ling Twilight.
The very fact of the 1992 riot is evidence of despair enacted. But the content of despair and hope alike can be so subtle as to convey the opposite of what it seems. This appears to be particularly true of persons affected by (or supposedly affected by) the King verdict. Now the obvious choice for analysis in this regard might seem to be members of the black community, but there is a danger of making too much of black-white discrepancies of perception in this kind of analysis--not because they are not true and important; they are. The danger is that they could fall prey to a peculiar ordinariness, despite Maxine Waters's impassioned reference to "the unheard" (162) of American society in general and Los Angeles in particular, to whom expectations of police brutality in the midst of isolation from mainstream opportunities and benefits have become a way of life. Accordingly, the focus of this research is on monologues from nonblacks, and principally on the subtext of what is said. For it appears that certain statements convey more about the content of hope and despair in Los Angeles than their surface words would indicate.
We begin with the statement of Mike Davis, whom Smith describes as a writer and urban critic (28). Over lunch at Los Angeles's pricey Biltmore Hotel, Davis, who is white, articulates his observed understanding of hope and despair in the city. Having come of age in the city in the 1960s, a child of the working class, Davis explains, he appreciates the attempt of the civil rights movement to alter for the better the political realities of minorities, so that "black kids can be surfers too. . . . And the whole ethos of the civil rights struggle and movement for equality in California's history was to make this available to everyone" (30-1). This description of a political movement informed by hope is accompanied by recollections that economic realities of the 1960s were more hopeful than they were by ...