The Crisis of Race in the New Millennium

Abstract

On May 4, 1992—twenty-three years to the day after the burning of cities during the 1960s had issued in a black reparations demand being delivered to the white liberal congregation of Riverside Church in New York—the last flames of South Central, Los Angeles were put out, ending four days of unrest. Between New York in the late 1960s and LA in the early 90s, an entire nation had managed to go nowhere in its grasp of its own tragic history. A week after the LA event, a popular national magazine featured the uprising in fold-out glossies. On the overleaf were two Asian-looking women consoling one another before a burning house as backdrop. On the facing page, a police car teetered on edge under the onslaught of four pairs of bulging tan biceps, coached by a set of black hands to the right. And at bottom, a powerful left-handed swing of an iron pole shattered store-front glass, wielded by a lightly pigmented cowboy-booted someone with fury in his mind and wind in his wavy hair. Meanwhile the brief blurb explaining the photos read, in effect, “blacks take revenge!” With almost no black skin in sight!

It is not accurate or, for these times, bold enough to just say that America has a race problem;…America is a race problem.

—Haki R. Madhubuti (Why LA. Happened: Implications of the ’92 Los Angeles Rebellion, xiii)