Why can't (minorities) Just Get Along?

Los Angeles is a flashpoint for racism, particularly between blacks and new, mostly illegal, immigrants. Some of you will likely read the article and comment about how awful guns are. The problem is much deeper than that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/us/17race.html?hp&ex=1169096400&en=20e6b200bebccf4f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16 ?- The Latino gang members were looking for a black person, any black person, to shoot, the police said, and they found one. Cheryl Green, perched near her scooter chatting with friends, was shot dead in a spray of bullets that left several other young people injured.

She was 14, an eighth grader who loved junk food and watching Court TV with her mother and had recently written a poem beginning: "I am black and beautiful. I wonder how I will be living in the future."

"I never thought something like this could happen here in L.A.," said her mother, Charlene Lovett, fighting tears.

Cheryl's killing last month, which the police said followed a confrontation between the gang members and a black man, stands out in a wave of bias-related attacks and incidents in a city that promotes its diversity as much as frets over it.

Ethnic and racial tension comes to Los Angeles as regularly as the Santa Ana winds. Race-related fights afflict school campuses and jails, and two major riots, in 1965 and 1992, are hardly forgotten. But civil rights advocates say that the violence grew at an alarming rate last year, continuing a trend of more Latino versus black confrontations and prompting street demonstrations and long discussions on talk-radio programs and in community meetings.

Much of the violence springs from rivalries between black and Latino gangs, especially in neighborhoods where the black population has been declining and the Latino population surging. A 14 percent increase in gang crime last year, at a time when overall violent crime was down, has been attributed in good measure to the interracial conflict.

This month, the authorities reported that crimes in the city motivated by racial, religious or sexual orientation discrimination had increased 34 percent in 2005 over the previous year. Statistics for 2006 have not yet been compiled.

Rabbi Allen Freehling, executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, a group created after the 1965 riots, said the recent growth in hate crimes reflected a failure by government and community leaders to prepare residents for socioeconomic changes in many neighborhoods, "and therefore people have a tendency to lash out, out of desperation."

In November, three Latino gang members received sentences of life in federal prison for crimes that included the murder of two black men ?- one waiting for a bus, another searching for a parking spot ?- and assaults on others in a conspiracy to intimidate black residents of a northeast Los Angeles neighborhood.

In another case, a twist on past racial dramas, 10 black youths, some of whom prosecutors say had connections to a gang, are on trial for what prosecutors contend was a racially motivated attack in neighboring Long Beach on three young white women who were visiting a haunted house on Halloween. Long Beach also experienced an increase in hate crimes in 2005.

But even with the alarm caused by the recent increase in bias crimes, Constance L. Rice, a veteran civil rights lawyer, said that, considering Los Angeles's diversity, race relations remained relatively calm and were even marked by many examples of groups getting along.

Still, in several corners of the city, particularly where poverty is high and demographics are shifting, tensions have been flaring.

"You don't find entire segments of the city against one another," Ms. Rice said, "but in the hot spots and areas of friction you find it is because the demographics are in transition and there is an assertion of power by one group or the other and you get friction."

In Harbor Gateway, the neighborhood where Cheryl Green was killed, tension had grown so severe that blacks and Latinos formed a dividing line on a street that both sides understood never to cross and a small market was unofficially declared off-limits to blacks. Ms. Lovett had warned her children not to go near the line, 206th Street, but Cheryl had ridden her scooter near it to talk to friends when she was shot.

Neighbors said the dominant 204th Street gang, which is Latino, had harassed blacks and Latinos alike and effectively kept the groups divided, though language and cultural differences also have contributed to segregation.

"We wave hello, but I cannot really talk to blacks because my English is limited and I don't want to mess with the gang," said Armando Lopez, speaking in Spanish, who lives near where Cheryl was shot.

A man who described himself as a former member of the 204th Street gang said black gang members had shot or assaulted Latinos, too, and explained the violence as a deadly tit-for-tat.