The 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the Asian American Abandonment Narrative as Political Fiction

Riots, Narrative, and Fiction

It is difficult to read any lengthy reflection of race relations written by an Asian American without coming across some mention of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. The desire to tell the story of the riots and their actual (re)telling has helped to produce a core narrative that is consistently found in accounts produced by Asian Americans. This narrative is one of abandonment, whereby we are to understand that Korean immigrants were abandoned by the state during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and, therefore, were not protected from rioters who subsequently damaged or destroyed their property. While it is certainly true that Koreans incurred a great deal of property damage or losses and that the state perhaps could have been more efficient in preventing the extent of both, the narrative of abandonment serves a greater political purpose than mere description.

In this narrative, the Korean immigrant entrepreneur is an outsider who is unwittingly caught in the conflict between the state and the consumer, but who is supposedly disconnected from both sides. As such, the Korean immigrant serves as a stand-in for the Asian American—one who is (presumably) floating, victimized, used by both sides, and, most importantly, unrelated to American racial conflict. Despite the multiracial nature of the riots, the police serve as a stand-in for whites, and the rioters serve as a stand-in for blacks. Subsequently, we are to conclude that Korean immigrant entrepreneurs were abandoned because they were Asian American and, therefore, racialized as outsiders who were unwittingly caught in the cross hairs of black-white antagonism.

The abandonment narrative is political fiction more than reality because it is predicated on the assumption that the state has no interest in or does not acknowledge Asian suffering and, therefore, acted accordingly during the course of the riots and after. Overall, we are to conclude that the state does not recognize or address Korean immigrant trauma or suffering simply because Asian Americans are racialized as outsiders (and, to an extent, as foreigners) and, therefore, are unimportant to domestic black-white relations. This conclusion is predicated on the sub-assumptions that

1. 1. Korean immigrants experienced a unique type of violence primarily because they were nonwhite or Asian;

2. 2. The state was not present at all during the riots or at least was not present soon enough; and

3. 3. The state did not attempt to address the concerns of Koreans after the fact.

This set of assumptions helps to obscure how the state did specifically respond to the 1992 L.A. Riots when they were happening. Moreover, this set of assumptions contributes to the idea of Asian American particularity where we are to conclude that no other group has a basis for similar concerns regarding the lack of state intervention against black rioters. As Park and Park (1999) rightfully argue, there is certainly a need for more work theorizing Asian Americans and their particular location in the color line. Yet the notion of Asian American particularity as it relates to the abandonment narrative has actually served as an a priori conclusion rather than as a possibility to investigate.

A critical interrogation of the abandonment narrative will reveal that while Koreans may have been targeted during the riots, they were by no means entirely abandoned by the state. Rather, the state operated during and after the riots in a fluid and contingent manner in ways that were both physical and symbolic. This fluidity and contingency appear to be less about Korean immigrants' racialization as Asian American or nonwhite as they did with the state's fixation with blackness. In this sense, many businesses may have been sacrificed at different points during the riots, but these sacrifices were not uniform or experienced only by Korean immigrant entrepreneurs.

My effort to critique the abandonment narrative is not just driven by an interest in empirical accuracy. Rather, I am more motivated by an interest in questioning the abandonment narrative because of how it has served as...