Irvine Flood
In most of my adventures, there's no tarantula strutting down the road, no Chinese sideways fire.
I grew up in Southern California; first in San Pedro on the south facing coast of Los Angeles County, then north over the Hollywood Hills in the San Fernando Valley. In my high school and college years, I lived in Santa Barbara County, on the coast.
I was a typical blonde haired kid. I spent a lot of time at the pool or the beach, I played trumpet in the school band, I did reasonably well in my classes, I was respectful of my elders, and I considered the police always to be the good guys.
When I got to high school we moved to Carpinteria, up the coast from LA in Santa Barbara County and began driving, I would come into contact with law enforcement occasionally for minor infractions, and I was usually let off with a warning. When I was 18, I got my first motorcycle. It was a 1948 BSA rigid frame 500cc one cylinder. It likely had raced at the Thunderbowl in its day. It was really quick when I had it running right, especially in the dirt. In the dirt, it was wise to strip it down. You didn't want the license plate to slash you when you bounced off the back or piled up, you didn't want your brake lights, taillights and mirrors to get damaged, your muffler was just going to get banged up, and roar of the straight pipe added to the excitement. It was kind of tedious to take that stuff off and put it back on, so you just left it off for weeks or more at a time.
When you got a motorcycle in those days, at least among my friends, you entered into a game of cat and mouse with the police. It was part of the fun. If you saw a patrol car when you were in this stripped down mode, you let off on the throttle, pulled in the clutch and coasted quietly on by and got away with it most of the time. Then one day you go rumbling by and a Highway Patrolman or a Deputy Sheriff pulls you over.
I was always polite and respectful. He would say, "Where's your license plate, your lights and your muffler?" And I would say, "At home in a box." So he would write me an equipment violation citation. The way the fix-it ticket worked was that you had ten days to get the equipment right and get it signed off by the CHP. Then there was no fine. So for the next week you could roar around with impunity, and put the stuff back on at the last minute.
In my life, I've been stopped by the police lots and lots of times and I never felt any fear that anything bad was going to happen to me. I always got along with the cops, and I didn't even get a ticket 80% of the time. There's a point to me saying all this.
Fast-forward to 1995. I'm an experienced FEMA Inspector, having learned my chops with Hurricane Andrew and the Northridge Earthquake. I was asked to inspect a small residential area south of LA that had experienced some flooding, enough to qualify for some federal assistance on the repairs. When FEMA sends you to the other end of the country, you have to rent a car, stay in hotel rooms and spend a lot of time on a pay phone. Those expenses you have to pay yourself out of what you get for inspections. Like the Northridge Earthquake, I could drive to the site in my own truck, take and make calls on my truck's mobile phone and return to Carpinteria each night and stay at my sister's or my Mom's, which saved me a bundle. Same deal on this assignment in Orange County, low overhead.
The flood zone was a small subdivision of nice single-family homes adjacent to the campus of UC Irvine. You have to go through the owner's documents to verify their claim to a FEMA grant so I learned that most of them were owned by the African-American families living there with at least one member holding down a good job at the University. The point being these were well-adjusted, well-educated, successful people with good jobs, nice cars and home ownership; probably the least disenfranchised black neighborhood in Southern California.
Well, it so happened at the time that the trial of OJ Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend had been going on for weeks. Everybody in my world was aware of it; if not watching it live in the daytime, watching the news reports and video clips of the proceedings in the evening. Here in the enclave of middle class black suburban homes, the TV's were tuned into the trial too. But our reactions to what we were seeing and hearing on the screen were completely different.
To back up here, three years before there had been a trial of four white Los Angeles police officers for the brutal clubbing of Rodney King, an unarmed black man, caught on amateur video. The trial had been moved out of LA County to nearby mostly white Simi Valley. The jury was composed of 10 Caucasians, one Hispanic, one Filipino and no blacks. When the trial ended in acquittal, Los Angeles had erupted into riots that lasted five days and resulted in the deaths of 55 people and the serious injury of another 2000. Anger toward the LAPD's mistreatment of black people had been smoldering for 50 years. The shocking brutality of the video and the officers' exoneration brought that rage to the surface. The vast majority of black people did not riot, but they did hold a deep resentment toward the LAPD, and the bias exposed by the jury's verdict.
