Friday, March 24, 2006

Straight Intta Compton

Imagine a part of the US where black children routinely skipped school on Thanksgiving Day in case they were shot for attending on a day of 'white celebration'. It would be all over the Guardian and BBC like a rash.

Different considerations apply when The Man isn't involved. Face Right reports on tensions in LA betwen black and Latino.

In 2005, widespread fighting between Latinos and African Americans, sometimes necessitating lockdowns and the deployment of police officers, rocked 12 schools in Los Angeles County....

Channa Cook, a teacher at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, said that even in her school, routinely regarded as one of the best in Los Angeles County, black students each year skip school on May 5 -- Cinco de Mayo -- the day when Mexicans celebrate a 19th-century military victory over France. Mexican gangs have warned in graffiti that they will shoot African Americans attending school that day.


"Large swaths of Los Angeles, such as Watts -- a place that Earl Paysinger, the deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, described as an "ecosystem for African American culture" -- are now increasingly Latino. The nearby city of Compton, the birthplace of gangsta rap, is now 60 percent Hispanic. "The movement of Latinos into these communities has been nothing less than a demographic earthquake," Paysinger said."

I remember even fifteen years go arriving in Chicago and being amazed at the number of Mexican immigrants - having to use my holiday Spanish in a bar to be understood.

Huge demographic shifts, previous inhabitants now outnumbered - sounds familiar somehow.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Enriched Studies" - what a laugh, something any person with the means to do so should run a mile on hearing the term.

Anonymous said...

"Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies"

doubleplusgood!

ba ba said...

Hey Laban!

I think i broke my first story...

The beeb "covered" the trafalgar rally, but gave only a link to "global civility" in the external links, the organisers of the counter rally, and not to the organisers of this rally!