I’m finishing up a deadline and away from the computer for most of the day. In the meantime, I’ve got two interesting things for you to chew on, both from the LA Times, both relating to race—and misconceptions.
But before we go to the stories…..as I mentioned in the comments section, tonight between 7 p.m. and 7:30 I’ll be on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA on KCRW, 89.9. By Wednesday morning you should be able to find it online.
Okay, back to the issues:
The first has to do with an Op Ed by Gregory Rodriguez that points to a study that came out of UC Irvine last week. Rather than explain the issue I’ll let Rodriguez speak for himself:
Get this: A new study by three UC Irvine criminologists has concluded that Los Angeles is not on the brink of a major interracial crime wave. Surprised? That’s understandable. Because for the last several years, the media have been increasingly fixated on the specter of black-versus-brown violence.
Last January, a CNN anchorwoman asked a visibly perturbed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa whether Los Angeles was “in the middle of a race war.” That same month, this newspaper published an opinion piece claiming that “Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods” was an “increasingly common trend.”
The study in question is by UCI criminologists John Hipp, George Tita and Lindsay Boggess. The three researchers took six years of LAPD crime data and analyzed all the aggravated assault, robbery and homicide cases between 2000 and 2006 in LAPD’s South Bureau. Then they looked at what percentage of the crimes were black on back, brown on black, brown on brown, black on brown… or some other racial match up. After that, the researchers compared their figures against 2000 Census data, and analyzed the probability in various neighborhoods of blacks and browns continually running into each other. Finally, they drew some conclusions.
The results were that “blacks are about 500% more likely to assault a fellow black than a Latino and about 650% more likely to murder a fellow black.”
I don’t know academics Hipp and Boggess, but I do know George Tita and can guarantee that he’s quite a smart cookie who has a history for innovative but extremely solid research.
Yes, there are assuredly some serious racial conflicts in prison and in some Los Angeles neighborhoods. But, the overall problem is not of a magnitude that the media would have us believe.
Among the questions Rodriguez asks in his essay is why—if there is no black/brown race war about to explode in the city—does the media, including the LA Times, persist in saying that there is?
And just to get you thinking further, here are some additional figures on the Black/Brown situation nationwide.
Plus here’s what Jill Leovy, LA Times Murder Blog maven, wrote about the issue when the report first came out.
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The second issue worth checking out can be found in an Op Ed in this morning’s Times by a UC San Diego professor named Tomás R. Jiménez
. He writes that when we talk about the education gap in American schools, with African American and Latino kids on one side of the gap, white kids on the other, we tend to view the whole thing through the lens of race. But Jimenez insists that with Latinos, it’s less a race-based gap than it is an assimilation-based gap.
When it comes to Latinos and education, what we’re seeing is an assimilation gap. The disparity in academic achievement between whites and blacks is the complicated result of more than 400 years of discrimination by one racial group against another, so it makes sense to describe this gap as racial. The problem with describing Latino achievement in the same terms is that it attributes to race certain facts and trends that are more easily, and more accurately, explained in other ways.
There’s a lot more, so take a look.
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PS: Back tomorrow with reports from the Homeboy opening and more.
“A new study by three UC Irvine criminologists has concluded that Los Angeles is not on the brink of a major interracial crime wave.â€Â
I guess these academic geniuses didn’t bother to take the 30 minute drive from the (White/Asian) UC Irvine to the gang infested parts of Los Angeles to actually talk with the people that they are studying.
But if they had taken the time to do their homework and fieldwork instead of just crunching ridicules statistics, they might have discovered that there is tremendous amount of racial tension and animosity between Blacks and Hispanics.
This racial tension has been exacerbated over that last 20 years by several factors:
1) Unabated influx of illegal Hispanic aliens.
2) High birth rate of Hispanics.
This invasion has caused many blacks to view Hispanics with disdain as their neighborhoods, jobs and schools became dominated by Hispanics. The prisons are a bell-weather for this animosity, where it the Blacks and Hispanics are often segregated from each other to reduce violence and assaults.
What their ridiculous study fails to understand is that the interracial violence is very real in Los Angeles as illustrated in the Jan 16, 2007 New York Times —
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/us/17race.html?pagewanted=print
When I read the story by Gregory Rodriguez of the L.A. times my first thought was, Jill Leovy is going to be one mad lady, since she wrote this story first.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/homicidereport/2007/03/marchers_protes.html
Pokey you missed a key point in the story by Gregory Rodriguez, gang-members are NOT the representatives or spokesman for the Latino community. Yes the prisons are segregated by race (including white prison gangs) and the race riots in prisons spread to the street gangs, but I would not use criminals as the basis for collecting data about the rest of society.
Do we base the criminal acts of white prison gangs such the Aryan Brotherhood or Nazi Low Riders as data or examples to draw conclusions about the feelings or opinions of the rest of white America?
