The Harbor Gateway is a thin, two mile wide strip of Los Angeles that connects South L.A. with the port areas of Wilmington and San Pedro. To look at it on a map, you can see how it cleaves through the area, dividing the landscape between Torrance and Carson. It divides other things, too.
Yesterday, a black family in a GMC Yukon was shot at by two Latino males, critically wounding a 6-year-old child who was hit in the head. This is just the latest in a long string of tragedies involving black and Latino gang violence in the area. They've had an enormous problem for years between the prevalent Latino gangs (in particular Varrio 204th Street and East Side Torrance) and the black residents, many of whom came into the area when housing developments they were living in were torn down in the mid-90's.
In December of '06, for example, 14-year-old Cheryl Green was killed by members of the 204th Street gang when she happened to walk on the wrong side of the street. Others came before her. Others, sadly, will likely follow.
The last month Los Angeles has endured some of the bloodiest gang violence the city has seen in recent times. Not all of it racially motivated, to be sure, but definitely some of it. But therein lies a question. Are these crimes a problem between black and Latino? Or is it just the small minded, parochial mindset of street gangs whose sole world is housed in a two mile wide strip of dead end streets?
My vote's for the latter. Certainly race plays a part. But I'm willing to bet that if you had a new influx of people into the area, outsiders regardless of race, you'd have the same problem. It just wouldn't be so easily identifiable and the targets so easy to pick out.
The mindset isn't very different, of course. Racism is an outrageously stupid lumping of people into stereotypes based on the color of their skin, or the type of food they eat. Same thing applies with gender conflicts, nationalities, sexual preferences. It's that tribal mentality that someone else is "different".
When it comes down to it, this sort of killing is about as cowardly as you can get. Random, faceless. Targeting people who not only aren't in a position to protect themselves, but also aren't expecting to have to. I wonder what would happen if more people just decided to start packing and shooting back. Or getting smart and using their cars as weapons like god intended. All in the name of self-defense, of course.
Maybe we'd have more gangbangers in the morgue and fewer six-year-olds.
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