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5 Feel the Rage A Personal Remembrance of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising (I have chosen here to preserve the perspective from which this essay was originally written on May 3, 1992, just on the heels of the Los Angeles uprising , which began April 29, 1992. I was a resident of Los Angeles at that time, attending graduate school at UCLA. The piece was published a few weeks later in a small African American progressive Christian newsletter in the San Francisco Bay Area.) Even as I begin the process of putting pen to paper, something about this project feels hopelessly anachronistic, out of sync with time. As a people, African Americans are told almost daily by the government and the media of the “progress” we have made. We are reminded on a regular basis (as if someone were trying to convince us) of how much better off we are now than we were some thirty years ago. However, the events of the several days following the announcement of the verdict in the Rodney King case tell quite a different story. These events expose such assertions of “progress” as the same dangerous rhetoric being used at this historical moment to undergird the political right’s ridiculous claims of “reverse discrimination” and to dismantle important strategies for achieving equality like affirmative action. Today (Sunday, May 3, 1992) I heard Congresswoman Maxine Waters deliver an invigorating speech at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. In that speech, she outlined the complex of social and economic inequities leading up to the eruption of violence following the verdict. Her speech was so similar in tone, critique, and content to statements made by Dr. Martin 143 Luther King Jr. following the Watts “riots” of twenty-seven years ago, that for a moment I almost thought the congregation had been transported back in time. In the media, we saw some racially motivated violence (a thought that the media has been reticent to address) against whites by blacks, violence borne out of frustration. We witnessed burning and looting in the streets of Los Angeles, which when televised bore an uncanny resemblance to the earlier Watts rebellion as well. So, while we are often inclined toward progressive models for understanding history, “progress” for African Americans has always been somewhat of an illusion. The story of our history resembles more the impossible fate of the legendary king of Corinth, Sisyphus, who is doomed for eternity to roll the stone up the mountain even though it inevitably rolls back down on him. But history is not what I want to address in this essay. Rather, I want to turn our attention for a moment to the anger, rage, frustration, disenfranchisement, hopelessness, and injustice that gave rise to the violence we all witnessed at the close of April. In the media, as in everyday discourse with people, we have heard those who participated in the LA rebellion referred to as “thugs,” “hoodlums,” “vandals,” “freaks,” “murderers,” “gang-type individuals” (my personal favorite ), and a host of other derogatory appellations. We have heard people say that violence and destruction are not the “right” ways to respond to the verdict. We have heard people say that they are ruining “their own neighborhoods .” And, perhaps worst of all, we have heard this rebellion referred to as “random violence.” Such statements dramatize the vast difference between the way that the “haves” and the “have-nots” perceive the world and their positions in it. Let us be clear: anger is an appropriate response to the verdict in the Rodney King case. As a people, African Americans have never gotten their fair share in the United States, to be sure. Our homelands were looted when we were first brought to this country as slaves. Our dignity and humanity were further stolen when we were counted as three-fifths human beings by the “founding fathers” in drafting the Constitution. Our labor was looted during slavery to build the legacy of a capitalist economy that continues to be reFEEL THE RAGE 144 [3.145.206.169] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08:01 GMT) sponsible for the wealth of so few and the destitution of so many in this country. A further violence was committed against African American people even after the Emancipation Proclamation, when we were violated once again by the rise of Jim and Jane Crow. We were looted of our promised forty acres and a mule, our reparations for slavery. After slavery, many of us were forced...

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