I am going to tell a story that is quite embarrassing to me. It's all about how ignorance and privilege go hand-in-hand, and how 12 year-old Dash was as much victim and exemplar of this fact as anyone ever has been.
Our elementary school, the Center for Early Education, had no space for a theater - we were too small, hip and urban for such things. Our plays (we called them Lullaby of Broadway productions, or Lullaby for short) were either in the school multipurpose room or at the Wilshire Blvd. Temple. It's a beautiful place for a production; it's got that old-LA construction, lots of marble and granite, and the performance space is huge. It's just not in the greatest part of town - not a bad part, by comparison, just...closer to downtown than CEE. Closer to South Central than CEE. Nonetheless, the bigger Lullaby productions were always at the Temple, as was the case with our 6th-grade stab at Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Blahdiblah.
(Really, I'm sitting here physically embarrassed to tell this story. You know that little twinge you get in your gut, that either presages or accompanies an everyone's-looking-at-me-and-I'm-naked blush? Yeah, I've got that feeling. For reference: I didn't have that feeling when everyone was looking at me and I was naked one time in college.)
It was the spring of 1992. When the first Rodney King verdicts came back, we were at the Wilshire Blvd. Temple, rehearsing for Lullaby; the first reports of rioting reached us at the same time. We were immediately whisked from the Temple back to the safer confines of West Hollywood; our parents picked us up at school. The director told us that our production of Joseph would also be moved from the Temple to the CEE MPR. This violation of tradition was absolutely untenable to us, the 6th grade of the Center for Early Education. We would not sit idly by and tolerate this injustice. Generations (not true) of 6th graders had held their last Lullaby shows in that space, and we would not be deprived of our rights.
We were raised, and taught, by people who had protested - either in favor of civil rights, or against the war in Vietnam, or both (and by those who had protested "in spirit," and spoke nonetheless of those Glory Days). We were taught the value of civil disobedience before we learned the value of civic participation. So we decided that we should protest this injustice. Just so that you're keeping track here, the injustice had nothing to do with the four racist LA policemen acquitted of the near-fatal beating of a Black motorist; the injustice was that our play venue had to be moved five miles west. Against this terrible crime, we protested. We picketed the front gate of our school after classes, when all of the parents would have to walk past us to pick up their kids.
Swaths of Los Angeles were on fire, and I was one of the kids who lived close enough to see the smoke. But my chief concern was that I be allowed to dress up and sing Andrew Lloyd Webber songs in Central Los Angeles instead of West Hollywood. We drew signs, we put on our angry faces, we chanted. Oh, yes, we chanted: "See Reality! Have Lullaby at the Temple! Peace! Reality! Have Lullaby at the Temple!" The crux of our argument, you understand, was that our parents had no right to insulate us from potentially harsh realities by changing venues.
Of course, we were 12 - perhaps we should be forgiven for our total lack of perspective. I went home that day, surprisingly without a Mom-lecture on the appropriate uses of civil disobedience, and watched the riots unfold on TV. Dad was an alternate on the Warren Commission, so we had the report at home. I read it. I began to understand the stakes, and the idiocy of protesting injustice by burning down your own neighborhood.
I also learned what injustice actually was, and how to never again use that word lightly.
When I speak of my experience of the riots, I usually talk about the first day, finding out about the verdicts and the rioting from Amos and refusing to believe him (he was a known prankster) until rehearsal was summarily cancelled. I talk about the somewhat-harrowing drive home from school, how some asshole lit up a Tire Center so we were stuck inhaling burning rubber at the same intersection for at least 30 minutes if not longer. I talk about living on a hill, above the fires but not quite above the smoke, and how some of the rowdier neighbors talked about going down the hill for some looting (nobody I know actually did, but some talked big). This part of the story, I usually leave out.
Every time I think of my fool self, marching in a tiny circle in front of my privileged-people's elementary school gate, having the nerve to talk about reality...I get that little twinge in the gut.
