The fire last time

What I wrote after L.A.'s Rodney King riots in 1992 hasn't aged well.

Sometimes when I go back to read something I wrote long ago I’m pleased to discover how good it was. Today wasn’t one of those times.

“Urban Solutions—Inner City Remedies Offer Novel Plans—And Hope, Experts Say” was the headline on a Page One piece I cowrote with David Wessel for the Wall Street Journal, where I was working when the acquittal of four police officers caught on video beating the crap out of a black man named Rodney King prompted riots in South Central Los Angeles. Our piece came out a few days later.

The most distressing thing I noticed about our story (for which I assign myself the lion’s share of the blame, as the lead reporter) is that almost none of it addressed the problem of police brutality against African Americans—which was, after all, the proximate cause of the riots (and also, of course, of the civil disturbances we’ve witnessed this past week).

The second most distressing thing was how our story downplayed the issue of racism:

Back in 1968, for instance, the report by the national commission on civil disorders chaired by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, stated unequivocally: "White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II." Today, a similar panel would probably conclude that racism is a contributor, but hardly the sole cause.

I don’t dispute that “white racism” is one among many problems facing low-income blacks, who were the focus of our story. Life is, after all, complicated. But why was poverty the focus of our story? The explosion we were writing about concerned a beating that the four cops, three of them white, visited on King. I marvel today that we were unable to see what was in front of our noses.

Some of the solutions we discussed—solutions to black poverty, not white racism—haven’t aged well. “Politicians and academics have quietly arrived at a consensus that welfare needs to focus more on getting recipients into jobs.” Yes, that consensus did exist. The result was a 1996 law, passed under a Democratic president, that eliminated “welfare as we know it,” in Bill Clinton’s words, and replaced it with a scaled-back program, Temporary Assistance For Needy Families, that imposed work requirements and, as the name suggests, limited sharply the duration of government assistance. For awhile it looked as though TANF really was moving people into work, but in retrospect the tech boom probably helped more than we recognized. When the Great Recession hit in 2007-9 the safety net’s shredding proved catastrophic for low-income African Americans.

(Even when the late-1990s economy was booming, it’s worth pointing out, Barbara Ehrenreich was able to demonstrate, in her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, that a low-wage job wasn’t remotely sufficient to secure basic necessities of life.)

The Democrats hoped that eliminating the New Deal-era Aid to Families With Dependent Children would end, or at least reduce, race-baiting by antigovernment Republicans. That turned out to be a fantasy. Instead, GOP officeholders reclassified as “welfare” a host of targeted means-tested programs, including, most ludicrously, Medicaid (as if any rational human being could possibly aspire to become so sick as to be judged a Medicaid Queen).

I’ll stand by some other ideas floated in the story, including expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (which subsequently happened under Clinton), the building of more low-income housing, national service, better transportation options to get low-income people to work, and an ROTC-style program for police departments to help kids pay for college and to bring in a broader (i.e., less white) range of recruits.

But I wince at this:

It's too soon to know if last week's riot in Los Angeles will polarize America or galvanize it. In the 1960s, such violence began the unraveling of an existing public consensus for civil rights and fighting poverty. But because the latest riot comes at a time when politicians and the press have been paying little attention to the urban poor, it may serve as a wake-up call. At the very least, Los Angeles put inner-city woes back onto the front pages.

The Rodney King riots neither polarized America nor galvanized it. We all just forgot about them as soon as we could. We did nothing to address the problem of racism, which was their cause, except perhaps to produce children whose wisdom and tolerance on matters of race exceeds by several degrees our own. We did a bit more to address urban poverty, which was not the riots’ cause; the poverty rate for African Americans is lower than it was in 1992. (It went down under Clinton, up under President George W. Bush, then down again under President Barack Obama. It’s almost certainly headed north again because of the present downturn.) But the poverty rate for African Americans is still more than twice that for whites.

I wouldn’t presume to write a piece today explaining in confident tones how best to address the subject of the current wave of riots. Electing a Democrat president would help; even prominent Republican officeholders have conceded, when pressed, that Donald Trump made racist statements while campaigning in 2016 and again afterwards while in office. And it’s undeniable that Trump has signaled, on Twitter and elsewhere, a bizarre affinity for various hate groups. Reinstating the police reforms initiated by Obama and discontinued by Trump would certainly help.

But these are, in this context, small gestures, and racism is a very big problem. So big that, 28 years ago, as a Wall Street Journal reporter, I dared not look it in the eye.