The Forbidden Zone For Blacks In 2007

I've heard of blacks being shot dead in "Forbidden Zones" on the south side of Chicago as well. They are usually formerly all black neighborhoods where nonblacks were welcomed with open arms. This is how they return the favor now.

The Forbidden Zone For Blacks In 2007

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, BlackNews.com Columnist

There’s no physical sign, barrier, or even a chalk line that marks the zone where a black can’t enter at the risk of grave harm. But the zone is there, and blacks know that if they enter it they can be beat, shot at, or killed. The twist is that the forbidden zone is not in a redneck, backwoods, and Deep South town during the rigid and violent Jim Crow segregation era. The bigger twist is that the Klan, Neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, and bikers didn’t establish the racially restrictive zone. Purported Latino gang members established it. The forbidden zone is in a small, mixed ethnic bedroom community in Los Angeles. The year is 2007, not 1947.

A black family that recently fled the community in fear for their lives bluntly told a reporter that they left because blacks there are scared to death. In the past year, the hate terror escalated to the point where blacks tell tormenting tales of being harried when they leave their homes, or their children walk to school. They say that they are forbidden to go into a park, and a convenience store.

This is not a bad case of racial paranoia run amok. Blacks have been taunted, harassed, beaten and shot at in this community. But the tragic murder of a 14-year-old black girl and the wounding of two other young blacks in the forbidden zone sparked anguish, rage, and finally drew some local media attention. The murder drew gasps of disbelieve that in America in 2007 in a big, Northern cosmopolitan city, with a Latino mayor, and that routinely back pats itself for its ethnic diversity, there is an entire area that blacks are banned from on pain of injury or death at the hands of other non-whites. And city officials seem powerless to do anything about it.

Though two reputed Latino gang members are charged with the teen’s murder, and were slapped with a hate crime charge, the arrest and the hate charge didn’t calm the jitters and fears of blacks that live there. Even after the arrests, a number of blacks still said that they planned to get out of the area as soon as they could.

Latino on black (and black on Latino) violence is hardly an aberration in Los Angeles (and other places). According to police reports, there have been more than a dozen murder attempts in other parts of Los Angeles by alleged Latino gang members on mostly young blacks that have no known gang involvement in the latter part of 2006. A Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission report on hate violence in 2005 found that overall Latinos committed nearly half of the hate attacks in the County, while blacks committed thirty percent of the hate attacks. But when it’s Latino and black violence, the figure for hate violence soars. Latinos and blacks committed the bulk of the racially motivated hate attacks against each other.

The easy explanation for the hate terror is that the perpetrators are bored, restless, disaffected, jobless, untutored, violence prone gang members, and the violence is a twisted response to racism and deprivation. The attacks no doubt are deliberately designed by the gang hate purveyors to send the message to blacks that this is our turf, and you’re an interloper. But despite arrests, police crackdowns, gang injunctions, assorted anti-violence marches and rallies, and community peace efforts, the black and Latino low intensity battle has shown no sign of abating.

Then there’s the vehemence of the racial hate. The dirty, and painful secret is that blacks and Latinos can be racist, maybe even more racist than whites, toward each other. It’s easy to see why. Many Latinos fail to understand the complexity and severity of the black experience. They frequently bash blacks for their poverty or type them as clowns, buffoons and crooks. Some routinely repeat the same vicious anti-black epithets as racist whites. The color complex reinforces the notion that blacks are a racial and competitive threat, and any distancing, ostracism, avoidance, and even violence is a rational response to keep blacks at arms length.

On the other side, some blacks feed the same myths and racial stereotypes, and bash Latinos as anti-black, and violence prone, gangsters that are a menace, as well as ethnic and economic competitors. The warped misconceptions and fears have so far trumped the loud calls and efforts by black and Latino activists and many residents for unity and peace.

The murder of a black teen, and the gradual dawning that racially motivated hate attacks are happening right under the noses of a slumbering, maybe indifferent public, and impotent city officials, in a modern-day city like Los Angeles, did touch a mild nerve of disgust and ignite faint demands for action. But that’s not nearly enough to erase the shame that in America in 2007 there is a zone in a big city that blacks can only enter at mortal peril. And that zone isn’t marked by a burning cross or guarded by men in menacing white sheets and hoods.

 

January 17, 2007
A City’s Violence Feeds on Black-Hispanic Rivalry
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

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.

“They shot a Mexican guy right around the corner from here and nobody protested or said anything,” said the man, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retaliation. He referred to neighborhood speculation that Cheryl’s killing was in retaliation for the killing of Arturo Mercado, a Latino shot to death in the neighborhood a week before Cheryl in what the police call an unexplained shooting.

