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Article Excerpt
THE CHANGING RACIAL LANDSCAPE OF LOS ANGELES EVIDENT BY THE 1990S EMERGED under the shadow of dramatic economic and social changes that were decades in the making. The deindustrialization of Los Angeles, most memorably the shutdown of Bethlehem Steel, marked the decline of what had seemed to be a stalwart industrial economy; it contributed to accelerating rates of unemployment in working-class communities and a massive reduction of the formerly unionized, mainly male, workforce (see, e.g., Oliver et al., 1993; Soja, 1996; Sassen, 1998). For example, between 1990 and 1992, over 600,000 jobs were lost in Los Angeles County, most of which were held by African-American men. The concurrent growth of the service sector and light manufacturing (such as the garment industry) offered work opportunities to over 2,800,000 Asian and Latino immigrants who had come to Los Angeles during the 1990s. (1) With the growth of these communities, Los Angeles became the first and largest U.S. city without a claim to a white majority population. This reality gave rise to a multiculturalist discourse of inclusion and anti-immigrant nativist fervor that was reflected in the greater militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, the demand that only English be spoken in schools and in government offices, and the 1994 passage of Proposition 187, which tried to deny undocumented immigrants access to health care and education. (2)
This article will explore the contradictory and paradoxical claims of the multiculturalist discourse in Los Angeles, which racially differentiated Asian and Latino immigrant populations from each other and from fully enfranchised citizens. These demographic and economic changes in Los Angeles were accompanied by representations of Los Angeles as a uniquely American space during the 1980s and 1990s. It is figured as emblematic of the achievement of wealth, progress, and inclusion in the U.S., but also as a space of (racialized) conflict and a dystopia of Third World encroachment. (3) An analysis of Los Angeles, which Saskia Sassen (2001) believes exemplifies a "global city," demonstrates the convergences and contradictions of neoliberal globalization; multiculturalist discourses that define nationalist cultural politics in the era of neoliberalism also contribute to this study. (4)
Multiculturalism emerged in the late 1980s and quickly became the dominant discourse to address the lack of racial diversity in media representations, curriculum, and in telling national history. Proponents argue that multiculturalist projects are a corrective to histories of racial repression that marginalize the cultural contributions of people of color, an erasure with ongoing, broad political implications. It is imagined as a continuation of the civil rights projects of the 1960s and 1970s, although this version is softer and easier to digest. Antiracist critics of multiculturalism, while agreeing that intervening in curriculums and emphasizing diversity are important, worry that multiculturalism represents "racism not as a form of institutional inequality, but as a matter of different mutually exclusive ways of life which must be preserved" (Davis, 1996: 45). Angela Davis (Ibid.) argues that women's rights, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, and native sovereignty rights are regarded as beyond the purview of multicultural politics because they are not part of "cultural traditions."
In this article, I argue that multiculturalism organizes difference and shapes political imperatives to erase material histories of oppression by discursively and politically situating the civil rights history of the 1960s as the "true" beginning of a U.S. (multicultural) nation. Legal scholars Rachel F. Moran (1998) and Kevin R. Johnson (1998) offer excellent analyses of how the gains of the civil rights movements are inadequate to address Latino conditions. The civil rights paradigm in Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny, they argue, privileges the particular African-American history of segregation. However, the redress offered by laws and policies based on the need to address segregation does not meet the needs of communities for whom segregation is not the primary locus of oppression:
The focus on corrective justice by the courts committed civil rights activists to a backward-looking perspective designed to rectify historical wrongs. This framework was not particularly suited to making prospective policy regarding race relations. In fact, the desired end state that came to be associated with Brown was one in which race would no longer matter in governmental decision-making (Moran, 1998: 137).
For Moran, civil rights paradigms that are fixated on a black/white binary force current practitioners into a "backward-looking perspective" that limits what is understood as racism in U.S. history. That perspective acknowledges only pre-civil rights histories of racial subjugation and elides post-1960s racism, even as it erases racism from history altogether by presenting the nation as beyond "race."
Multiculturalism claims to organize a pluralist model of a nation in place of a previously monocultural one, but it depends on nostalgia for a time past, an imagined lost topos of homogeneity based on shared national culture and history. Such nostalgia longs for a time when black and white were clearly distinguishable and it authorizes a re-centering of whiteness as redeemed citizens willing to embrace a multicultural present. The contradictions of the multicultural discourse are particularly visible in global cities such as Los Angeles, where "new" subjects make "new" claims. For Sassen (2001), the "global city" is a phenomenon of the late-20th-century global economy, which brings together transnational elites and migrant workers in a single urban social space, yet whose political, economic, and cultural connections defy the boundaries of a single nation-state:
The analysis presented here grounds its interpretation of the new politics made possible by globalization in a detailed understanding of the economics of globalization, and specifically in the centrality of place against a rhetorical and policy context where place is seen as neutralized by global communications and hypermobility of capital. We need to dissect the economics of globalization to understand whether a transnational politics can be centered in the new transnational economic geography. Second, I think that dissecting the economics of place in the global economy allows us to recover noncorporate components of economic globalization and to inquire about the possibility of a new type of transnational politics, a politics of those who lack power but now have "presence" (Sassen, 1998: xxi).
Sassen believes that migration and neoliberal economy are inextricably linked. Even if the articulation by "those who lack power but now have 'presence'" may not be legible within national (multi)culture and politics, their presence affects and shapes the social geography around them. The force of their presence calls to attention the limitations of "nation" and "citizen" in determining rights and belonging. Immigrant and migrant groups push against existing parameters to express their right to take up space, but dominant multiculturalism can only subsume or erase migrant articulations as "excess" to the nation.
In Los Angeles, immigrants represent the local, regional, and national collapse and its (differently located) citizens the cultural, economic, and political victims of that collapse. For example, African-American participation in the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 is popularly represented as proof of their "propensity" toward violence or "victimization" due to poverty and police violence. Despite general agreement that the property damage against Korean shopkeepers was a tragedy, African-American anger was legible against an illegible immigrant condition. Angela Davis, who argues that multicultural discourse has adopted a black-white construction that tends to "ignore everyone who does not fit," provides further insight. She notes that different groups of color are expected to occupy either the "black" or "white" space, that of the "oppressed" or the "oppressor." However, I see multicultural discourse as positioning "white" and "black" as citizens (of a different kind), whereas Koreans and Central Americans are immigrants with inconceivable claims to the nation.
Koreans and Central Americans do not evenly fit within the "black" or "white" racial position. The poverty and exploitation that many Central American participants endured were defined as beyond the purview of multiculturalism. This was done by drawing on a repertoire of representations of Latino "illegality," which does not easily fit into the status perceptions of being a "black" second-class citizen. (5) Also challenging was the sense of betrayal experienced by Korean shopkeepers. Lacking resonance with African American and Latino anger against Korean shopkeepers (who were therefore not "black") was the celebration of Asian Americans as "model minorities" and a sign of the success of multiculturalism. The absence of state protection for this population and the obviously segregated and unassimilated position of Korean shopkeepers did not fit into a racial position of being "white" or a "model minority." (6) State and local officials who encouraged Koreans and African Americans to "learn" about each other's cultures as a prophylactic against future violence again elided the structuring role that white racism, property inequity, and police violence played in the Korean and African-American conflict. Language used regarding the riots attempted to revert to a familiar terrain of black/white or black/Korean (as opposed to Korean/Latino or even Korean/white), even though the Latino and Korean immigrant populations involved in the riots constituted a majority, exposing the exploitative conditions migrants have suffered, in the context of ongoing, state-authorized violence against African-Americans. (7) Instead...
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