Reflections on "Straight Outta Compton"

jef costello

Thanks, maybe this should be a blog post, it deserves to be seen by more people.

Thanks to all of you for the supportive words.

Could one of the moderators enable me to create a blog? Thanks.

eugene

Hey thanks for writing this in a personalized sort of way, I feel like it's not done enough. Growing up in the A.V. (Lancaster-Palmdale, which is now a ghettoized suburb of L.A.) and dealing with the Los Angeles Sheriff Department, the ghetto birds...ect. ect., I can relate while acknowledging that the experiences are still different.

Hey Eugene,

Thanks for the feedback. I'd really like to hear of your experiences with the LA County Sheriffs in the high desert ghetto.

Which brings up my own experience with them:

My dad grew up at the heart of unincorporated East LA, near the corner of Whittier and Atlantic Boulevards. My grandmother lived in same house near that corner from 1932 until she died the year of the Rodney King Uprising. The whole area had been surrounded by factories and all adult males in my family once worked in either the tire plants (B.F. Goodrich and Uniroyal) or foundries that were within walking distance. With deindustrialization, the area went from a varied ethnic mix to the Latina/o majority it is today.

My cousins grew up in that house too, were half Chicano, and constantly suffered the random intimidation and racial profiling of the LA County Sheriffs. One cousin explained the dynamic: the LA County Jails were administered by the Sheriffs Department and new recruits to the force had to work the jails for a couple years as their initiation before working the streets. And in the jails, the deputies ran a brutal regime; any time they were outside their cells, prisoners had to keep both hands in the pockets of their jail pants. Removing one's hands was seen by the jailers as an "assault" and it resulted in a severe beating. Those rookie sheriffs who couldn't show their brutality didn't survive this rite of passage and never made it onto the streets. So the ones who did make it were conditioned by regularly administering beatings.

I found this out firsthand. In the mid-1980s my grandmother, aunt and all my cousins but one were out of town together. It was another one of those hot sweltering LA summer nights and me and my friends were going to hang out with my remaining cousin after he got off work. We arrived early, found a hidden key, and let ourselves into my grandmother's house and waited. We raided the refrigerator and were eating when we heard loud raps at the front door. I went to answer it and no sooner had I opened the door, than I was being dragged out, handcuffed and thrown on the hood of a squad car in the street. All I can remember is getting several fists in my mid-section and feeling my face slammed on the car's hood. My two friends, who came to the front of the house to check on the commotion, were soon face-down on squadcar hoods too. The sheriff's deputies were all pumped up on adrenaline and kept shouting questions at us, but without allowing us to respond.

The pig haranguing me did calm down and ask what we'd stolen. I responded "nothing," and said it was my grandma's house. He simply said "bullshit" and continued the yelling. Then, they paraded the next door neighbors by us, who'd apparently called the police. They were elderly and despite knowing me my entire life, didn't recognize me and told this to the cops. They'd yanked my ID out of my wallet and noticed I lived in LA proper, all the way on the other side of town. This confirmed to them that we were burglars. My friends, indignant at being beaten up and laid out on the hoods (there were a half dozen squadcars), mouthed off -- only to receive more punches to their backs and mid-sections.

In my mind, I was resigned that I was headed to the hellhole of Men's Central Jail, which once booked into could take at least another day to get booked out of. I dreaded the thought and was worried my friends weren't shutting up and were were getting battered. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my cousin innocently walking down the street. He had a look on his face of shock and surprise; he rushed too quickly towards us and was too inquisitive and got too close to the cops. Before he even realized it, he also was lying handcuffed on the hood of a squad car. He protested that he lived in the house and I was his cousin. Which was answered with "bullshit." Literally, about an hour later the pigs verified my cousin's address on his ID as being the house we were in front of. The next door neighbors eventually came back out, squinted at us, and recognized my cousin and finally me too, so after almost two and a half hours in handcuffs, the sheriff deputies let us go. The beating had quieted us all down somewhat, so we were completely taken off guard when the pigs continued threatening us, telling us they were going to fuck us up and kick our asses if they ever saw us again as they drove away.

Years later, when I learned the history of how the LA County Sheriffs had killed LA Times reporter Ruben Salazar and three others on August 29, 1970 as they ruthlessly broke up a march by 30,000 during the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War, it all became clear. That had happened just 2 miles west from where I was jacked up; my cousins related to me that harassment by LA County Sheriffs was a daily part of their existence. The U.S. was born in a bloodbath of genocidal conquest, which soon gave rise to a slave economy and a permanent police state. LA is among the places in the U.S. where the pigs most closely carry on this tradition of terrorizing with impunity. Thankfully, movements like Black Lives Matter have risen up to resist this; hopefully it will expand to include all of the working class.