The violence in that neighborhood and others has prompted a flurry of announcements by Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and police officials promising a renewed crackdown on gangs, particularly those responsible for hate-related crimes. Mr. Villaraigosa plans to meet Friday with Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, about expanding its assistance in investigating gang and hate-related violence; the agency has been working with the police on such investigations in the San Fernando Valley, where gang violence has increased the most.

Chief William J. Bratton has said the Police Department would soon issue a most-wanted list of the city’s 10 to 20 worst gangs, with those most active in hate crimes likely to land on it.

“It’s to say, ‘We’re coming after you,’ ” Mr. Bratton said.

A city-financed report by Ms. Rice released Friday said Los Angeles needed a “Marshall plan” to address gang violence in light of a growth in gang membership and a lack of a comprehensive strategy to curb the problem.

Despite the spike in hate crimes in 2005, the total number of bias-related incidents in Los Angeles, 333 in a city of 3.8 million people, was down from peaks in violent crime in the mid-1990s and just after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheryl Green’s killing particularly alarmed community and civil rights advocates because of her age and the indication that the neighborhood’s long history of racial violence was continuing. Two Latino gang members have been charged with murder in the case. With the district attorney having filed a formal allegation that the men were motivated by hate, they could be eligible for the death penalty or life in prison without parole if convicted.

Mr. Villaraigosa, the city’s first Latino mayor in over a century, was elected in 2005 in part on a promise of keeping peace among racial and ethnic groups. He attended a rally in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood Saturday, one of a few demonstrations calling for unity. He hugged Ms. Lovett and Beatriz Villa, the sister-in-law of Mr. Mercado, the Latino killed earlier.

“Our cultural and ethnic diversity are cornerstones of a strong L.A.,” the mayor said Friday, “and violent crime motivated by the victim’s skin color will not be tolerated.”

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an African-American syndicated columnist who plays host to the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, a weekly gathering in the Leimert Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles, said blacks complained that illegal Latin American immigrants were stealing jobs. Latinos, particularly newcomers unaccustomed to living among large numbers of African-Americans, in turn accuse blacks of criminal activity and harassing them.

“I think L.A. is a microcosm of what could happen in big cities in the future,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “When we have the kind of tension you see in L.A. in the schools, the workplace and now hate-crime violence, my great concern is this is a horrific view of what could happen in other cities.”

Ms. Lovett, Cheryl’s mother, said the family moved to Harbor Gateway six years ago to get away from a high-crime neighborhood in another part of Los Angeles. A relative of a black neighbor was shot by the gang a few years ago, she said, and recently she had begun looking for a safer area.

“I feel it is unfortunate my daughter had to be the sacrificial lamb,” she said. “But I just hope there is a change in this neighborhood

 

Oh gods...and I am going to L.A. n a couple of months. I have a tendency to wander around new cities I visit at random. you can do that in Canada, but not in the States.

 

Thanks for those articles Lex.

We've talked about the black and Mexican riff on this site and I've talked to some friends about it. [I've never liked the terms Latino and Hispanic because it seeks to group people and cultures based on nothing more than a shared language. Okay, I'm off my soap box now!]

Anyway, most of the issues I see are between Mexican and black people and most of the under currents are power based. Some black people feel that Mexicans are coming over here and displacing them/us and now because there are “new” people here, we've just gotten pushed back again. Some Mexicans feel as if we -black people- are standing between them and their place next “the top”.

Whatever the reasons for the problems that really are there, we'll never move forward without some communications. Sadly to say – I don't see that happening on too many fronts.

Again thanks Lex.

Aqua,
Just use good judgment no matter where you go. The States are not as bad as the media would have you believe. Bad things can and will happen but good judgment is your best friend!

 

So much for the "people of color" unity. Bull.

 

designer, blacks opened many doors for all the other minorities which they refuse to admit. They also consider us immigrants just like them and resist learning anything about our history in this country. Black school teachers have talked about the disruptions they cause in classrooms when topics discussing our achievements are in session. They routinely cause confrontations during celebrations for Martin Luther King and say he hasn't done shit for them. This is an excellent article below and I have another one to post later which points out how the city never really took this problem seriously. Blacks are routinely locked out of jobs in California and have sued and won a number of lawsuits. They hang flags outside of residential buildings to signal who's in charge and this should never be allowed, plus it's mainly taking place in former all black neighborhoods. They feel that since their population has surged past ours we should simply be pushed aside and removed from any position they desire. Even bus drivers have been threatened with violence so Mexicans can take their jobs. Trust me...these ill feelings are sweeping the entire country.

Longtime prejudices, not economic rivalry, fuel tensions.

