Smoke Singals

SOMETIME DURING my junior year a woman was killed near my high school in Seattle. The yellow police tape around the convenience store was a familiar sight. With three to four crack houses regularly in operation literally across the street and many more in the neighboring blocks, it was a rare week when there wasn't some kind of police bust or drug/gang-related violence in the area.

The woman wasn't the first to die from the crossfire in the Central District and no article about the incident appeared in the newspaper the next day. A few weeks later, I was watching the news when they went to commercial with a teaser that said something like, "community shaken by drive-by shooting of child." I remember saying to my mother, "I bet the kid's white." I was right.

A white victim in the ghetto was tragedy, a Black victim was normal.

The Central District has never been the safest neighborhood in Seattle, but when members of the Crips and Bloods moved up from Los Angeles to join wannabe gangs already in existence, the resulting gang war increased violence in the neighborhood dramatically.

The police responded, in part, by frequent "checks" of cars whose inhabitants met the gang members profile. "Black, young and male" covered a lot of the students at my school, however--the ones going to Brown University no less than the one that were members of the Black Gangster Disciples.

It finally made the front page when they stopped a car containing the daughter of the coach of the Seattle SuperSonics.

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE in the country, the news from Los Angeles saddened me. It neither shocked nor surprised me, however, and I was once again amazed at how little white, suburban, comfortable America seems in touch the reality of the inner cities.

We are shocked at this sudden eruption of violence in the land of opportunity. Yes, the Rodney King verdict was an affront to decency, but we must hold the laws of this country sacred, say our leaders. It is only the lawless rabble that are rioting, using the protests as an excuse to plunder the city, they say. Upstanding citizens of all races know that we are a nation of justice, they say. Los Angeles is an aberration, easily fixed by sending in the National Guard.

Los Angeles is not that different from New York, however, or from Boston, Miami or even Seattle. As the clean-up begins, we should not ask "why did it happen?" but "why didn't it happen before?" The King verdict was only one match among hundreds, lying on a very dry forest floor.

The problems of the inner cities have been ignored for years. Injustice in the courts and police stations is paralleled by the injustice in the economic and educational systems. Public schools receive progressively less money, fewer teachers and minimal community support while they face overcrowded classrooms made up of impoverished illiterate children.

Low-cost health care is only a myth tossed around by politicians running for reelection. There are countries in Africa and Asia with lower infant mortality rates than those of some American cities. Job opportunities out-side of the gangs are slim to nonexistent. Meanwhile, inner-city residents are expected to respect a police force that only comes into the neighborhood to arrest someone, and to have faith in a system that works against them.

Rapper Ice T was asked on National public Radio on May 1 if his controversial lyrics, like those in "Cop Killer," helped to incite the violence in his neighborhood of South Central L.A. He responded that he had been trying to warn people and that the events happening now were all things he had talked about in his songs. People think it is only a few people who feel this kind of anger, said Ice T.

"Anyone who is surprised by [the protests], who didn't expect so many people to be angry--it's your fault," he said.

When the interviewer asked reprovingly if the destruction of the neighborhood and the violence didn't worry him, Ice T replied "Isn't that how revolutions start? It's going down, it's going down."

FORTUNATELY, we have leaders who know what to do when faced with a popular uprising--send in troops. Of course, law and order need to be restored. But "sending in the cops" is too often the only response of middle class America to the inner-city crisis.

Is it racism that allows our society to expect the African-American inner-city community to be passive about the continual abuse of power by the police? Or are we merely too complacent to look beyond the barded wire encircling the camp?

The sudden concern evinced by the White House over the problems of the inner city is hypocritical from an administration that has spent over a decade ignoring them. Congress too is culpable.

City governments have had to struggle to come up with solutions on their own. Some have dealt better than others, but nationwide denial of inner-city problems has led to a perversion of priorities.

The flames finally rose high enough to be seen over the ghetto wall. Why did no one see the smoke?

Lori E. Smith '93-'94 graduated from Seattle's Garfield High School in 1989.