"}This is Ron Unz reposting a thorough 1999 article of his about the development of racial politics in 1990s California, framed around 3 high-profile, racially relevant ballot initiative campaigns.
It\u2019s fascinating because it very clearly foreshadows and leads into where we are now, right down to its terminal predictions (the attempt to put racial issues in politics to rest and realign around a cross-racial citizenship faces difficulties and cannot be assumed, there is a real risk the system will continue on current logic with whites developing a conscious political identity in response), and yet as Unz depicts them - and he was in the weeds here - the actual motivations of the players involved are near-completely incomprehensible from a modern standpoint, a measure of how fast things change.
That is one critique I have, on how fast things change, Unz puts the 1992 \u201cRodney King\u201d riots as the moment that put Californian whites on notice that their comfortable paradise was threatened by racial unrest.
Now, I really do want to emphasize the scale of this shift - as I\u2019ve mentioned before, California during most of the 20th century was a white middle class bastion of conservative Republicanism. For all its Summer of Love, hippie, surfer girl, Black Panther mystique, it was a reliable Republican presidential vote from the end of the FDR-Truman New Deal Dynasty all the way up through Bush the Elder in \u201888 (excepting the Goldwater/Johnson landslide).
Like, if you\u2019ve got a modern sense of what \u201cCalifornia\u201d and \u201cLos Angeles\u201d mean, that\u2019s a bit jarring, and the shift was jarring as hell to live through. This explains Steve Sailer. If you\u2019ve ever wondered what explains Steve Sailer, this explains Steve Sailer.
But, for all that I find Unz\u2019s depiction of the \u201992 riots as an end to innocence a bit wishful. For one, the Watts Riots of 1965, Hunter\u2019s Point \u201966. But closer at hand than that, I can off the top of my head think of several prominent artistic depictions of a racially tense California that were produced just prior to this, indicating that the tensions were on thinking people\u2019s minds.
There\u2019s White Men Can\u2019t Jump, which basically shared Unz\u2019s \u201cno illusions, but this might just work out\u201d tack, released almost exactly a month before the riots. Falling Down, an elegy for white middle class LA, was released almost a year afterwards on an accelerated production schedule but still written prior.
Closest to my heart, Neal Stephenson\u2019s Snow Crash is a fantastic projection of period SoCal, gated communities and franchised everything, and its looming specter of the \u201cThe Raft\u201d threatening to arrive and swamp the locals is drawn partly from the Mexican immigrant wave that usually gets dated contemporary to the \u201984 Summer Olympics, and partly from the Asian \u201cboat people\u201d refugee wave all the way back in the 1970s.
So, maybe up to that point it registered as \u201cnothing LAPD nightsticks can\u2019t solve\u201d, but the idea that racial tensions weren\u2019t noticed as a threat strikes me as a bit of a stretch.