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Introduction Los Angeles, 1992. Opportunity was in the air, though it hardly appeared that way. The air itself was pungent with smoke; South Central was charred and skeletal after the riots of late April and early May, its sprawling but meager insides exposed block after block, intersection by intersection. But the shock had its benefits, as shocks always do. The truth was out. The injustice and imbalance that had long defined black communities burst the confines of gray statistics and became vivid photos and pitched voices that the country and the whole world could see and hear for days on end. The fact that this late-­ century discontent had erupted in L.A., a city romanticized for its opportunity and lack of urban stagnation relative to other big American cities, made the shock of post-­ riot truth that much more potent. At the same time, it made the prospect of change in black places more real. That’s how I saw it at the time. Like many people, I was angry at the not-­ guilty verdict of the Rodney King trial that had touched off the rioting , saddened by watching old childhood haunts cowed and desecrated by a week of looting and fire. But just beneath these feelings, I was thrilled. Here was a chance to expand the record, to deepen and change the story; here was my chance to raise my own voice and make a difference I didn’t know I could make because I had frankly never known how. In 1992, though I had been writing for a small monthly black newsmagazine called Accent L.A. for years, I didn’t really have a vocation. I cobbled together a living as a high school substitute and night-­ school teacher, the liberal-­ arts graduate’s version of slacking. I also had a degree in theater and dreamt of being on a bigger stage of some kind but had settled into living in the wings. In L.A., living in the wings—in the permanent ether of potential, as I say later in this book—is very easy to do. Then the riots thrust me into moment. I joined the Los Angeles Times as a beat reporter covering the predominantly black, southwest part of the city, otherwise known as the Crenshaw district. Though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I set out to do something different—combine old-­ fashioned black advocacy with a point of view that was more intimate and participatory than I had been used to reading. The riots had broken black issues out of a glass case where they had been visible, but coiled and silent; I wanted to break out of the journalistic narrative of black people that was earnest but formulaic, almost like war reporting. This narrative had themes and issues but no individuals, only figures whose triumphs or tragedies (rarely anything xx introduction in between) were used to illustrate the nature and depth of this crisis or that bit of progress. It was as if writers felt that focusing too much on black people would trivialize or distract from the “bigger picture” (the slavery question, the race issue, the color line) that have always had a life and a resonance much greater than our own. I believed wholeheartedly in the bigger picture, but I thought it needed balance. So I wanted to marry the crucial narrative of black justice to an equally crucial examination of how living the justice narrative for so long (it has never resolved) has shaped black people as people. I wanted to describe how all the ongoing battles for equality and acceptance, from affirmative action to public school and police reform, have influenced who we are, what we expect from the world, how we shop for shoes, how we operate daily in this social experiment called America in which blacks are still the primary guinea pigs, despite modern arguments that blackness is passé and irrelevant (or if it actually isn’t irrelevant, the argument goes, it should be). I wanted to ponder aloud questions like: In the amorphous but still oppressive racial atmosphere of the late twentieth and early twenty-­ first century, who are we? How are we feeling? What is the line between the battle and us? What kind of American is it possible for us to be? I am not saying that race is destiny. But there’s no question that being black still shapes the arc of an American life more distinctly, and...

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