Americans speak of their social crisis gingerly, if at all, with the practiced euphemisms of a people deep in denial. Like “codependent” spouses attempting to cover their partners’ alcoholic indiscretions with apologies and excuses, too many Americans seem to think that the best way to deal with the country’s worsening divisions of class and race is to pretend that the problems aren’t there at all, and to attack those who insist on bringing the issue up for being “divisive.” Amid evidence that the crisis is deeply rooted in the structure of the nation’s economy, Americans insist that all will get better if we can only “get along.” Amid evidence that free-market capitalism is the root of the growing inequality, Americans insist that self-help (now perversely called “empowerment”) is the answer. When Dan Quayle, after attacking Mother Murphy Brown, blamed a “poverty of values” (not material poverty) for the riots in LA, commentators chuckled for a moment over Quayle’s inability to tell fiction from reality, then soberly decided that the boy vice president “had a point.” A good dose of family values, and all will be well again.
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What all these interpretations shared was a simple impatience to be done with the story once and for all. Once the initial shock of the verdict and the voyeuristic thrill of the riots wore off, CBS news begged to be allowed to go “Beyond the Rage”; Newsweek magazine wanted to go “Beyond Black and White”; Time magazine (echoing Rodney King) asked simply “Can we all get along?” Implicit in all these headlines was the media’s simple frustration that any tough issues had been raised at all, and a desire to simply wrap things up with a few somber op-ed pieces. As the country continues “meandering amid its own collapse,” as critic Gary Indiana has so aptly put it, the media peddle an interpretation of the world that studiously avoids examining the structural explanations of the present mess in favor of a bland psychologized rhetoric that transforms the all-too-explicable symptoms of America’s deepening inequality into irrational, individualized problems that will disappear if only people can “come together” and wipe all bad thoughts out of their minds, or if the police and military are simply allowed to have a free hand to protect “good people” from the “bad.” Americans may want a simple closure, a happy ending for even the most distressing stories, but it’s unlikely that the real world will comply with the demands of this comforting, if delusional, narrative.
The riots, to put it mildly, didn’t quite fit the neat middle-class narrative so beloved by the media. For a moment, it looked as though the narrative would have to switch–from middle-class discontent to class conflict, from white to black and brown. Fat chance; the fires had barely been lit before the denial set in. A few in the media–particularly in the first days of the riots and their aftermath–relied on the crudest forms of denial, attempting simply to wish the unpleasantness away entirely. Professing surprise at the anger the verdict brought forth–though anyone who didn’t expect LA to blow after the verdict just hasn’t been paying attention–these writers saw the riots (as Tribune columnist Jon Margolis wrote) as simply irrational, “the latest in a series of bizarre occurrences that have captivated the nation . . . as though reality was being . . . designed by a cynical playwright who engineered events for his amusement.” Others expanded on these theatrical metaphors, depicting the rioters as easily manipulated “actors” playing out their appointed “roles,” with nary a conscious thought intervening between the actions and the script. Nicholas Horrock, also in the Tribune, described the rioters (“the characters of this drama”) as “devil dancers on a concrete stage. . . . The rioters . . . seem to know their role: to steal, to leer, to dance and gesture, to chat with television reporters, comfortable in impunity.” In the Sun-Times, Vernon Jarrett was more blunt, though equally extravagant in his rhetoric: “All of the performers,” he wrote, “followed the script [in] this updated version of the ‘Theater of the Absurd.’” There was no point, of course, in asking the residents why they did what they did (few writers even thought of doing such a thing) because they were simply playing by the script. The riot, in all these accounts, became little more than a dream or a melodrama–unreal, inexplicable. Perhaps when we opened our eyes (or the performers closed the curtains) the trouble would simply vanish.
Healing, healing, healing: the phrase was repeated endlessly, like some New Age mantra. “While President Bush proclaimed Thursday a national day of healing a spirit of unity began to grow in the nation’s most ethnically diverse city,” USA Today correspondent Sally Ann Stewart gushed. “Celebrities did their part, too.” (Bless their little celebrity hearts!) Invariably, the “healing” proposed in these stories was of the most limited kind possible, an attempt to provide a simple psychological mind-cure for racial “divisiveness,” not a systematic or structural cure for racial injustice. The focus on “healing”–redolent of the happy-talk human interest stories that routinely close the evening news–informed those familiar with the media’s narrative codes that the story was coming to an end. And, predictably, it did. Stories about racism and injustice appeared from time to time in the newspapers, but they seemed more a result of institutional momentum than continuing interest: as far as the media were concerned, the moment had passed. (We’re healing–don’t pick at the scabs.)
In the end, what makes the rhetoric of denial so striking is that the basic facts of class and racial injustice are well-known and often acknowledged. Though the riots caught most newspapers off guard, and reporters at a distance were forced for the first week or so to rely on cliche and conjecture to cover their initial ignorance, the media (the print media in particular) were soon filled with serious and substantive accounts of poverty and sometimes (even more striking) its causes. The rich are, indeed, getting richer and the poor, indeed, getting poorer: in the years between 1977 and 1991, the income of the top 1 percent of American families doubled, while the income of the bottom three-fifths dropped by 5 to 10 percent. Racially, the situation is similar. In 1954, before the civil rights revolution, black families earned 53 percent of what whites earned; by 1975 the figure had increased to 62 percent. Since then, the figure has dropped to 56 percent, nearly as bad as it was in the days of official segregation. For the black poor–for the poor in general–the situation has grown much worse. These facts and others are easily available for anyone who reads beyond the headlines. In Newsweek, hardly an organ of unreconstructed radicalism, Tom Morganthau noted with admirable directness the simple fact that “victory over Jim Crow did not bring much progress for [poor] blacks. . . . Let’s be candid,” he went on to note, “America did not really intend to win [the war on poverty.] Time and again, through the ’60s and ’70s, Congress considered programs (like a guaranteed-income floor) designed to attack the root causes of poverty and turned those programs down.” It’s true, it’s honest–and it’s in Newsweek to boot.
