She was a sixteen-year-old African American who was killed in Los Angeles by convenience store owner Soon Ja Doo, after an altercation in which Doo accused Harlins of trying to steal a bottle of juice. The gun she used to kill her was licensed to her husband, but there were a couple things about this gun. It had been stolen from the Doos, they reported it stolen, it was recovered, but before it ended up back with its legal, rightful owners, the gun had been fixed with a hairpin trigger, unbeknownst to the Doos.
This is how Doo's gun went off more or less at the mere touch of her finger on the trigger. And Harlins dropped immediately.
Doo was sentenced to five years probation and a $500 fine. Oh, and 400 hours of community service.
You might not have remembered Latasha. Doo killed her about two weeks after the Rodney King beating. Like that beating, Latasha's murder was caught on tape, the store's security tape. Had this incident -- or for that matter, the King incident -- occurred in our time, we'd all be sharing it. But she's more or less forgotten these days.
A few more of you might remember Yusef Hawkins. He was a 16-year-old honors student from Brooklyn. Like Harlins, he was African American. He went with a couple of friends to look at a used car that the owner had advertised in the paper. (This was long before Craig's List.) The neighborhood where the owner lived, Bensonhurst, is populated by a lot of Italian Americans. (My grandmother lived in that neighborhood from 1927 until her death nearly seventy years later. My mother was born in her house.) And as it turns out, Hawkins and his friends were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
On this evening, a punk named Mondello got into a big fight with an ex-girlfriend. (The gossip around the neighborhood had some not-so-nice things to say about her. That's not surprising. That's what gossip is. I have no idea if any of those things were true or not.) She taunted Mondello by telling her that she was having a party and had invited some... I'll use a popular racist epithet among the paisans..."moolies" to come. Mondello got really ticked off and organized a mob to go find any "niggers" coming into the neighborhood. Hawkins and his friends stumbled upon this mob. The mob chased, them, beat them, and then one kid with a screw loose, name of Fama, shot his gun off, and it killed Hawkins.
Of all the group that beat on these kids, Mondello, as ringleader, and Fama, as shooter, and two others were charged in connection with Hawkins' death. Only Fama was found guilty of second-degree murder; Mondello was found guilty of lesser counts including starting a riot. They received the maximum sentences: Mondello was released after serving 8 years in Attica; Fama is still in prison.
This story is better known perhaps because it garnered the attention of Al Sharpton, and it also probably swung the Democratic Party primary election for Mayor in favor of Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, who marched with Sharpton into Bensonhurst in protest while then-Mayor Ed Koch refused. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing had come out that summer, and is arguably prophetic in its tone; his later film Jungle Fever is dedicated to Hawkins' memory.
This of course brings us to Treyvon Martin and George Zimmerman's acquittal of killing him. Or perhaps it brings us back, to Emmett Till. And how many other Black teens killed mostly because their lives are not worth anything to this society.
Yes, each case is different, and yet each case is not. Any way you want to defend Soon Ja Doo or George Zimmerman, or the cops who beat Rodney King, or the ones who shot Amadou Diallo, or even Dr. King's assassin, it all comes down to the same thing: the life of person of color in this country is worth diddly squat. The thinking behind these deaths is the same: it's only a nigger, and one who is a threat to my sense of self, my property, my agency. And because for so long people have killed Blacks with little impunity, that thinking is allowed to continue. This thinking is aided by the continue media-projected paranoia of the Black Criminal.
Quick: I say, welfare queen. What image pops in your head? A Black woman, right? Quick: I say, drug dealer? Bet you thought of a Black dude. These images are so pervasive, they continue to perpetuate the fear of Blackness that allows shopkeepers to carefully eye the loud Black girl going to the fridge for a juice, that makes white drivers go thunk-a-thunk with their door locks when a Black man, or a group of Black men walk down the street, that allow lawmakers to cut welfare and food stamps. And the fact that Black man is the President hasn't changed a thing; it didn't change a thing when a Black man had the number one show on TV, nor when a Black woman became one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
When the cops who beat King were acquitted by a 1990s version of an AllWhiteJury, I showed a clip of the beating to my students and said, write me an essay that justifies this, and you get an A. I argued with my wife about this, because, Devil's Advocate that she is, she insisted that I don't know all that happened, so I can't really know for sure. (Then she saw the tape.) When the cops who shot Diallo were acquitted, I wrote a poem in rage. I was much younger when King was beaten, when Harlins and Hawkins were murdered. I don't know if I'm less angry, or less sensitive, having seen all this before. And I do think that with the economy still in the toilet, we're gonna see more of this kind of shit.
The other day I watched Blazing Saddles with a friend. Brooks' parody of the western is widely regarded as his masterpiece, and if so, one of the reasons is its frank presentation of race, and its explosion of racist stereotypes. In an early scene, two Black railroad workers are sent out to check out whether or not there is quicksand on the rails. (They are sent because, "we can't afford to lose no team of horses, you dummy," demands the foreman, "send over a coupla niggers.") When the two workers and their hand cart start to sink, the foreman and his henchman get a rope... for the hand cart. I can find no better illustration than this one to demonstrate how little America cares about Blacks.
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