L.A. Story: Who Gains from Framing Gang Attacks as "Ethnic Cleansing"?

Ramos, Tarso Luis, Colorlines Magazine

"WE NEED TO GO ON THE OFFENSIVE to put an end to this idea of ethnic cleansing in L.A.," declares Noreen McClendon, executive director of Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles. "It is not happening."

McClendon--an African American who serves as vice president of operations for the Watts Gang Task Force--is upset about a recent deluge of news stories claiming that Latinos are "ethnically cleansing" their African-American neighbors in southern California. The reports, which McClendon characterizes as dangerously misleading, have circulated widely in print, broadcast, and Web media, generating alarm in civil rights circles and unrestrained glee in those of anti-immigrant activists and white supremacists. In McClendon's view, all this hype obscures some basic realities: "Gangs kill each other. Gangs kill innocent people." The ethnic cleansing label, she says, "is blown so far out of proportion" with the facts on the ground.

Violent competition for control of the southern California drug trade between two prison gangs, the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerilla Family, has been spilling onto the streets of Los Angeles for more than 15 years. Gangs that once included African-American and Chicano youth are increasingly segregated. In neighborhoods like Harbor Gateway, racist, anti-Black graffiti has become commonplace. Last year's trial of several Chicano gang members on murder and civil rights charges and other police investigations strongly indicate that some Mexican Mafia-connected gang members have crossed the line separating gang rivalry from deliberate, racially motivated crimes against innocent bystanders.

But the reasons for these developments, the scale of the problem and what must be done have been largely lost amidst sensationalist media declarations that a "race war" has broken out in Los Angeles. Although it is now clear that racism has indeed played a role in some gang killings, other non-lethal attacks and the ongoing threats faced by African American residents of certain neighborhoods, the propagation of the ethnic-cleansing frame has badly distorted a story that is sobering enough without the exaggerations.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Last November, three members of a street gang known as Avenues 43 were sentenced on federal civil rights charges for their roles in the murders of two African-American men, Christopher Bowser and Kenneth Wilson, in separate attacks six years earlier in the Highland Park neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles. (A fourth convicted gang member was sentenced in January.) The victims were not gang members, and prosecutors successfully demonstrated that they had been …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: L.A. Story: Who Gains from Framing Gang Attacks as "Ethnic Cleansing"?. Contributors: Ramos, Tarso Luis - Author. Magazine title: Colorlines Magazine. Volume: 10. Issue: 4 Publication date: July-August 2007. Page number: 33+. © 2009 Color Lines Magazine. COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale Group.

This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.