Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

As if in direct response to Salas’s prologue, the easy yet rigid category of “enemy” emerges once more to launch the opening act. Here, Stanley K. Sheinbaum—former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission—recounts getting a tip from friend and Congresswoman Maxine Waters about a series of gang truce meetings unfolding at Nickerson Gardens, a public park in Los Angeles.

Sheinbaum decides to have a look and walks directly into the midst of one of these massive gang meetings. With a couple hundred policemen anxiously ringing the park, Sheinbaum approaches the gang members and engages them in direct conversation. This act of intended diplomacy is promptly regarded as an act of betrayal by the rank and file in the police department, who promptly send Sheinbaum a letter complaining, “‘You went in and talked to our enemy’” (14).

Sheinbaum bristles at this perceived narrow-mindedness, seeing his détente as a unique “shot I had at talking to these curious people about whom I know nothing and I wanna learn” (14-15). He is quick to claim he has fought “for what’s right for the cops” and also that, in a vital sense, police officers and gang members are on the same side: “this city,” he declares, “has abused both sides. The city has abused the cops” (15). In this light, perhaps there simply are no sides. For Sheinbaum, it makes little sense when the police force asks, “‘So which side are you on?’ […] my answer was ‘Why do I have to be on a side?’” (15). It is a question that remains urgent and unanswered: “Why do I have to be on a side? There’s a problem here” (15).

The title of this section is a somewhat paternalistic reference to the gang members Sheinbaum mingles with during a gang truce meeting on which the police force has descended en masse (14).

Similar to Rudy Salas, Sr., only with greater and more graphic detail, is the account of Michael Zinzun, ex-Black Panther and anti-police brutality activist. Zinzun tells of the night in his neighborhood when an episode of spontaneous and excessive police brutality cost him his vision in one eye. Responding, with neighbors, to the sight of the police “beatin’ the shit out of” a handcuffed “brother,” Zinzun became part of a crowd on whom the police turned as if fending off a riot, assaulting bystanders with mace and nightsticks (16). Zinzun’s account of having his eye smashed in with a flashlight, and his vision permanently lost, is especially unsettling. But there is uplift to be found in his response.

Using the $1.2 million dollars the city paid him as settlement for the damage to his eye, Zinzun devotes his energies “to further the struggle” against an epidemic of police brutality (19-20). He has done it wisely, patiently, and programmatically, seeking incremental, institutional changes; coordinated mobilization; and successfully bringing reckless officers to trial and eventual dismissal from the police force. This has proved its own reward. As Zinzun makes clear, “I ain’t got no big Cadillac, I ain’t got no gold […] What we do have is an opportunity to keep struggling and to do research and to organize” (20). It is clear that Zinzun draws inspiration from a long historical view of this “struggle” by the fact that he was a member of the Black Panther Party, whose banner continues to hang prominently in his office, along with the grisly snapshots of latter-day victims of police brutality.

The title of this section refers to Zinzun’s experience getting Maced by the police, after having been drawn out into the streets, like his neighbors, in his “nightclothes” (17).

Presenting a very different voice, one removed from the fray by geography, by race, and by social status, Jason Sanford tells of life in affluent, white Santa Barbara, where racial divisions (in his youth) had yet to ruffle feathers. “Who’s they?” Sanford asks at the outset, a simple but profound question which will re-emerge directly and indirectly throughout the remainder of the play (21). It’s “interesting,” he finds, because “the they” in question is different for someone raised in Santa Barbara—where “You see Mexicans, you see some Chinese, but you don’t see blacks”—and someone brought up in L.A (21). The implication is that a black “they” is a different matter from a ‘white’ or even a ‘brown’ or a ‘yellow’ “they,” and Sanford’s experience bears this out.

Sanford’s own run-ins with the police, though numerous, have had a far different outcome than that of Rodney King, or those described by Salas and Zinzun, or in the many forthcoming accounts by people of color: regarded as an “all-American white boy” (a handsome tennis player) the worst they do is remonstrate him for not being smarter, cutting him slack along the way, trying to coach him along to the proper station he deserves by virtue of being white and well-to-do (22). Instead of beatings, he recalls, after one arrest, “driving back in the cop car and having a conversation about tennis with the cops” (22-23). Pondering this leniency, Sanford can only conclude, “I’m sure I’m seen by the police totally different than a black man”(23). Sanford’s is the first voice in what will become, in Act III, a chorus of “white privilege.”

The title of this section refers to Sanford’s emphasis on the varying definition of “they” (someone other than) according to one’s environment. The buried implication is that there is a felt necessity of having and defining “they” regardless of who the particular “they” may be.

This section is voiced by an Anonymous Young Man,and lends perspective on gang life in Los Angeles, detailing a generational divide within the black community and a loss of respect for, and by, the community’s “elders” (25). There is some tough talk about gang rivalry, fighting strategy and “reputation,” with our Anonymous Young Man boasting to acquaintances, “‘Man, I’m a one-man army’” (25). Yet, in the end, this former gang member confides, “I like oldies. My favorite song is by Atlantic Star. It’s called ‘Am I Dreamin’?’” (27). Although Smith never says a word about the song or its lyrics, they are significant. “Am I Dreamin?’” is a far cry from gangsta rap and street-hustling; it’s a wistful, R&B love song, about “dreamin’” of an “angel . . . to call mine” and the anxiety of uncertainty: “And I hope/ That you don’t run out and disappear/My love, I pray/That’s it’s not a hoax and it’s for real.” The song is a prayer for love and personal connection, and, by virtue of his affection for it, we are forced to view the gang member, who promotes shooting in “broad daylight,” in his own “broad daylight,” with humanity and common desires intact, a multiple-angle vision asking us whether what is corrupt lies within the man or within his circumstances.

