task force began after a 1996 machete attack by skinheads on a 16-year-old African American boy, and has since met monthly to discuss anti-hate crime measures.

That same year, the Sheriff’s Department began tracking white supremacists as it had Latino and black gangs, said Det. Brad Foss, a gang specialist at the sheriff’s Lancaster station. Since then, deputies have scattered the skinheads by driving them from public hangouts, such as parks and motels, by patrolling those areas, Foss said.

Task force members and law enforcement officials say that their efforts have helped to keep hate crimes from escalating. The Nazi Lowriders prison gang, sheriff’s officials said, has now called on its members on the streets to cease attacking minorities. The gang fears that the massive community and police response to hate crimes will hamper its street drug sales, Foss said.

If white supremacists have recognized the Antelope Valley’s crackdown on hate, word has not trickled “down below,” as Los Angeles is known in these High Desert communities.

Between touchdowns during a Super Bowl party at the First Missionary Baptist Church in Littlerock, Brian Hemenway said he is astounded when he hears the Antelope Valley described as a hotbed of racism. “If anything, things are better here,” said Hemenway, who is a deacon in the black congregation--and white.

Ethnic Groups Live Among Each Other

There are no ghettos or barrios in the Antelope Valley, residents say; people of different races often live on the same block.

Darren Parker, president of the Antelope Valley Human Relations Task Force, lives on a street that divides a new housing tract from an older neighborhood. Parker’s house sits in a row of mammoth, two-story, Spanish-style clones. Shiny SUVs and luxury import cars sit in the driveways of the suburban dream homes, whose owners include blacks, Latinos and Asians.

Across the street are older, single-level ranch houses, with a different set of status symbols--bass boats and pickups--parked in front. They’re mostly white on that side of the street, Parker said. Yet families on both sides of the street greet each other daily, attend each other’s garage sales and mow lawns for vacationing neighbors, Parker said.

But Parker, a labor union political director, doesn’t gloss over tensions that sometimes arise from such close interaction.

Neighborhood children scrawled racist graffiti on a black man’s house, Parker said. And at the neighborhood liquor store, the cashier does not hide his swastika tattoo.

Still, Parker said he would rather face such incidents than live in a more segregated community.

“Unlike L.A., you don’t have the luxury to not go into Watts if you don’t want to deal with the Grape Street gang, or to not go to the South Bay if you don’t want to deal with an Asian gang. There are no sections here,” he said.

The Antelope Valley grew so rapidly that there wasn’t time to name its streets, much less form ethnic enclaves. Numbered and lettered roads cut through rows of identical suburban dream houses plopped onto vast desert plains. Tumbleweeds blow across the scrub as the latest fighter jets roar overhead.

Palmdale’s population grew by about 37% in the last decade, according to U.S. Census data, while Lancaster grew by about 22%. The California Department of Finance estimates Lancaster’s population at more than 123,000 and Palmdale’s at nearly 115,000. The Antelope Valley’s total population is about 359,300 Los Angeles County residents, with another 60,000 in the Kern County portion of the valley, according to the Antelope Valley Board of Trade.

The schools provide a window into the area’s racial mix. Enrollment in the high school district is about 50% white, 29% Latino and 16% African American, with the racial mix fairly constant across campuses.

By contrast, Pasadena, a city that is 39% white, has a public school system that is 83% minority.

Young People Mingle Freely

As at many malls throughout Southern California, the Antelope Valley Mall is filled with young people of all races mingling comfortably.

College students Gary McCree, 22, and his girlfriend of four years, Brittany Davis, 20, say that the Antelope Valley opened up their lives like nothing else.

McCree, an African American, grew up in mostly Latino and black Pacoima, where he said he not only “never had a white friend,” he rarely had any meaningful contact with whites.

Davis moved to the area with her family nine years ago from Beaver, Utah, where she said “there were no black people--just white.” Now, she sees her life as downright cosmopolitan. “You should see our friends,” Davis said. “We’ve got black friends, white friends, Korean friends, Japanese friends.”

What encourages Davis, however, alarms others.

Lawyer Kelso, who has lived in Acton for 17 years, said that plenty of white residents are unhappy about the area’s burgeoning minority population.

Kelso said she has heard complaints from both longtime residents and whites who fled Los Angeles’ diversity, only to find their new neighborhoods becoming populated by minorities. “I hear anti-Semitic comments, racial stereotyping and comments about immigrants,” she said.

But Kelso, 55, doubts that the Antelope Valley is really worse than other parts of the county. “We certainly had hate crimes when I was growing up in Glendale, but they weren’t called hate crimes. They weren’t addressed at all.”

As Antelope Valley residents continue to chafe at their hate crime pariah status, some also wonder whether they are focusing too narrowly on the problem.

Michael Kirkland, a task force member, worries that the community could miss less obvious racial conflicts if it becomes fixated on hate crimes.

But even Kirkland agrees that the Antelope Valley has gotten a bum rap. In this country, he said, it is hypocritical to single out one community as racist.

“Racism is a permanent problem in American society,” Kirkland said. “Not just in the Antelope Valley.”

* HATE CRIMES LEGISLATION

Gov. Gray Davis announces bills to get tough on hate crimes and paramilitary groups. A13