Eugene,

Thanks for your excellent account and the link to the LA Times story about Section 8 raids. Very insightful and useful to see how the conditions of the class war affect us, especially the racial divisions in far-flung suburbs -- and exurbs.

eugene

I can validate what you said about LA Central. I was there on a petty drug charge and while I’ve been in many jails sense, that one sticks in the back of my mind and was actually a determining factor of why I moved out of LA county.

Being white, yet having so many fucked up interactions with pigs was one of the main reason I moved to Northern California. Like you, me and my friends did lots and lots of stupid shit, but when caught we were also often let go with a paternalistic warning by a white pig. Also, around 1984 I was cruising around LA with a carload of friends on a Saturday night. We were thinking of checking out some music along the Sunset Strip, but couldn't find anything. So we turned back and were headed east towards home when we made the mistake of turning off La Brea onto Hollywood Boulevard. Cruising was big then and cars were moving at a crawl. No sooner had we got stuck in the traffic, than a verbal beef was happening right in front of us between a car and a pickup truck. A guy riding in the bed of the pickup approached the passenger side window of the car to throw some punches, but wasn't able to do that because the driver reached out the window and put a pistol out in front of the windshield and shot him once -- hitting him in the leg. The guy hobbled back to the pickup, his friends dragged him in and they drove onto the sidewalk and raced down it to the next corner and turned off the boulevard. It was at that point that I decided I never wanted to live in LA again.

eugene

Once on the range, racial segregation was strictly enforced by both prisoners and the deps. ‘Woods” (for those that don’t know, ’whites” imprisoned in the southwest and west coast of the US are referred to as peckerwoods) were denied food because “our” wood rep (the only one the deps speak to) stayed in his bunk, instead of lining up for breakfast.

I once had the misfortune of doing a month at the rural jail of a Central Valley county (kinda like the old "honor rancho" of LA County) for a serious driving charge. I was hit with the whole "woods" thing as I walked in, since in the Central Valley it's common outside jails/prisons too. My naivety turned out to be a blessing, as I was put in a minimum security mixed worker dorm where there were no affiliations (gang, ethnic or otherwise). We delivered meals from the kitchen to the 10 or so other dorms, so I got to see the ethnic segregation. But the Sureños were segregated in remote pods in an adjacent maximum security building, were all chained together when they were moved (the rest of us just had individual hand and ankle shackles), and had to literally wear striped black and white jail clothes (the rest of us had clothes with colors indicating our dorm). Since all the dorms were in a square that enclosed the "yard," we could see all the other prisoners during exercise. Lots of 23-16 tattoos on whites, symbolizing W(hite)-P(ower) along with swastikas. There were lots of Norteños with their 14 tattoos, since this part of the Valley was their base, along with many Hmong gangsters but I don't know their broader affiliation. There were even a few Chinese Crips.

eugene

One thing for certain was that the LASD treated blacks and hispanic's as some sort of LA invasion, which was reflective of many whites in the valley. Not to dive too far off into this vast topic, but you referenced Mike Davis City of Quartz, (which was a pivotal book for me in helping deconstruct a lot of this shit), and the valley boom was the result of the white flight he talked about.

I finished reading City of Quartz while visiting family during an El Niño thunderstorm in 1992. I arrived in downtown LA at night and it was like a scene out of Blade Runner because the normally arid city was dripping wet and intersections flooded due to the heavy rain. I stayed with a relative who had become a yuppie and decided to move into a former warehouse, located east of downtown along the railroad tracks between the massive Civic Center complex and the LA River. The warehouse had been converted to "artists lofts" a decade before, but by this time was mostly full of stockbrokers, lawyers and other hip professionals. But since it had been a warehouse, the roof was leaking -- on me -- and I couldn't sleep. I woke up, parted the curtains and looked out the window. And what I saw directly across the street was the Metropolitan Detention Center Los Angeles (pictured above), the Post Modern federal prison that also happened to be on the cover of the copy of City of Quartz that I'd literally finished earlier that evening. It was surreal, to say the least.

eugene

The reason I bring this up is that it created in the shadow of the pseudo-liberal bastion of LA, one of the most racially tense environments one can think of outside of jim crow and one that I have never came close to experiencing elsewhere. I was young when rodney king happened but I can still remember the fear in the family, in the schools and elsewhere amongst integrated whites who literally perceived themselves as being under siege by “those people from LA”.