Back to 1995 in Irvine: The storm water had gotten to about a foot deep inside the houses, and my task was to go from room to room and calculate how much sheetrock and insulation, how much carpeting, and how many electrical receptacles, what essential appliances damaged. These were nice well kept houses, nicer than the ones I had grown up in. During the course of my visit, there would be a session looking over their documentation of ownership, residency, insurance and receipts for what they had personally spent to deal with the flood. The session would usually take place on the dining room table or kitchen table, and just like in my world, the nearest TV was tuned in to the live spectacle of OJ's trial.
The defense attorneys were promoting the idea that a racist rogue police detective, Mark Fuhrman, had planted evidence of a bloody glove at OJ's home. To white viewers, many of the conspiratorial claims of the defense were far-fetched and laughable, but not to the black residents of Irvine. I quickly realized that the gags and the mocking that took place in my world would not be the least bit funny here.
I got to know each family a little, spending 30 or 45 minutes doing what I needed to do. I'm doing my non-threatening sort of Uncle Sam, and this time I'm not listening to the recounting of a disastrous or life-threatening event. The water came up, ruining cars, carpets, furniture and appliances; and then went back down. The sense of trauma I was hearing was something deep and long term. In each of the houses that I inspected, someone said to another within my earshot, or sometimes directly to me, recounting that someone in their immediate family had suffered ill treatment at the hands of the LAPD. The typical story went like this: "He was the nicest kid. He was going to college studying to be a teacher. He was always getting good grades. A gun? He never had a gun in his life. They planted it on him and took him to jail!" Every single family had a story like that; a young black man with his bright future destroyed after being pulled over by the police, evidence of drugs or guns planted by the police. After hearing that kind of thing in house after house, I had formed new insights into what it's like to be a targeted minority.
To most people in my world, the defense team's theory of police conspiracy seemed a stretch of the imagination, a ludricrous invention of the defense team; but in the world of black people in Southern California, the idea that the police would frame a black man was not at all preposterous. It was commonplace. It was the everyday reality in their own families.
So I didn't fully realize what "white privilege" was until on this trip I got a look into the world that didn't have it. I think of all the times I was a young joker in the hands of the police and how leniently I had been treated. If I had been black, any one of those encounters could have led to harsh treatment, beatings, entrapment or imprisonment, even murder, through no fault of my own. How lucky I had been to be a poor white kid. I never felt privileged, but I lived in a world where the cops were not a daily nightmare for me and my whole community.
That's the thing about white privilege. If you're white, you're likely blind to it.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
I grew up in Southern California; first in San Pedro on the south facing coast of Los Angeles County, then north over the Hollywood Hills in the San Fernando Valley. In my high school and college years, I lived in Santa Barbara County, on the coast.
I was a typical blonde haired kid. I spent a lot of time at the pool or the beach, I played trumpet in the school band, I did reasonably well in my classes, I was respectful of my elders, and I considered the police always to be the good guys.
When I got to high school we moved to Carpinteria, up the coast from LA in Santa Barbara County and began driving, I would come into contact with law enforcement occasionally for minor infractions, and I was usually let off with a warning. When I was 18, I got my first motorcycle. It was a 1948 BSA rigid frame 500cc one cylinder. It likely had raced at the Thunderbowl in its day. It was really quick when I had it running right, especially in the dirt. In the dirt, it was wise to strip it down. You didn't want the license plate to slash you when you bounced off the back or piled up, you didn't want your brake lights, taillights and mirrors to get damaged, your muffler was just going to get banged up, and roar of the straight pipe added to the excitement. It was kind of tedious to take that stuff off and put it back on, so you just left it off for weeks or more at a time.
When you got a motorcycle in those days, at least among my friends, you entered into a game of cat and mouse with the police. It was part of the fun. If you saw a patrol car when you were in this stripped down mode, you let off on the throttle, pulled in the clutch and coasted quietly on by and got away with it most of the time. Then one day you go rumbling by and a Highway Patrolman or a Deputy Sheriff pulls you over.
I was always polite and respectful. He would say, "Where's your license plate, your lights and your muffler?" And I would say, "At home in a box." So he would write me an equipment violation citation. The way the fix-it ticket worked was that you had ten days to get the equipment right and get it signed off by the CHP. Then there was no fine. So for the next week you could roar around with impunity, and put the stuff back on at the last minute.
In my life, I've been stopped by the police lots and lots of times and I never felt any fear that anything bad was going to happen to me. I always got along with the cops, and I didn't even get a ticket 80% of the time. There's a point to me saying all this.