The title of this section refers to shooting in “broad daylight” as a means of sowing confusion and, hence, improper identification (26).

This section focuses on LA-based writer Mike Davis. Davis—a well-known journalist, urban theorist, and historian—views these troubling events through the prism of the long civil rights movement. With nostalgia, he returns to the 1960s, a time of more fluid boundaries and opportunities and personal “freedom,” and, regrettably, much unfinished business. “For all the talk of the civil rights movement,” Davis observes, “we need it today like we need sunshine and […] fresh air” (28). Without it, present-day society offers only a stifling atmosphere destined to entrap and frustrate young people whose passions quite logically seek an outlet, and a violent one, if necessary. Davis remains optimistic, seeing the recent gang truce as the hopeful “sign of a generation that won’t commit suicide” (28-29); at the same time, he is wise to the racial diversity and multifarious racial tensions throughout the city, noting that the truce among inner-city blacks has been offset by “the worst Latino gang war in history” on the city’s East Side. It all adds up to “a city at war with its own children”—including even the “white middle class”— and “nobody’s gettin’ up and sayin’, ‘Look, this is an emergency’” (29).

Reflecting back on the promises of the civil rights movement, “that black kids can be surfers too,” Davis sees failure all around: instead of making equality and opportunity “available to everyone, [the] irony now is that even white privileged kids are losing these things” (30). Working-class Southern California has been effectively “destroyed,” “there is no freedom of movement or right of assembly for youth,” and now the “only permitted legal activity anymore is[…] being in a mall shopping” (31). This is especially bad news for inner-city blacks for whom the surfer/mall-rat lifestyle is a hard find; if Davis appears too lost in his own reveries to notice this here, he certainly has not neglected it elsewhere. Davis had already begun his career as a political activist and stern critic of economic and political inequality, and his book,City of Quartz (1990), highlights many of the tensions that would precipitate the L.A. riots.

The title of this section refers to a vanishing sense of freedom in Southern California, as defined by living one of two bohemian lifestyles: the surfer’s life on the coast, or in communes out in the desert (30-31).

The voice in this section is Theresa Allison, Founder of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC). She is the mother of gang truce architect Dewayne Holmes. Here, the “enemy” rears its ugly head again, this time in the form of “an unjust system” so bent on cowing the black population that it has been the “intention” of the police “to kill [Theresa Allison’s] son,” Dewayne Holmes (32, 37). In expressing this sentiment, Allison recounts the plight of inner-city mothers, whose children are caught in the cross-hairs of police deception, brutality, and face-saving cover-ups: dressing and presenting “like gang members” and shooting innocent victims (like her son, Tiny) repeatedly “to make it look like a drive-by shooting” (33); taking kids from one project and dropping them into “another gang zone and leave ‘em in there and let those guys kill ‘em and then say it’s a gang-related thing” (38); sentencing her son, Dewayne, “for a crime he did not do” (32); and taking twelve-year old kids and hitting “their heads against trees” and stomping them on the ground (39). The outcome is the rewarding of white police officers—a “big plaque—woman of the year!” for the officer who shot her son “Tiny” in the face—and the perfect vulnerability of black youth: “They’ve done it to my kid, they’ll do it to your kid. It’s the color, because we’re Black” (38). If this reads as a lengthy indictment of a racist “system,” it has also bred awareness and motivated Allison to a life of activism, a theme found consistently in Act One.

The title of this section refers to the odd weather on the night her son Tiny was killed by police, on the order of a divine message: “I told people, ‘Doesn’t this look like the crucifixion of Jesus?’ and they say, ‘You right’ […] It was lightning, no rain!” (34)

Famed scholar Cornel West comes in at the close of this Act to place the Rodney King events within a long history of social, political, and economic struggle. West supplies the overarching context of an impoverished patriarchal/capitalist system which thrives on commodification, objectification, and the profit motive—an attempt, for all and sundry, “to gain access to power and property and pleasure by any means you cayan” (41). West harnesses the old “frontier myth in America” and its gun-slinging vision of “machismo,” which sets out to protect its own women and reap vigilante justice upon the men of other races, and finds this problematic “racial reasoning” and its “machismo heroes” at work in both white and black communities, a “gangsterous orientation” with “a long history in black and white” (41-43).

Where Mike Davis lamented the failed promise of the civil rights movement, West does so as well, pointedly noting the erasure and disappearance of a “broad international,” if not universalist, “perspective” in which the roles of “people of color,” “progressive white persons,” and “whosoever will identify with poor people and working people” would be equally “acknowledged” and incorporated (46-47). In this vein, the Black Panther Party that West remembers (and Zinzun touts) “was not closing ranks, it was not just a kind of narrow black nationalism” but instead offered a “broad, all-embracing vision that people forget” (47). That vision has been done in not by black-white division so much as by a particular, economic subset of white power—climaxing with the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s—which preys on the disadvantaged of all races: “conservative forces, business classes, especially corporate elites […] reshaping society, primarily in their own interest” (47).

Collapsing scholarly distance with the call to activism, West seeks a middle ground between naiveté and amorality, testifying to the urgent need to reclaim “the broader possibilities of [human] beings engaging in interaction that accents our humanness, more than simply our, uh, our delusory foundations, race or gender or whatever” (45). The L.A. riots, seen from such a broad historical perspective, become their own “bloodstained banner” in the long-running struggle to topple these “delusory foundations” and replace them with a long-promised foundation of freedom.

The title of this section refers to the perpetual need to hoist the “bloodstained banner” of an ancient “black struggle” that has historically been “rooted in moral vision” while “acknowledging the fact that a power struggle will be fundamental for any change” (45).