And I fully agree with you about LA -- and southern California more generally -- being a place of Jim Crow. As you move through the city, you see the demarcation lines separating the different ethnic and class enclaves. After the explosion last year in Ferguson, I read Colin Gordon's brilliant Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (with his amazing Mapping Decline website) and could see how this white flight and resegregation dynamic plays out when working class people of color also suburbanize -- into places like the Antelope Valley, as you mention, as well as Riverside County (where many of my Chicano cousins now live) and other hinterlands. In other places where these explosions have occurred, like Baltimore and Oakland, are on the other end of this process as they are the hollowed out inner-city cores that everyone went in flight from.

[youtube]_p7FcO2UJOo[/youtube]

My mixed feeling about LA had been inflamed a couple years before, in 1990, when a group of Bay Area labor activists showed a VHS video (at the beginning of the the YouTube clip above) with raw footage of the Justice for Janitors legally permitted march in LA's elite modern financial district of Century City getting brutally broken up by LAPD. For nearly a century LA was an "open shop" fortress, where the ruling class was hardly challenged (compared to the Bay Area, where there were general strikes in 1934 and 1946) and resistance was forced to take the form of urban riots in 1965 and 1992 (as MLK said, "riots are the voice of the unheard"). The May Day General Strike in 2006 showed that the Spanish-speaking proletariat could fight back. Hopefully class-based actions like those will fuse with the Black Lives Matter protests into broader class struggle resistance to the brutal austerity-driven conditions we are forced to live under.

Khawaga

Eugene and Hieronymous, I just wanted to say that I've found your respective posts really fascinating.

Thanks, comrade.

jef costello

There's a good book about the LAPD and how it was conceived of as a bastion of whiteness, the great white spot, and how the police department was run, specifically by Gates.
Unfortunately it was an ebook and I can't for the life of me remember it's name.

If you can find it, please forward it to us. Sounds like a really important book.

Darryl Gates was unique as a large city chief of police because in nearly every U.S. city the job is non-partisan. Gates took strong advocacy positions on political issues and endorsed candidates. Gates was a straight-up racist and in 1982 said:

Gates

Blacks might be more likely to die from chokeholds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do in "normal people."

Horne's Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s has excellent accounts of LA's history of racism and with roots in attacks on the white working class:

Gerald Horne

LA was an antiunion town as a direct result of the furor surrounding the bombing of the LA Times building in 1910, and this helped to ensure an ample supply of cheap white labor. The subsequent trial of labor and left advocates and the resultant growth of the right wing in Southern California was a dominant factor in shaping racism there; cheap white labor feared cheaper black labor, and captains of industry manipulated one against the other. Almost no blacks were employed in the city's booming tire and auto plants during the early 1930s. They were excluded from most unions, except the left-influenced Packing House Workers. The exclusion from the private sector led blacks to the public sector for jobs, but obstacles were there also; teaching jobs were generally not available. In Pasadena blacks were barred from public swimming pools, but in a uniquely LA twist, so were Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, and Mexicans. (p. 28)

Then he gets to the rise of reactionaries:

Gerald Horne

LA provided fertile territory for hte growth of the ultraright. As Christopher Rand put it, the city "has few of the Abolitionist memories that have helped move Northern consciences." LA may have been victim of what Rand has termed the "horizontality to the U.S migration camp," whereby northerners migrate to the San Francisco Bay Area and southerners to LA, thus bolstering racist and regressive sentiment; there was enormous rightward pressure on elected officials like President Lyndon Johnson and Governor Pat Brown. By 1965 Southern California generally had developed a well-deserved reputation for being a headquarters of the U.S. right [emphasis mine -- H.] The right in this region had developed a taste for violence that reached back at least to the racist Chinatown Massacre of 24 October 1871 that cost eighteen their lives. The image of gun-toting blacks in 1965 Watts was perceived by some ultrightists as a challenge that had to be met. Other militant rightists responded by deserting LA in droves for Orange County to the south, which played a role in boosting this populous region into the forefront of right-wing politics nationally. (p. 264)

After the Rodney King Rebellion in 1992, Orange County wasn't an escape hatch any more -- as witnessed by the 2012 uprising in Anaheim, home of Disneyland, after the police killing of an unarmed Latino man (Anaheim was also where there had been Klansman cops as far back as the 1920s). The new way out of LA was the high desert -- like what Eugene describes -- or moving due east along highway I-10 into San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, and even pushing as far out as the Moreno Valley and then south along 1-215 to the valley around the once remote farming town of Hemet. Others have followed the well-worn trail of racists down I-15 into northern San Diego County, to places like Fallbrook that was once the base for White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger. But John Birchers used to be all over Southern California. Don't know if their Cold War politics survived the times.

R Totale

By the way, thinking about Mike Davis and City of Quartz, has anyone read his new one? I've not, but it sounds good.

Having grown up in LA it's kinda like required reading, but haven't started it yet. But I've heard it's great!