By Tanya K. Hernandez, Tanya K. Hernandez is a professor of law at Rutgers University Law School.
January 7, 2007


THE ACRIMONIOUS relationship between Latinos and African Americans in Los Angeles is growing hard to ignore. Although last weekend's black-versus-Latino race riot at Chino state prison is unfortunately not an aberration, the Dec. 15 murder in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood of Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old African American, allegedly by members of a Latino gang, was shocking.

Yet there was nothing really new about it. Rather, the murder was a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods. Just last August, federal prosecutors convicted four Latino gang members of engaging in a six-year conspiracy to assault and murder African Americans in Highland Park. During the trial, prosecutors demonstrated that African American residents (with no gang ties at all) were being terrorized in an effort to force them out of a neighborhood now perceived as Latino.

For example, one African American resident was murdered by Latino gang members as he looked for a parking space near his Highland Park home. In another case, a woman was knocked off her bicycle and her husband was threatened with a box cutter by one of the defendants, who said, "You niggers have been here long enough."

At first blush, it may be mystifying why such animosity exists between two ethnic groups that share so many of the same socioeconomic deprivations. Over the years, the hostility has been explained as a natural reaction to competition for blue-collar jobs in a tight labor market, or as the result of turf battles and cultural disputes in changing neighborhoods. Others have suggested that perhaps Latinos have simply been adept at learning the U.S. lesson of anti-black racism, or that perhaps black Americans are resentful at having the benefits of the civil rights movement extended to Latinos.

Although there may be a degree of truth to some or all of these explanations, they are insufficient to explain the extremity of the ethnic violence.

Over the years, there's also been a tendency on the part of observers to blame the conflict more on African Americans (who are often portrayed as the aggressors) than on Latinos. But although it's certainly true that there's plenty of blame to go around, it's important not to ignore the effect of Latino culture and history in fueling the rift.

The fact is that racism — and anti-black racism in particular — is a pervasive and historically entrenched reality of life in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 90% of the approximately 10 million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean (by the French, Spanish and British, primarily), whereas only 4.6% were brought to the United States. By 1793, colonial Mexico had a population of 370,000 Africans (and descendants of Africans) — the largest concentration in all of Spanish America.

The legacy of the slave period in Latin America and the Caribbean is similar to that in the United States: Having lighter skin and European features increases the chances of socioeconomic opportunity, while having darker skin and African features severely limits social mobility.

White supremacy is deeply ingrained in Latin America and continues into the present. In Mexico, for instance, citizens of African descent (who are estimated to make up 1% of the population) report that they regularly experience racial harassment at the hands of local and state police, according to recent studies by Antonieta Gimeno, then of Mount Holyoke College, and Sagrario Cruz-Carretero of the University of Veracruz.

Mexican public discourse reflects the hostility toward blackness; consider such common phrases as "getting black" to denote getting angry, and "a supper of blacks" to describe a riotous gathering of people. Similarly, the word "black" is often used to mean "ugly." It is not surprising that Mexicans who have been surveyed indicate a disinclination to marry darker-skinned partners, as reported in a 2001 study by Bobby Vaughn, an anthropology professor at Notre Dame de Namur University.

Anti-black sentiment also manifests itself in Mexican politics. During the 2001 elections, for instance, Lazaro Cardenas, a candidate for governor of the state of Michoacan, is believed to have lost substantial support among voters for having an Afro Cuban wife. Even though Cardenas had great name recognition (as the grandson of Mexico's most popular president), he only won by 5 percentage points — largely because of the anti-black platform of his opponent, Alfredo Anaya, who said that "there is a great feeling that we want to be governed by our own race, by our own people."

Given this, it should not be surprising that migrants from Mexico and other areas of Latin America and the Caribbean arrive in the U.S. carrying the baggage of racism. Nor that this facet of Latino culture is in turn transmitted, to some degree, to younger generations along with all other manifestations of the culture.

The sociological concept of "social distance" measures the unease one ethnic or racial group has for interacting with another. Social science studies of Latino racial attitudes often indicate a preference for maintaining social distance from African Americans. And although the social distance level is largest for recent immigrants, more established communities of Latinos in the United States also show a marked social distance from African Americans.

For instance, in University of Houston sociologist Tatcho Mindiola's 2002 survey of 600 Latinos in Houston (two-thirds of whom were Mexican, the remainder Salvadoran and Colombian) and 600 African Americans, the African Americans had substantially more positive views of Latinos than Latinos had of African Americans. Although a slim majority of the U.S.-born Latinos used positive identifiers when describing African Americans, only a minority of the foreign-born Latinos did so. One typical foreign-born Latino respondent stated: "I just don't trust them…. The men, especially, all use drugs, and they all carry guns."

This same study found that 46% of Latino immigrants who lived in residential neighborhoods with African Americans reported almost no interaction with them. (It's interesting that they move in black neighborhoods feeling as they do.)

