Category: Racism

AWP vs LA Festival of Books

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Los Angeles hosted two large book events within two months, and I attended both. Was one better than the other? I think not. They both focused on their audience and did so quite well.

March was abuzz with AWP and the writers who visited from across the country and internationally to make the city grand!

Association of Writers and Writing Programs hosted 12,000 writers, editors, publishers, book sellers, college programs, and others at the LA Convention Center. Amazingly, I didn’t just attend. I also presented for the first time! I was on the “New Literary Forms for a New Los Angeles” panel moderated by Claire Phillips. Along with Claire, I was proud to accompany writers Steph Cha, Sesshu Foster, and Gina Frangello.

Challenge number one was to calm my nerves! This was my first time presenting at AWP. The closest I’d ever gotten to presenting at AWP was participating in an off-site event alongside my publisher, Another Chicago Magazine, at AWP Seattle in 2023. But practice paves the way for perfection. And practice I did, even though my goal wasn’t to be perfect. I just wanted to be prepared enough so that if I made a mistake, I’d be able to regain composure and keep it moving.

As an attendee, I made my way to the panel “Do the Hustle: How to Publicize Your Book.” Luckily, I am reaching that yearned-for point in the writing process in which I get to focus now on submission, marketing, and publicity. So, it was great hearing how authors are clearing their own pathways to sales in an era in which publishers do less book promotion.

The panel “Literary Production During Authoritarian Governments” hit the right notes of concern and caution given our current administration in D.C. I share in the presenters’ belief that it’s imperative we continue writing and resisting during this era of book bans and limited funding.

“We Beautifully Outside: Informal Writing Collectives, Community and Kinship” was a wonderful reminder of the power of writing groups and how they have nurtured Black women writers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Seattle.

In April, LA Festival of Books had about 160,000 people in attendance and was more about casual engagement. Let’s face it, at AWP writers are speaking to their peers — the toughest audience sometimes.

Because AWP and LA Festival of Books were back-to-back in the same city, I picked up on the different tone right away. At the book festival, authors speak to their readers. So, the presenters delve into the content of the text more so than the writing process that led to its creation. Their presentation is more relaxed because they want to meet their audience halfway, and their audience is simply out and about enjoying their weekend.

For me, panel number one was “Existential Memoirs.” As a writer of hybrid memoir, I search out this genre. The panel was moderated by Gina Frangello, my co-panelist at AWP, and included authors Meghan Daum, Lyz Lenz, and Glynnis MacNicol. The women covered a wide range of topics including relationships, motherhood, the humor of daily life, and the horror of contemporary politics.

And finally, the “Speak Out” panel on writing and activism was moderated by journalist Jonathan Capehart and included authors Ibram X. Kendi, Aida Mariam Davis, and Rita Omokha. I loved that this panel had a Pan African scope, with presenters of US, Ethiopian, and Nigerian heritage. Their call to activism was rooted in US reality but stretched across the African/Black diaspora and highlighted the need to act locally and analyze globally as we draw on Black activism from the past to traverse the winding roads of an uncertain future.

Kendrick Lamar, LA Street Culture, and Memoir Writing

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During the week of the Kendrick Lamar Pop Out Concert scheduled for Juneteenth in Inglewood, I was busy reviewing my research on the history of Watts. Watts figures in the penultimate chapter of the hybrid memoir I am writing because I owned a home (or a few mortgages) for five years – 2004 until 2009 — in that unincorporated area of Los Angeles. Since I am mixing the history of Los Angeles with my own personal experience as a writer in this city, I knew that in writing about Watts I needed to include some history on the Watts Uprising of 1965. Both the research in my manuscript and my statements here draw heavily on the article by Alex Alonso titled “Out of the Void: Street Gangs in Black Los Angeles.”

The Watts riots of 1965 that were sparked by police officers using excessive force on a Black family during a traffic stop were pivotal in the history of street gangs in Los Angeles. After six days of riots that left thirty-four people dead, L.A.’s rival gangs focused on unity and the ability to work together. And they were successful during a three-year period.

 At the Pop Out concert, Kendrick and others reflected on his concert’s ability to draw rival gangs and various other participants together to celebrate the Juneteenth holiday commemorating the end of Black enslavement. But why gangs? And how do gangs figure into the history of the City of Compton and greater Los Angeles?

As Alonso clearly delineates, Black gangs in Los Angeles developed as a reaction to the white racism that was fundamental in founding this country. As Black migrants left the segregated South and their numbers grew in the rapidly industrializing Los Angeles of the 1940’s, Black residents sought homes beyond the Central Avenue corridor to which they were limited by racially restrictive covenants. The KKK and white teenage hate groups like the Spook Hunters organized to keep Black residents from moving into predominantly white parts of South LA and adjacent cities such as Downey, Compton, Lynwood, and South Gate. Black teens formed their own clubs in order to protect their neighborhoods and combat the white violence being perpetuated against them and their families.

Over the years leading up to the Watts Uprising, South L.A. and cities like Compton became increasingly Black resulting in little need for these groups of Black youths. Yet the formations remained within the deteriorating political and socioeconomic environment of the era, and many of the Black gangs began to engage in Black-on-Black violence. L.A.’s Crips and Bloods gangs filled the void left by former street clubs that had engaged in the positive street behavior which initially resisted white racism and then advocated for Black power. And street violence began to mirror Black socioeconomics as gangs on the Eastside battled with the more upwardly mobile Westside gangs.

Black gangs in L.A. have always been connected to politics – initially, the politics of racism, and later the politics of the Black Panther Party and the revolutionary uprisings in Central America. Regarding the BPP, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter who was president of the LA-based Black Panther Party was also a member of the Slausons gang. Carter and BPP member John Huggins were targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence agency COINTELPRO, and they were both killed at UCLA’s Campbell Hall in 1969. After COINTELPRO decimated L.A.’s Black Power Movement, the behavior of street gangs became “self-genocidal” in nature.

These “self-genocidal” tendencies broadened in scope during the time of revolutionary upheaval in Central America. Alonso states that between 1979 and 1988, there were more than 2,994 gang-related murders in L.A., and these occurred when the US Government was allegedly involved in facilitating the distribution of crack cocaine amongst Black gangs in order to fund the CONTRA counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua – further proof of just how intertwined Black gangs are in the politics of not only L.A., but the nation.

When Kendrick Lamar beams onstage about members of rival gangs coming together to join him at his concert, there are layers of culture, history and politics that deserve to be reckoned with. Black South L.A. formed in resistance to white racism, and California dreamin has rarely been our state of mind no matter how many sunny afternoons fill a calendar year. So many dreams have passed on, packed up and left, been either locked up or tragically shot down. And like Kendrick said, Black L.A. hasn’t been the same since…

Unlike other cities, greater Los Angeles, like its Eastside, has demanded that its rappers stay true to the streets or connected to their working-class roots in ways that other cities have not.  That is part of LA street culture and culture, as evidenced by Kendrick’s stage, is something we live in the moment without rationalizing about history and politics. Until we must. And then we analyze to discern if the social connections are real, partial, or just make believe.

How much of the history and politics of street gangs in L.A. is conscious to Kendrick Lamar and those who celebrated both on and offstage with him on Juneteenth? That is a question I can’t answer. But I can reflect on the history and politics of this topic in my memoir which I must hastily get back to writing.