Can’t We All Finally Get Along? Race in Los Angeles Twenty Five Years After Rodney King

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Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s, intergroup conflict increased between various racial minority groups, namely Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. These conflicts mark a departure from the social history of U.S. race relations in which racial minorities were usually in conflict with Whites. Despite the growing importance of multiracial intergroup conflicts, research on race relations in the United States continues to be dominated by the Black-White paradigm. Not only has this dualist perspective limited the empirical investigation of intergroup attitudes and conflict among various racial minority groups, but it has also produced little research on the Asian American population in general. In light of these shifting racial configurations, this paper examines how race relations in Los Angeles have evolved, particularly in the twenty five years since the 1992 L.A. uprising, and how these unfolding racial dynamics are creating new challenges and opportunities for a more inclusive and equitable L.A. Specifically, we will utilize the most recent data from the 2017 Los Angeles Public Opinion Survey to examine racial attitudes among Asians, Blacks, Latinos, and Whites about themselves and each other. We will analyze survey questions that we helped design specifically for the survey to gauge residents’ outlooks about various race related issues such as evaluation of race relations since the 1992 L.A. unrest, including overall sense of linked fate, beliefs about whether another civil unrest is likely to occur since Trump was elected, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and support for the Black Lives Matter campaign. We will further address the broader implications of these findings for the potential for inter-ethnic alliances for social, economic, and racial justice.

Authors

• Sylvia Zamora, Loyola Marymount University

• Nadia Y. Kim, Loyola Marymount University