ELW

In the April 2005 issue of KoreAm Journal, Dorothy Pirtle reflects on the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 in her article, It Was Never an Uprising. She writes about the racial tension, misunderstandings, and legacy of the Riots as well as her personal experience being African American and Korean American and living in the middle of it. Here’s an excerpt:

Activists were trying to say people looted, burned, beat, shot and carried on like they did because they were upset about our community’s gang violence, liquor stores, police brutality, substandard schools, joblessness.

It just did not add up for me. If our community was so messed up, why were people making it worse? To say that people destroyed what we shared in order to initiate a rebuilding of our community seemed like a way to cover things up, in hindsight, and make the Riots sound proactive.

Opportunism is what drove the looting. Hate fueled the burning and looting. Color lines were being redrawn.

I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone asked me to choose a side.

When I returned to my mostly black fifth-grade classroom at Baldwin Hills Elementary School a week after the Riots, kids wanted to know whether I sympathized with them or the Koreans. They wanted to see if I would choose my black father or my Korean mother. I had been asked this before. The Riots just gave people more fuel.