Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

The voice in this section is Rev. Tom Choi, Minister, Westwood Presbyterian Church. Choi, a Yale Divinity graduate who is “afraid that somebody would mistake [him] for a Korean shop owner,” decides to don the clerical collar he had eschewed “for about seven or eight years,” “hiding” behind it “for protection” (201).

To further demonstrate his distance from his own Korean-American heritage, and his alliance with blacks, Choi made sure to patronize black businesses for lunch (something people complained Korean-Americans did not do), making “sure that everyone saw my collar” (203). Rev. Choi soon realizes that the collar was as unnecessary as his perceived need for protection: among “these people that quote unquote were supposed to be hostile on TV and whatnot, there was nothing but warmth,” a feeling of unity and “friendliness” (203). Choi makes the “discovery” that he “had been out of touch with this part of the city,” as had so many Los Angelinos (203). It is particularly poignant given that Choi appears to have had to eschew his own personal identity in order to make this connection.

The title of this section refers to Choi’s memory of going out in the streets prominently displaying his clerical collar, so he would not be mistaken for a Korean-American business-owner (201).

The voice in this section is Paula Weinstein, a movie producer.As if in direct response to Rev. Choi, Weinstein—removed from the streets by her exalted calling as a movie producer—notes that “People who had lived in Los Angeles all their lives” and “had never been to South Central” were suddenly heading there in “caravans,” as she did, to distribute goods and supplies and make their own discoveries (208). It is a strange phenomenon, this complete social isolation of the races and of neighborhoods, one that doesn’t apply to Chicago’s South Side or to Harlem in New York City. But in LA “It’s as if it is a different country […] —and that’s the horror of Los Angeles” (208-09).

Weinstein’s story is somewhat comparable to Elaine Young’s, where she has all these young movie industry kids camped out in her house, yet it differs in the level of engagement. Weinstein tells a brief-lived story of feeling alive and involved in effecting change, in being part of something, in the best of intentions: “there was a sense of community here, and you felt the possibility, you believed that it actually could change” (210). But that story quickly fades: “of course here we are a year later, (seven-second pause) didn’t change” (210). It was all just “language” and “big gestures” (211). The reality lay not in togetherness, in a “collective consciousness,” but in “watching rich white people guard their houses and send their children out of L.A. as if the devil was coming after them” (208, 211).

The end result was “a media fest of making white people scared of the African-American community, and, and nothing had changed” (211). Rather, the city’s white community “went into a sense of real terror,” resorting to an “inward looking self-protectiveness, as opposed to standing up and saying, ‘We are gonna stand by whatever, if the verdict is this, and these people are found not guilty, it will be unjust and we will stand together’” (212). For a brief period, a matter of “four days,” citizens of LA, of all races, could experience “a fake euphoria […] the euphoria of, ‘Look at what’s possible not what’s real’” (212). But the sad reality is that, “Everybody’s scared in L.A.” (213).

Weinstein starts out as if reviving those halcyon Civil Rights days of Mike Davis’s remembrance and yet leaves us with another declension narrative: the backlash of “conservative forces” (Cornel West), the unfulfilled Kerner Commission (Maxine Waters), the fact “nobody’s getting’ up and sayin’, ‘Look, this is an emergency’” (Mike Davis).

The title of this section refers to a brief-lived moment in which everyone seemed to be on the same wavelength in the wake of the L.A. riots (208).

The voice of this section is Bill Bradley, Senator, D-New Jersey. Senator Bradley, a former NBA star, recalls the story of an African-American Harvard Law School colleague, in order to make sense of the L.A. riots. En route to a brunch at a partner’s home, while interning out in L.A. in the late 1970s, Bradley’s friend was pulled over, thrown to the curb, handcuffed, and roughly interrogated, with guns drawn, by an entire squad of policemen for the offense of driving with, and thus presumably having kidnapped, a white woman. It is only after the woman’s repeated and escalating pleas that the officers simply pack up and drive off. The partner from the big law firm says and does nothing about the incident. It stuck with Bradley. His friend had done nothing more than find himself simultaneously “in the wrong neighborhood and black” (much like Julio Menjivar in “National Guard”), and the “moral power” of the corporate institution with which he was associated failed to bring itself to bear “in the public institutions, which in many places are not fair” (217). It is only “in theory” that we are we all “equal” in the “application of the law,” then, and by implication now (217).