Fast-forward to 1995. I'm an experienced FEMA Inspector, having learned my chops with Hurricane Andrew and the Northridge Earthquake. I was asked to inspect a small residential area south of LA that had experienced some flooding, enough to qualify for some federal assistance on the repairs. When FEMA sends you to the other end of the country, you have to rent a car, stay in hotel rooms and spend a lot of time on a pay phone. Those expenses you have to pay yourself out of what you get for inspections. Like the Northridge Earthquake, I could drive to the site in my own truck, take and make calls on my truck's mobile phone and return to Carpinteria each night and stay at my sister's or my Mom's, which saved me a bundle. Same deal on this assignment in Orange County, low overhead.
The flood zone was a small subdivision of nice single-family homes adjacent to the campus of UC Irvine. You have to go through the owner's documents to verify their claim to a FEMA grant so I learned that most of them were owned by the African-American families living there with at least one member holding down a good job at the University. The point being these were well-adjusted, well-educated, successful people with good jobs, nice cars and home ownership; probably the least disenfranchised black neighborhood in Southern California.
Well, it so happened at the time that the trial of OJ Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend had been going on for weeks. Everybody in my world was aware of it; if not watching it live in the daytime, watching the news reports and video clips of the proceedings in the evening. Here in the enclave of middle class black suburban homes, the TV's were tuned into the trial too. But our reactions to what we were seeing and hearing on the screen were completely different.
To back up here, three years before there had been a trial of four white Los Angeles police officers for the brutal clubbing of Rodney King, an unarmed black man, caught on amateur video. The trial had been moved out of LA County to nearby mostly white Simi Valley. The jury was composed of 10 Caucasians, one Hispanic, one Filipino and no blacks. When the trial ended in acquittal, Los Angeles had erupted into riots that lasted five days and resulted in the deaths of 55 people and the serious injury of another 2000. Anger toward the LAPD's mistreatment of black people had been smoldering for 50 years. The shocking brutality of the video and the officers' exoneration brought that rage to the surface. The vast majority of black people did not riot, but they did hold a deep resentment toward the LAPD, and the bias exposed by the jury's verdict.
Back to 1995 in Irvine: The storm water had gotten to about a foot deep inside the houses, and my task was to go from room to room and calculate how much sheetrock and insulation, how much carpeting, and how many electrical receptacles, what essential appliances damaged. These were nice well kept houses, nicer than the ones I had grown up in. During the course of my visit, there would be a session looking over their documentation of ownership, residency, insurance and receipts for what they had personally spent to deal with the flood. The session would usually take place on the dining room table or kitchen table, and just like in my world, the nearest TV was tuned in to the live spectacle of OJ's trial.
The defense attorneys were promoting the idea that a racist rogue police detective, Mark Fuhrman, had planted evidence of a bloody glove at OJ's home. To white viewers, many of the conspiratorial claims of the defense were far-fetched and laughable, but not to the black residents of Irvine. I quickly realized that the gags and the mocking that took place in my world would not be the least bit funny here.
I got to know each family a little, spending 30 or 45 minutes doing what I needed to do. I'm doing my non-threatening sort of Uncle Sam, and this time I'm not listening to the recounting of a disastrous or life-threatening event. The water came up, ruining cars, carpets, furniture and appliances; and then went back down. The sense of trauma I was hearing was something deep and long term. In each of the houses that I inspected, someone said to another within my earshot, or sometimes directly to me, recounting that someone in their immediate family had suffered ill treatment at the hands of the LAPD. The typical story went like this: "He was the nicest kid. He was going to college studying to be a teacher. He was always getting good grades. A gun? He never had a gun in his life. They planted it on him and took him to jail!" Every single family had a story like that; a young black man with his bright future destroyed after being pulled over by the police, evidence of drugs or guns planted by the police. After hearing that kind of thing in house after house, I had formed new insights into what it's like to be a targeted minority.
To most people in my world, the defense team's theory of police conspiracy seemed a stretch of the imagination, a ludricrous invention of the defense team; but in the world of black people in Southern California, the idea that the police would frame a black man was not at all preposterous. It was commonplace. It was the everyday reality in their own families.
So I didn't fully realize what "white privilege" was until on this trip I got a look into the world that didn't have it. I think of all the times I was a young joker in the hands of the police and how leniently I had been treated. If I had been black, any one of those encounters could have led to harsh treatment, beatings, entrapment or imprisonment, even murder, through no fault of my own. How lucky I had been to be a poor white kid. I never felt privileged, but I lived in a world where the cops were not a daily nightmare for me and my whole community.
That's the thing about white privilege. If you're white, you're likely blind to it.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com