There’s no physical
sign, barrier, or even a chalk line that marks the zone where
a black can’t enter at the risk of grave harm. But the zone
is there, and blacks know that if they enter it they can be
beat, shot at, or killed. The twist is that the forbidden
zone is not in a redneck, backwoods, and Deep South town during
the rigid and violent Jim Crow segregation era. The bigger
twist is that the Klan, Neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, and bikers
didn’t establish the racially restrictive zone. Purported
Latino gang members established it. The forbidden zone is
in a small, mixed ethnic bedroom community in Los Angeles.
The year is 2007, not 1947.
A black family
that recently fled the community in fear for their lives bluntly
told a reporter that they left because blacks there are scared
to death. In the past year, the hate terror escalated to the
point where blacks tell tormenting tales of being harried
when they leave their homes, or their children walk to school.
They say that they are forbidden to go into a park, and a
convenience store.
This
is not a bad case of racial paranoia run amok. Blacks have
been taunted, harassed, beaten and shot at in this community.
But the tragic murder of a 14-year-old black girl and the
wounding of two other young blacks in the forbidden zone sparked
anguish, rage, and finally drew some local media attention.
The murder drew gasps of disbelieve that in America in 2007
in a big, Northern cosmopolitan city, with a Latino mayor,
and that routinely back pats itself for its ethnic diversity,
there is an entire area that blacks are banned from on pain
of injury or death at the hands of other non-whites. And city
officials seem powerless to do anything about it.
Though
two reputed Latino gang members are charged with the
teen’s murder, and were slapped with a hate crime charge,
the arrest and the hate charge didn’t calm the jitters
and fears of blacks that live there. Even after the
arrests, a number of blacks still said that they planned
to get out of the area as soon as they could.
Latino on black (and black on Latino) violence is hardly
an aberration in Los Angeles (and other places). According
to police reports, there have been more than a dozen
murder attempts in other parts of Los Angeles by alleged
Latino gang members on mostly young blacks that have
no known gang involvement in the latter part of 2006.
A Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission report
on hate violence in 2005 found that overall Latinos
committed nearly half of the hate attacks in the County,
while blacks committed thirty percent of the hate attacks.
But when it’s Latino and black violence, the figure
for hate violence soars. Latinos and blacks committed
the bulk of the racially motivated hate attacks against
each other.
The easy explanation for the hate terror is that the
perpetrators are bored, restless, disaffected, jobless,
untutored, violence prone gang members, and the violence
is a twisted response to racism and deprivation. The
attacks no doubt are deliberately designed by the gang
hate purveyors to send the message to blacks that this
is our turf, and you’re an interloper. But despite arrests,
police crackdowns, gang injunctions, assorted anti-violence
marches and rallies, and community peace efforts, the
black and Latino low intensity battle has shown no sign
of abating.
Then there’s the vehemence of the racial hate. The dirty,
and painful secret is that blacks and Latinos can be
racist, maybe even more racist than whites, toward each
other. It’s easy to see why. Many Latinos fail to understand
the complexity and severity of the black experience.
They frequently bash blacks for their poverty or type
them as clowns, buffoons and crooks. Some routinely
repeat the same vicious anti-black epithets as racist
whites. The color complex reinforces the notion that
blacks are a racial and competitive threat, and any
distancing, ostracism, avoidance, and even violence
is a rational response to keep blacks at arms length.
On the other side, some blacks feed the same myths and
racial stereotypes, and bash Latinos as anti-black,
and violence prone, gangsters that are a menace, as
well as ethnic and economic competitors. The warped
misconceptions and fears have so far trumped the loud
calls and efforts by black and Latino activists and
many residents for unity and peace.
The murder of a black teen, and the gradual dawning
that racially motivated hate attacks are happening right
under the noses of a slumbering, maybe indifferent public,
and impotent city officials, in a modern-day city like
Los Angeles, did touch a mild nerve of disgust and ignite
faint demands for action. But that’s not nearly enough
to erase the shame that in America in 2007 there is
a zone in a big city that blacks can only enter at mortal
peril. And that zone isn’t marked by a burning cross
or guarded by men in menacing white sheets and hoods.
BlackNews.com
columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst
and social issues commentator, and the author of The
Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September
2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and The GOP’s court
of black voters. For order information, see www.blackgopbook.com
For
media interviews, contact:
Mr. Hutchinson at 323-296-6331 or hutchinsonreport@aol.com
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