The title of this section refers to the racially motivated inequality in law enforcement, from an anecdote told by Senator Bill Bradley (217).

The voice here is Otis Chandler, a director of the Times Mirror Company. Considering the road ahead, Chandler contemplates the very long and widespread “commitment” that will have to be made to bring about any significant or lasting change. The situation, though not “hopeless,” “can never be made right” if “we should just throw money at it or we should just make speeches” (219). Instead, “It’s going to be a lot of things and a lot of people participating,” and “the whole community, political leadership, private leadership” will have to be a “commitment for the long term” (219, 220-21). Patience, resolve, commitment are the watchwords. To take the view that leadership could “just do a couple things for a few years and it will go away” would be to invite disaster; the proof is in the city’s history: “after the Watts riots there was something called the McClellan Commission[1]. Fine. That was for two years and we forgot about Watts. So here we are again” (221). If “[w]e all have to make a commitment that this is never going to happen again in Los Angeles,” Chandler is cautious (222). Echoing Paula Weinstein, Chandler foresees the prospect that “the situation” will “deteriorate again” and attention again shift away “after a year or two years of hope and building and new alliances, promises, political speeches, a new mayor, all of the things that are going on now” (221). 

Chandler calls for the formation of a “quasi-public, quasi-political group” that meets “on a regular basis” and possesses power of purse. Businesses and government will have to contribute, as well as private citizens, who may well have to be taxed for the demand of preventing “our cities” from deteriorating “into jungle land, which they are now” (222-23). 

The title of this section refers to Chandler’s conception of a task force on racial and urban affairs that has enough power, organization, and sway to “call the governor, […] the publisher of the LA Times, the President of the United States, and say, ‘hey, we gotta see you, we got something cookin here’” (222).

The voice of this section is Owen Smet of the Culver City Police Department and a former range manager at the Beverly Hills Gun Club. Smet, as if in testimony to the fears arrayed in “Godzilla” and “A Jungian Collective Conscious”—of whites besieged by gun-wielding minorities—notes a 40-50 percent increase in business after the riots. Noting long-standing fears of “some areas of LA County where you couldn’t walk after dark,” Smet now admits, “it’s progressed to the point where you say, ‘Gee, there’s no place safe in LA County, daylight or dark’” (224), not without a good gun and some shooting practice, anyhow. Smet adds cause for concern by claiming the “gang members and some of the more organized groups out there are using everything […] There’s no question about it, they are probably better armed than we are” (226). What choice is there, Smet implies—as had Judith Tur (“War Zone”) and, more skeptically, the Anonymous Hollywood agent (“Godzilla”)—but to arm up in return?

The title of this section refers to being a “very good shot” on the range, the terminology employed within a gun club (225).

The voice of this section is Elaine Brown, Former head of the Black Panther Party and the author ofA Taste of Power. Elaine Brown, like Michael Zinzun, is a former member of the Black Panther Party. Echoing Otis Chandler’s call for long-term “commitment,” and qualifying Smet’s ominous linkage between inner-city gangs and the power of firearms, she offers a rallying cry for black political organization, planning, and commitment versus the romantic but misguided image of the “young brother with a gun in your hand, tough and strong and beautiful as you are” (227-28).

