City of Quartz Vintage Books, £8.99 Reviewed by Jane Kelly IN THE BLACK ghetto of Southcentral Los Angeles, 70% of black men will have been involved with the criminal justice system before they are 35. Across the US more young black men are in prison than in college.
The insurrections in Los Angeles and across the US cites, sparked off by the obscene verdict in the Rodney Kina affair. has Ifted the id on tha enormous racial and class tension. feit especially in the inner cites in the But the revolts have deeper roots being paid for by the poor and under privileged. In the US, the richest country in the world, more than 25 milion people are on food vouchers. Without a welfare state the soup kitchens and vouchers catch only the most destitute and vulhorable - all 25 milion of them!
It is no coincidence that it was in LA, home of the Holywood dream, that these events started. Mike Davis' book City of Quartz, Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, recently published in paperback, examines ho corruption and racism of the notorious LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), led by Police Chief Jary Cates, and the nestory of the gangs, espocialy those in South.
Vietnam-style
In a chapter entitled 'The Hammer and the Rock' he describes how the LAPD use Vietnam style operations to bust drug offenders. In one opera. con arresang more black yout Gran at any time since the Watts rebellion , nos are notank y forced to 'Kiss the sidowak' of spreadeagled against police cruisers while officers chock their names against computerised files of gang members.There are 1,453 arrests... mostly for trivial offences like deinquent parking tickets or curfew violaions. Hundreds more, uncharged, have thei names and addreses entered into the olectronic gang roster for future survellance.
Vietnam molaphors proliferato. This is Vietnam here", says the chief of the District Attorney/s Drug Unit: the vel cong soroad i cur community says a local mayor. once the home of the LA Black Panther Party. With the Party leadership formed from g pang members, gang hostilties in the mil 1960s virtually coased, while black youth politicised under the influence of the Chil Rights movement and Maicolm X. forming patrols to monitor police abuse ano quaro the annual vatk festival, rather than trade narcolics in the streets of the area Socialist ideas But as in the rest of the USA, the Panthers' politicisation of blacks, as wel as Maicolm X's increasingly sociaist ideas, were beginning to endanger the state.
As elsewhere, the Black Panther leaders in LA were murdered, 'on the campus of UCLA by members of a rival nationalist group (which Panther veterans stit insist was actualy police instigatod)... Athough a general massacre of the Panther cadre", at their Southcentral HO, was narrowly averted by an angry community outpouring into the streets, the party was offectively destroyed:
Gang activity What took its place was a resurgenca of gang activity.
The recent events of Southcentral are the resul: a mixture of violent criminal activity against people and property in thei own neighbourhood, combined with a more poltical response of attacks on police stations, city halls and banks. But the lack of a radical leadership with a way forward, is a disaster Los Angeles was developed as a union-free town in competition with highty organised San Fransisco. Compared to that city, nothing about LA's geography makes it an ileal place for a huge city. viewer is ensnared in a complex, 7 Other chapters show the "Anglos', the white Los Angolenos, getting their residental areas de signated so that they couk (and still do) exclude Latino, home owners moving in Thus the exclusive areas of weath Ike Beverly Hills and Simi Valley (just city line, where the trial was hekl, also home to the Reagan Library) keep out any bu: tho white rich from buying homes of via violting.
Public space too is increasingly planned for the exclusive use of the wealthy. Fortress LA' Davis calls it.
Malls and hotels provide 'safe". clean' environments, confident in the knowledge that the poor, the blacks, the Latinos, working in the sweat shop districts nearby, are shut out.
The divi'sd communites of LA provide the clarkest example of the raw odge ci captalism. Huge weath sted noxi to, bet not among. desperte poverty of the totally free market, without a wolare state, where to be "on welfare" is to be fed in soup kitchens and with food vouchers; a work where the ileology of treadom and 'choice' are bandiod about but work of the two-thirds, one-third work where the state has to place tanks on the streets to control its population.
The lesson for us is that this is the society proclaimed by Thatcher. The events there in the past weeks expose the reality of Thatcher's dream.