Earlier this year, I attended one of those sedate conferences writers get invited to every so often. I talked for an hour or so very politely about books, until the audience rose up in rebellion and told me to stop.
I'd been invited by USC to be on a panel discussing the topic of blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles literature. But the mostly student audience didn't want a writerly chat. They wanted to talk about the reality of a divided, angry city.
"There's certain parts of Watts and Compton where blacks can't go," a young black man told us, rising up from his seat to describe Latino gang members' slurs and threats.
A high school teacher rose to his feet, too, to talk about his Latino students' ignorance of African American history and the intolerance he often hears from the Spanish-speaking immigrants around him.
It hurts me deeply to hear of these things. I suppose, like a lot of people, I've been in a sort of denial about what's happening in my hometown.
Earlier this month, a few idiots with spray paint, and hate in their hearts, ran an African American family out of a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Duarte. It was the latest in a series of incidents in which suspected Latino gang members have committed crimes against black people.
These acts of intolerance are obviously the work of a tiny minority of delinquents. And yet they feed a larger malaise among African Americans. A lot of black people feel they're being crowded out and disrespected by the growing plurality of Latinos around them.
I know that mostly our two peoples are working, living in peace and even starting families together. And yet the seeds of a deeper intolerance lie all around us, ready to sprout.
More often than we care to admit, our people segregate themselves from blacks in schools and churches.
And how many of us Latinos have been at family gatherings and heard some obnoxious old uncle drop a racist remark? Generally speaking, do we have the courage to stand up and tell the guy to shut up? No. We're Latinos, and we don't like to make an "escándalo" if we can avoid it.
Still, it is those who publicly and privately speak ill of African Americans whom I address today, because the "escándalo" can't be put off any longer.
Listen up, raza. We're walking in the footsteps of giants. Black people have bled and been beaten in the name of equality, and without their sacrifice, we'd be 30 years behind where we are today.
