Committing to Collective Healing & Thriving on the Anniversary of the LA Uprising
Thursday, April 29th, 2021
Twenty nine years ago, the city of Los Angeles burned. For 5 days, people rioted in the South Los Angeles and Koreatown neighborhoods to protest years of racial and economic inequality and unjust police brutality directed at communities of color, and of those predominantly the Black and Latinx communities. In those short few days, more than 2,000 people were injured and 63 people lost their lives. Over $1 billion worth of property was destroyed, most being Korean-owned businesses.
Racial tensions between the Black and Korean communities had been steadily rising for years, and exploded after the killing of Latasha Harlins, and the acquittal of the four police officers who were responsible in the Rodney King beatings.
Unfortunately, many of those tensions are still not completely resolved today. Neither are the systemic inequities experienced by both communities of color, whose root cause is white supremacy, that have kept all communities of color divided and in competition with each other for too long.
Rather than focusing on these differences, and continuing to participate in these toxic systems of oppression, we must work to heal our misunderstandings and biases, and work in true partnership with each other. In particular, the Korean and Asian American communities must begin to address the anti-blackness and internalized white supremacy in our cultures.
We must work in solidarity to demand actual change to the systems of oppression that keep us all down. This looks like investing in life affirming infrastructures in our communities, funding social services, education, housing, and healthcare. It is standing in solidarity with other communities of color and speaking out against the injustices of police brutality, xenophobia and racism that too many of us deal with daily and, too often, alone.
And this work begins by creating safe spaces for our communities to come together and have the necessary and difficult conversations that still need to take place. There is still a lot of pain between the Black and Korean communities, exacerbated by the LA Uprising, that needs to be addressed and healed.
KRC is committed to creating that space, and starting those conversations and is proactively working on numerous resources and events to help bring our communities together to heal. On the anniversary of the LA Uprising, we acknowledge and honor the lives lost and affected by those traumatic events, committing ourselves to making sure that such tragedy would not occur again. We look forward to changing the future for the better by focusing on collective and transformative change. Let us reimagine a future where each and everyone of us thrives because we truly have each other's backs.