FEELING LUCKY, PUNK?
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
When I moved to Inglewood, California in 2001, I was moving back after a long time away. I grew up just outside the city limits before my family moved into town when I was 15. It was homey and comfortable back then, with roomy houses, lots of backyards to go around and annual Christmas decorating competitions—middle-class and then some.
But there was simultaneously a sense of encroaching danger, a wariness of other, rougher elements that gave Inglewood a dubious reputation that dogs so many black communities...
When I moved back as a homeowner seven years ago, I found myself mulling over not the fond memories but those dubious elements--was moving back a move up? I was hardly proud of those thoughts, but there they were.In the meantime, I relaxed into a real community life I hadn’t felt in ages. I talked to people across hedges and picket fences. I walked my dogs at night. I joined the block club that met monthly and planned summer parties and fundraisers. But over time I noticed a kind of stoic refusal to address the less idyllic happenings in town that had always been part of Inglewood’s profile, namely gang activity and shootings.
If the police were involved in the controversial shooting of a citizen—as has been happening frequently over the last year, most recently with the shootings of teenager Michael Byoune in May and postal worker Kevin Wicks last month—people had even less to say.
(Postal Worker Kevin Wicks)
The almost determined indifference to the deaths of mostly young black men was disturbing; at one meeting last year, a neighbor reported the shooting death of a 12-year-old boy in the area like he was reading a routine item from the city hall newsletter.
At meetings like this, I fumed—how could we claim to be about neighborhood improvement and safety but ignore the implications of such shootings? Yet I said nothing. The unfortunate truth is, I understood. We were—are-- grappling with a serious identity crisis that’s rooted in both class and race. Inglewood’s block-club denizens are middle-class strivers who applaud the chain stores and eateries that have appeared over the last several years--Marshalls, Ross, Starbucks, Chili’s.
They see all this as civic progress and want to protect it from the thugs and troublemakers. But the strivers and the so-called troublemakers are black. This means when a shooting death happens, black people have to choose who they are and which side they’re on. With a police shooting, whatever its merits, the stakes are higher: they have to decide whether they empathize more with the cause of social justice or material justice, whether the death of another young black man is simply part of the price to be paid for the material justice and well-being that for black folk has been too long in coming.
Of course, the choice between caring about property values and caring about the welfare of the entire community is eminently false. But that’s gotten lost in all the public concern about stamping out gangs has reached a fever pitch this past year in Los Angeles; “possible gang member” has become an almost generic description for black and brown males under the age of 30 who are apprehended by the police.
But the media-driven divide between black suspects and the rest of us—that is, between bad black folk and good—is mostly an illusion. Inglewood is a town that is not so big and the class gap not so wide that people don’t know each other.Shooting victims live next door to solid citizens; they are somebody’s son or nephew or godchild. I’ve noticed with growing unease that Inglewood police has gotten an extra layer of law enforcement from the California Highway Patrol: On my dog walks I’ve seen more people getting pulled over, spread-eagled or handcuffed than I have in a long time. They are almost always young, black and male.
Recently I overheard a man on my block sternly warn my 14-year-old neighbor, John, to stay away from the streets and to keep his head down. He told John that trouble awaited young black men like him if he wasn’t careful. I wondered: Did he mean trouble from the police or from other young black men not as upstanding as John? Both. And this very upstanding neighbor of mine made it clear that he was speaking from experience.
I appreciated the guy caring enough to speak up and school a young boy, something black people agree we need more of. But the speaking up and coming together can’t stop at the end of anybody’s particular block. If it does, we’re all as imperiled in Inglewood, and in other black neighborhoods across the country, as John surely is now.
Former LA Weekly staff writer and weekly LA Times Columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan is currently a freelance writer and contributing editor to the Times' Opinion section.