“In March 1999, in Lancaster, California, two reputed members of the Nazi Low Riders (NLR), a vicious neo-Nazi skinhead prison and street gang, attacked an African-American Wal-Mart employee with a hammer. The two, Shaun Broderick and Christopher Crawford, were charged with attempted murder and two counts of assault. This was not an isolated incident — NLR members have committed a number of violent racially motivated attacks in Lancaster.â€Â
http://www.adl.org/issue_combating_hate/nazi_low_riders.asp
The example you gave about prisoners being segregated can be applied to whites as well, in prison and out of prison, all one needs to do is look at our communities as a whole, how do you think a group of six young blacks would be received at a restaurant in Irvine. I actually saw this happen in Irvine the racism was so obvious you could cut the racism with a Dave & Buster’s steak knife. I would like see the three UC Irvine criminologists invite a group of six young blacks around Irvine and take notes about how the blacks are received and accepted at different places in White/Asian Irvine.
If I can remember correctly there was a story way back in time about some white kids who tied hangman’s nooses in an oak tree in a small southern town. And the whites in town were complaining because black activists portrayed the whole town as good ole’ boy white racists.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070920/ap_on_re_us/jena_six_protest_4
“Many white residents of Jena also expressed anger at the way news organizations portrayed this town of 3,000 people. I believe in people standing up for what’s right,” said resident Ricky Coleman, 46, who is white. What bothers me is this town being labeled racist. I’m not racist.â€Â
Good call LA Res, I meant to link to Jill’s article last night, but I forgot. She’s got a better ‘graphic anyway.
Thanks for the reminder.
I have to agree with Pokey: When I hear some academics in Irvine (which has very few Hispasnics or blacks, their ethnic battles have been Asians and Asian Indians supplanting whites, along with their cultural institutions: huge Buddhist and some Hindu temples replacing churches, etc.) giving opinions based on crunching numbers, I have to laugh it off. What about the recent black-Latino violence at Hamilton High, which required the intervention of not only campus police but LAPD, and resulting in shutting down the school for the day? And at high schools around the city. Tables reserved for certain races isn’t just the case at Jena. And Janice Hahn and Mayor V very recently tried to calm tensions in her district, where young people get shot for accidentally crossing to the wrong “black” vs. “Latino” side of the street. I guess those people are “nominal” in termms of some UCI academic numbers. If they believe the UCI nonsense and ignore the reality on the street, they’ll be killed and become a relatively “nominal” statistic.
Calculating statistics is a naive approach to the problem. The issue is that these two groups are being polarized apart. The comparison of intra racial homicides is like tabulating rapes at work and relating it sexual discrimination.
My point is that the racial tensions (brown vs black) have been growing over the last 20 years and has recently erupted (as Maggie mentioned) in schools and prisons.
It seems to be getting worse – Not better.
The research is the closest Ive seen to the truth.
For those that say that racial issues between blacks and latinos started 20 years back, you have no real gasp, inside, or competent knowledge of the discrimation that was occurring from blacks toward latinos in the lates 50s to the 1960s.
Pokey, your statements is probably the most saddest stereotypical of all views I’ve heard.
I would go into lecturing all of you on gang issues, but its a waste of my time and energy.
Poplock, perhaps I live in the sheltered small world, they call Orange County, but I went to school in downtown Los Angeles when it was mostly black and latino in the early 70’s. I had two Hispanic roommates and spent quite a bit of time in East LA with them, and they in my neighborhood.
Since that period, I have noticed that the blacks have felt displaces by the new immigrants. I plead ignorance about the zoot suit era of the 40’s and 50’s and what it was like.
From my viewpoint, I have been very surprised at the increased racial animosity among some of the blacks that I have encountered to Hispanics.
I have not found Hispanics to convey the same thing about blacks. Certainly there are millions of exceptions, my Hispanic God Daughter dated a black man for more than a year and mixed marriages are very common.
So you think it is getting better (Poplock????)
I was surprised to read this morning’s paper as well. Clearly, this is a much more complicated situation than these numbers reveal. I teach at Jefferson High School and make a giant effort to discuss black/brown racial tension. I watch black students get hated on by other black students for hanging out with brown kids. I see brown and black students making babies together (hmmm, other problems with this example). I hear brown students make remarks about lazy black people. I hear black students make remarks about immigrants destroying our country. Almost every Friday night I watch the brown/black football team lose games together. Ha.
So, I just do not buy all of this recent publicity. There is indeed conflict between folks struggling over the crumbs. I just showed my students “Walkout” and “The Children’s March” to begin the dialogue for the year. These researchers need to spend a day in the hood.
Celeste, your radio appearance hasn’t made it up yet. I’m interested in hearing whether your voice is sweet like your heart or whiney like a liberal–or a combination, maybe called swiney.
Hi Woody, I’ve got a more direct link up now. I did the interview from the Homeboy building, which was a somewhat crazy environment, so I was a tad more scattered sounding than I’d have liked. Still Warren is a sweetie, so I’m always happy to do his show.
Ms. Meff – The research numbers are strictly addressing gang violence – Murder. Your comparing apples and oranges.
In 1970s, I remember standing at the local grocery store line more than once and blacks cutting in front of my mother and saying, “what bitch?” What is a mother holding three boys ages 1 through 6 going to do? Let black people try that number these days….
Back in my elementary school days, I dont remember a day without fighting a handful of chicken shit black boys…. I dont regret cracking their heads in two.
Nevertheless, I was one of the few fortunate that had good black friends from outstanding families. This taught me the best lesson in life – there is good in every culture and race.
My father tells me blacks were a lot worst toward latinos in the late 50s and 60s. He dropped out of High School over racial issues.