The social distance of Latinos from African Americans is consistently reflected in Latino responses to survey questions. In a 2000 study of residential segregation, Camille Zubrinsky Charles, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that Latinos were more likely to reject African Americans as neighbors than they were to reject members of other racial groups. In addition, in the 1999-2000 Lilly Survey of American Attitudes and Friendships, Latinos identified African Americans as their least desirable marriage partners, whereas African Americans proved to be more accepting of intermarriage with Latinos.

Ironically, African Americans, who are often depicted as being averse to coalition-building with Latinos, have repeatedly demonstrated in their survey responses that they feel less hostility toward Latinos than Latinos feel toward them.

Although some commentators have attributed the Latino hostility to African Americans to the stress of competition in the job market, a 1996 sociological study of racial group competition suggests otherwise. In a study of 477 Latinos from the 1992 Los Angeles County Social Survey, professors Lawrence Bobo, then of Harvard, and Vincent Hutchings of the University of Michigan found that underlying prejudices and existing animosities contribute to the perception that African Americans pose an economic threat — not the other way around.

It is certainly true that the acrimony between African Americans and Latinos cannot be resolved until both sides address their own unconscious biases about one another. But it would be a mistake to ignore the Latino side of the equation as some observers have done — particularly now, when the recent violence in Los Angeles has involved Latinos targeting peaceful African American citizens.

This conflict cannot be sloughed off as simply another generation of ethnic group competition in the United States (like the familiar rivalries between Irish, Italians and Jews in the early part of the last century). Rather, as the violence grows, the "diasporic" origins of the anti-black sentiment — the entrenched anti-black prejudice among Latinos that exists not just in the United States but across the Americas will need to be directly confronted.

 

Thanks Lex.

Trust me, I know what you are saying and it really is a far bigger problem than the media and many people want to believe.

I still have an issue with "Latino" as I know not all Spanish speaking cultures have many of the issues that come here from Mexico.
And this problem between blacks and many Mexicans plays into wishes of those powers that be that have be here long before the massive wave of illegals got the green light to come over.

It's also well known that the ranks of Neo-Nazis and the KKK have been on the decline but why expose yourself when you can get others to do it for you??

After all the Klan and Neo-Nazis were pawns too.

Great topic Lex.

 

To be honest, sometimes these Latinos, and Asians, can be more racist than whites. If i had a choice, i'd rather live in a white-majority neighborhood than a Mexican-majority neighborhood(hell, i did live in white-majority neighborhoods since i came here in '98). I purposely did no say "Latino" because i've lived with Puerto Ricans and Cubans and they're cool, for the most part. Blacks and Latinos get on fine in New York like crazy; same in Chicago and many big cities. It's in Cali that there is much madness and it's starting to spread into the South, slowly but surely.

I've never bought the whole "people of color unity" anyway so it does not surprise me. America is racist but i'd rather live here than in some South American country, word on that.

 

I agree for the most part and that's why I want to be clear on this issue which is more about Mexicans and their feelings about black people.

 

Cosmetic,
I believe that's what Lex was saying in her first post.
In many areas that were all black, Mexicans came in without any troubles from black people and once the numbers were on the Mexicans side then those very same black people got harassed to point of them fearing for their lives.

People are people and I think we all know that here but there really is an issue between a large number of Mexicans and black people.
Would I like to work it out?
Sure.
Can I do without their input?
No.

 

But what happens when the U.S becomes some south american Country?

Then what?

I suggest that Black people with the means and VISION start aquiring property in other Countries because our standard of living is UNDER ATTACK by the Elites that run this Country and it's politicians..

Illegal immigration is being used to wreck every aspect of the 'new deal' reforms of Roosevelt..

That's what all this shit is about..

Replacing Joe 6-pack with Jose half-pack..

Outsourcing and illegal immigration is the one-two KO combo they're using to destroy the U.S middle class..

This mofo won't be fit for goats in 5 years

 

In a matter of fact, California belonged to Mexico before it became part of the US

As cosmetic said already: History seems to repeat itself ...

 

Indeed we are not immigrants and were enslaved and used for "centuries".

 

Illegals are POURING into states THAT WERE NEVER PART OF MEXICO..

What about that??

 

There were blacks here in America way before slavery. In fact, the vast majority of blacks that were enslaved were indigenous to the Americas. It is falsely estimated even between Afrrican-American scholars that over 100 million slaves were taken from Africa and put over here. At that time is was logistically impossible to fit that many people on a ship, in that short of time in the roughest ocean(Atlantic) to transport them here. Check Moorish American history. I believe from my research that only 25% of the black people that were enslaved during that period were from Africa.