On August 11, 1965, police in Los Angeles arrested a man named Marquette Fry, along with his brother and his mother, sparking the infamous Watts riots. The violence lasted six days, leaving 34 dead and 1,000 injured.
The divisions in Los Angeles — in our nation — are such that there is still disagreement about what happened that summer and what the causes were. Even the label is in dispute — what the world has agreed to call a riot, local activists call a revolt.
The arresting officer says the traffic stop was routine and he didn’t do anything wrong. Witnesses say the arrest was violent and that Marquette Fry’s mother was roughly treated.
Locals say the National Guard who were called in were brutal, that they shot first and asked questions later. The National Guard says they did everything by the book.
According to conventional wisdom, there were and are problems in Watts, but the riots are generally treated as a mystery, almost an act of nature. It was an unnaturally hot summer they say. Some violent youths started the whole thing and it took on a life of its own the story goes. Someone spit, someone threw a rock.
No one understands the violence, the looting, the burning — they’re only hurting themselves, they say, it doesn’t make any sense.
And it still didn’t make any sense when the LA riots broke out in 1992. Again there was an arrest. Again there was the violence, the looting and burning. Again the excuses and bewilderment.
Again the litany repeated in the news — they’re only hurting themselves can’t they see it’s all so senseless.
The violence doesn’t make any sense to the newscasters, the reporters, the politicians, and the concerned citizens when it happens every day in Watts, in South Central, in Compton — all the same area, year after year, none of it making any sense at all to the experts, all this senseless violence.
And the residents of the area, they tell us each time — police brutality, harassment, injustice, inequity. They tell us of a system that hasn’t just failed, but is preying on the community. They tell us of their sons and daughters being arrested for no reason, brutalized for no reason.
They tell us of businesses that sell inferior goods at inflated prices. Schools that can’t teach. No jobs. No opportunity. And after the violence, we shake our heads and conduct studies and give more funding to the schools and the police, and things stay the same.
When the studies show that the charges are accurate, that the businesses are indeed selling rotten food and clothes that fall apart and we have video of the police beating the crap out of American citizens and we don’t do anything and we still don’t understand, then our system is called racist and we wonder why.
It’s been 40 years since the Watts riots and we’re still calling the violence in Los Angeles senseless and saying we don’t understand. After 40 years, it’s not a lack of understanding, it’s a refusal to understand.
Perhaps as individuals, we’re each doing the best we can, but clearly as a group, as a nation, something is broken. We won’t be able to fix it until we admit that it makes sense.
(cross-posted from Unbossed)