Mayssa Chehata Blog #2, Part 2: Twilight, Los Angeles 1992

I wanted to follow up my Blog #2 post with some additional comments and relate my thoughts back to the Twilight: Los Angeles film.

Our mental schema are constructed and have developed to look at the world and want to place people into groups and categories. This helps us make assumptions about people, which is often times easier than actually getting to know someone on a deeper level. This obviously perpetuates stereotypes and hinders social development. Thinking about this in the context of Twilight: Los Angeles and the LA riots, I think it is obvious that the LA community was very much formed along these lines. In the film, we particularly see the African American, Korean, and White communities at odds with each other. I can imagine that other groups were divided and experienced similar tensions between one another.

I thought it was really interesting in class when Professor Tanglao noted that it was not only African Americans involved in the riots, but also Caucasians, Latinos, Asians, pretty much everybody. This was interesting because it sort of blurred the lines of “us” vs. “them,” which in this case would have been African Americans versus Whites and Koreans, or possibly a better division would be lower class versus upper class. Professor also noted that this was not the case either, and people of all economic backgrounds took part. Nonetheless, I would imagine (and I caught myself doing this throughout the film) that African Americans participating in the riots were grouping together all “White” or all “Korean” people as one group. One looter made an interesting comment stating, “It’s not us looting the shops, that’s the Mexicans.” Again, this brings up that “us” and “them” mentality.

Another instance where this was brought up was in the Matt McDaniel film, where he discusses with rappers (before the riots occurred) about their subject matter, and focuses on how the phrase “Fuck the Police” came about and the rappers’ relationships with the police. One rapper made the comment that, “All police ain’t bad police, just like 90 percent of them. And we’re talking about that 90 percent.” So here again, we see a psychological division (done mentally, and perpetuated physically in the form of uniforms and behavior of policemen), a categorization, and a stereotyping. This case is not in racial terms but in terms of profession.

Another comment I wanted to add from today’s class discussion was a question brought up (I believe by Caio) at one point asking Does this still happen today? And the answer to that is, does what part of the LA riots still happen today. I think you can break down the entire situation into many pieces. For example, you could say:

1.     Does racial profiling in the justice system still happen today? I would say yes.

2.     Are trials sometimes mishandled due to overzealous media coverage? Yes.

3.     Are trials sometimes mishandled due to racial profiling? Yes.

However, Professor Tanglao responded to this stating, but do we have the riots? And this is very important. I thought a lot about the Treyvon Martin case while watching this movie and reflecting on the LA riots and their context in today’s society. While there was a backlash to what happened, there was nothing to the extent of the backlash of what happened after the Rodney King beating. And this got me thinking about power, and hegemony, and society. Has the hegemony in American society grown so much that we no longer stand up for ourselves?

This then got me thinking about the Occupy Wall Street movement. That was a backlash to a social injustice that was going on, but again, nothing like the LA Riots. This is not to say that I am in favor of un-peaceful protest, I absolutely am not, but I just wonder about what has changed since 1992 that we don’t see that kind of backlash to social injustice anymore. You could say that OWS was one of the largest social movements of our generation, and the injustice it was addressing (economic injustice) was HUGE and affected millions of people, but it still was, in my open, kept at a slight murmur (maybe at sometimes a whisper, but usually not even that) since it first got started.

Sorry for writing such long winded posts, but I’m interested in what everyone else thinks about how society today differs from that of 1992, that we don’t see as immense of responses to social injustices.