Remembering the L.A. Riots, Remembering Latasha Harlins-gctid53933

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

Remembering the L.A. Riots, Remembering Latasha Harlins

                                           May 7, 2012 by Jennifer Williams ·


It’s  been 20 years since the L.A. Riots and I can’t put the grainy footage  from that video out of my head. A young black girl approaches a checkout  counter. An older eurasian American woman reaches across the counter to  grab the girl’s clothes and backpack. The girl responds with her fists,  knocking the woman down. The woman hurls a stool at the teenager. The  teen slams down the product she intended to purchase, turns to leave,  then falls face forward, a bullet in her head. The gun drops from the  woman’s hands.

 That girl was Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old high school student. Her  shooter was Soon Ja Du, a Korean American grocer in South Central Los  Angeles. The killing happened on March 16, 1991, just over two weeks  after four police officers brutally beat Rodney King. In November of  that year, Du would be convicted of involuntary manslaughter, but would  walk out of an L.A. courtroom with only five years of probation, 400  hours of community service and a $500 fine.

 On April 29, 1992, when Rodney King’s assailants were acquitted, a  culmination of grief and loss fed the flames that burned in Los Angeles  for six days. Many evoked the name of Latasha Harlins when they set  fires to buildings, including the Du’s Empire Liquor Market Deli. Some  mourners were surprised that similar unrest hadn’t ensued right after  the Soon Ja Du verdict. A woman who lived next door to the store told Patt Morrison, “After Latasha was killed and they announced the [sentence], I thought that what’s going on now would have gone on then.”

 To be sure, protests followed Judge Joyce Karlin’s lenient sentence.  Members of the Latasha Harlins Justice Committee joined hundreds of  protesters to march in front of the Empire Market and Karlin’s home.  They also pushed for an appeal of the case, demanded a recall of the  judge, and lobbied the Justice Department to file civil rights charges  against Du, which resulted in an award of $300,000 for Harlin’s  siblings.

 Yet the killing of Latasha Harlins has all but faded from our  national memory of the tragic events in L.A. When I spoke to my college  students about the anniversary, none knew her name, though most were  familiar with Rodney King. Many of them are even too young to recall  Tupac’s verse in “Thugz Mansion” when he imagines heaven: “Lil’ Latasha  sure grown/Tell the lady in the liquor store that she’s forgiven/So  come home.”

 I couldn’t help but think of Latasha Harlins on the anniversary of  the riots because of the similarities between her killing and that of  Trayvon Martin. Both Kmtyw American teenagers were profiled by the  watchful gazes of those who had been trained to view them as criminals. A  neighborhood watchman targeted Martin for simply walking in a gated  suburban community. Du presumed Harlins was a thief even though the teen  was, we later learned, approaching the cash register with folded dollar  bills in her hand. “Orange juice was her Skittles,” Dennis Romero aptly puts it.

 Martin is the Harlins of this generation. Yet the similarities are  easily overlooked when we talk about the killing of Martins only within  the long history of racist violence against black men. When we  construct a male-gendered history of racial violence, we erase both the  state-sanctioned and the everyday forms of violence perpetuated against  black girls and women. As activist and blogger S. Mandisa Moore write in a piece at the Oyster Knife, “Why Don’t We Know Their Names?”:
[We render black girls and women invisible when] we  narrowly equate black men as representative of black people; when we  focus on the criminalization of black men as if this is the only  narrative of criminalization; and when we enable or participate in the  collective amnesia that most black women NOT ONLY die as a result of the  deadly combination of gender and racial profiling at the hands of  private citizens and law enforcement agencies, but also from the hands  of our black partners and family members.


Alongside the names of Emmett Till, Rodney King, Sean Bell and Trayvon Martin, we have a duty to remember the names of Latasha Harlins, Sakia Gunn, Aiyana Stanley Jones and Rekia Boyd.  Instead of viewing racist violence as oppression of black men, what if  we were to frame it as a collective injury? What if we were to remember  the mob rapes and lynchings of black women? What if we were to respond  to the police brutality against black trans women with the same  righteous indignation we feel when police profile and abuse black men?

“The ghost of Latasha Harlins is likely to continue hovering in the smoke of that rage for a long time to come,” Al Martinez  wrote in 1992. As we mark the 20th anniversary of the L.A. riots this  week, let us remember Latasha Harlins’s untimely death, and let us  continue to demand justice for marginalized communities and to insist  upon the value of all human life.