The Racial Divide in California

[cephalocide]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...022000976.html

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 21, 2006; Page A01

Part 1

LOS ANGELES -- A series of deadly racial attacks in the jails of this sprawling metropolis has cast a spotlight on long-simmering but little-discussed tensions between a shrinking black presence and an ascendant Latino one in California.

In almost every arena of public life -- schools, politics, hospitals, housing and the workplace -- African Americans and Hispanics are engaged in an edgy competition, according to interviews with teachers, students, politicians, researchers, government officials, civil rights lawyers, street cops and businesspeople.

Los Angeles's first Latino mayor since the 19th century, Antonio Villaraigosa (D), was elected last year with strong support from African Americans amid hopes of the creation of a true rainbow coalition in one of the world's most ethnically diverse metropolitan areas. But the reality, said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black radio talk show host who directs the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, is that "the jail violence is only symptomatic of something larger."

"There is conflict and competition in all areas," Hutchinson said. "This city and this state is a caldron of racial issues. This thing is pulsating."

Fighting broke out at the Pitchess Detention Center on the northern fringes of Los Angeles County about two weeks ago when a group of Latino inmates in a two-tiered dormitory began throwing furniture down on a group of black inmates, leaving one of them dead. In the ensuing days, scores more were injured in a string of clashes between Latinos and blacks at Pitchess and other jails. On Feb. 12, a second African American was killed in a jail brawl.

Fighting continued at Pitchess on Friday night, leaving six more injured. The sheriff's department responded to the riots by firing tear gas at some participants and stripping 100 others, giving them only blankets for cover. The jail system, which houses about 21,000 people and is the nation's largest, is in lockdown, and Latino and black inmates are being segregated.

Sheriff Lee Baca said the fights were part of an "ongoing gun battle" between black and Latino gangs. "People on the outside are shot-calling to the inside to Latinos to start racial disturbances," he said. Sheriff's officials said a gang known as the Mexican Mafia is believed to have given the green light to prisoners of Mexican ancestry to go after African Americans.

The conflict has come amid a large increase of Latinos in California, said Nicolas C. Vaca, author of "The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means for America." In 1980, Latinos made up 19 percent of California's population while African Americans made up 7.7 percent. Today, almost a third of California's 36 million people are Hispanic while blacks have fallen to 6.7 percent of the state's population.

Vaca, Hutchinson and others say the competition and tension in Los Angeles highlight a nationwide issue between the two groups. Last year, after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin complained of Mexicans overrunning his city and displacing blacks. In a recent interview on CNN, Jesse L. Jackson also said he was worried about illegal Mexicans in New Orleans.

Large swaths of Los Angeles, such as Watts -- a place that Earl Paysinger, the deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, described as an "ecosystem for African American culture" -- are now increasingly Latino. The nearby city of Compton, the birthplace of gangsta rap, is now 60 percent Hispanic. "The movement of Latinos into these communities has been nothing less than a demographic earthquake," Paysinger said.

Schools that for more than a decade had been predominantly black are now predominantly Latino, and that shift has led to racial strife. In 2005, widespread fighting between Latinos and African Americans, sometimes necessitating lockdowns and the deployment of police officers, rocked 12 schools in Los Angeles County, said Marshall Wong, a member of the county's Commission on Human Relations.

Channa Cook, a teacher at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, said that even in her school, routinely regarded as one of the best in Los Angeles County, black students each year skip school on May 5 -- Cinco de Mayo -- the day when Mexicans celebrate a 19th-century military victory over France. Mexican gangs have warned in graffiti that they will shoot African Americans attending school that day.

Part 2

"My first year here, I didn't believe it, but the students told me, 'No, Miss Cook, if you come to school you're going to get shot,' " said Cook, who is African American. "When I arrived at class, all the black kids had stayed home."

Experts on hate crimes also point to a worrying trend among the two communities in Los Angeles County. In the past, non-Hispanic whites committed most hate crimes. Now, 73 percent of the identified suspects in anti-black hate crimes are Latino and 80 percent of the suspects in anti-Latino crimes are black, according to a report by the county Commission on Human Relations.

"The old paradigm of black-white race relations is falling by the wayside," Vaca said.

His view holds true for battles over employment as well.

A decade ago, in Southern California, minorities taking cases to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rarely if ever complained that they had lost the job to another minority, said Anna Park, a lawyer for the EEOC's Los Angeles district office. Now, however, an increasing number of African Americans are taking and winning cases against employers who have hired Latinos instead of them, she said.

"Discrimination is not just black-white anymore," she said.

To be sure, there are optimists. Martin Ludlow, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the county's most powerful labor organization, is one of them. Ludlow, an African American, took the reins of what was traditionally seen as a bastion of Hispanic power last year. He said the federation would soon launch a campaign to push the hotel industry, which is dominated by Latinos, to begin rehiring African Americans in what he called "a largely Latino union effort to reach out to African Americans."

Still, Los Angeles's gang scourge has only added to the racial problems. The county is home to an estimated 1,000 gangs, predominantly Mexican and some of the most dangerous in the United States. A decade ago, said civil rights lawyer Connie Rice, black and Latino gangs operated in separate parts of the city. "Then the populations merged and the borders mixed," she said, "and now the underclass is at war."

Tony Rafael, a gang expert who is writing a book on the Mexican Mafia, said so far the Latinos are winning.

"Obviously it goes both ways, but the hammer is much bigger on the Latino side," Rafael said. "Blacks are outnumbered. And they can't seem to create a united front to resist."

In the jails, the problems are further magnified by poor living conditions that often spark violence, said Jody Kent, coordinator of the jails project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which has monitored conditions in the jails since winning a lawsuit against Los Angeles County in the 1970s.

Prisoners in the jail are housed mostly in dormitory settings, with men suspected of committing violent offenses bunking with people not involved with violent crimes. Although the jails were designed to house prisoners sentenced to one year or less of jail time, at this point 80 percent of the inmates are awaiting trial or are convicted felons awaiting transfer to a state prison. Plumbing is poor, and the deputies are short-staffed.

After the racial attacks, county sheriff's deputies said they anticipated a reaction on the streets.

On a recent evening, Deputy Tim Brennan, a patrol officer who has worked the streets of Compton for more than two decades, stopped two members of warring black gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, riding in one car. "What are you doing?" Brennan asked, clearly surprised to see the two men -- one wearing red, the other blue -- in the same vehicle. "Going to get the Mexicans?"

Everyone laughed uneasily.

[Isis]

"On a recent evening, Deputy Tim Brennan, a patrol officer who has worked the streets of Compton for more than two decades, stopped two members of warring black gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, riding in one car. "What are you doing?" Brennan asked, clearly surprised to see the two men -- one wearing red, the other blue -- in the same vehicle. "Going to get the Mexicans?"

Everyone laughed uneasily."

It shouldn't take the threat of a Latin street gang in order for Black gangs to unite. What does this say about urban AA's? First whites and Arabs, now Latins are our sworn enemy? I suspect that these petty rivalries have a greater force behind them. I surely hope these Black-hating Latins don't think everything will be roses once the system is done exploiting them as cheap labor. Many of them have the whitemans complex, and figure demeaning Blacks is the foundation of success, as whites have done. They need to realize that white men want both Black and Brown to disappear.