It is necessary to exchange “swashbuckling” for “strategy,” spontaneous violence for “a lifetime commitment”; “this idea of picking up a gun and going into the street without a plan and without any more rhyme or reason than rage is bizarre and […] foolish” and, ultimately, destructive (228). All “one has to do,” Brown says,“is ask the Vietnamese or Saddam Hussein about the power and weaponry and the arsenal of the United States government and its willingness to use it to get to understanding what this is about” (228).

(At another point she tells those “talking about a war against the United States government,” to “talk” as well to “the Nicaraguans and El Salvadorans and people in South Africa and people in other countries in Southeast Asia” about “what this country is capable of doing” (230).)

Brown serves notice that the thoughtful, progressive, motivated African-American, who wants to bring significant and lasting change—who will stand in the footsteps of “Martin, Malcolm, and the Black Panther Party”—will have to do much more than don the “symbolic vestment” of a “black beret” or a “Malcolm X hat” or a handgun and instead “think in terms of what are you going to do for black people” over “the long haul” (231). To the anonymous gang member who proudly declares himself “a one-man army” (25), Brown asks that there be no illusions: “At this point you talkin’ about a piss-poor, ragtag, unorganized, poorly armed and […] poorly led army,” entirely unfit for “armed struggle” much less positive structural change (231).

Brown says to “[b]e conscious of what you are doing” lest you just “die and become a poster” to go up “on the wall with all the rest of the people” (229. It is a forceful, humbling call to action from a woman long in experience and global in her vision.

The title of this section refers to Brown’s rejoinder to the young black man ready to make war with the United States government and its local authorities: ask people elsewhere, who have felt the brunt of American power, just what you will be up against (228, 230).

The voice in this section is Homi Bhabha, literary critic, writer, and scholar. Bhabha, a famous scholar devoted to issues of race and race-making, sees a moment of opportunity in this time of “ambivalence and ambiguity” after the King verdict/riots (233). It is an essential moment when boundaries blur and new ones can be created or dissolved completely: “That fuzziness of twilight allows us to see the intersections of the event with a number of other things that daylight obscures for us” (233).

It is a challenging moment, but in the best sense: “We have to interpret more in twilight, we have to make ourselves part of the act” (233). With nothing given, we become aware of circumstance and our own role in creating it: “twilight challenges us to be aware of how we are projecting onto the event itself. We are part of producing the event,” whereas in normal times, in time of “daylight,” we assume that reality is something independent, is merely “presented to us, and we have to just react to it,” heedless to the very possibility that we are conditioning and creating that reality itself (233-34).

The title of this section refers to a “moment of ambivalence and ambiguity” when the “interpretive” and “creative” powers are given sway and new possibilities of awareness, understanding, and participation are given rein (232-33).

This section’s voice is Betye Saar. Saar is an accomplished visual artist, known for her participation in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the highly-politicized Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, which boldly confronted stereotypes and myths of race and gender (in Saar’s case iconic representations like Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima). Her perspective is that of an activist and visual storyteller. In recalling the first evening of the riots, Saar draws on the ominous impression of the sky, reminding us of Theresa Allison’s memory of the night her son Tiny was killed, when she looked to the sky and had a premonition of disaster (“Lightning but No Rain,” pp. 32-40).

Saar, like Homi Bhabha, dilates on the ambiguous in-between time of twilight, “the kind of surreal time of day” (236). Like Bhabha, she sees it as a moment of “transition,” a “sort of limbo,” “even magical,” but, unlike Bhabha, she sees in it the possibility of “evil and control,” a state of “enchantment” in which people are rendered powerless rather than empowered (236). The ambiguous, cautionary stance Saar takes clues in to the extremity and volatility of Los Angeles’s race problem, since Saar had long been a dedicated proponent of political and social protest, for whom “magic” (Voodoo, shamanism, mysticism) and “magical” elements (talismans, shrines, keepsakes) held a positive and consistent presence in her work.

The title of this section refers, at once, to “Magic #1” (about the courtroom“aura” of testifying police officers), and to the “magic” moment of twilight (236).