Nearly 30 years ago my wife and I returned to Los Angeles from a month abroad, our last hurrah before we settled into a couple decades of parenting. We landed at LAX just 24 hours before the Rodney King verdict was announced, and having been away for several weeks, we were embarrassingly out of touch with what was going on.
The events that transpired are still hard to fathom. It was inconceivable that the jury would find the defendants not guilty. It was even harder to deconstruct and understand the many layers of racial tension that led to five days of riots. Clearly a slow-burning rage, stoked by decades of oppression and this miscarriage of justice, had erupted in violence against “others”.
It was a lot to process at the time. My wife was eight months pregnant. We lived near the corner of Beverly and La Brea, a main artery down into the heart of South Central LA. Not far from us, a photo supply shop was set on fire. We heard gunshots, and police racing up and down our street. I crawled up on the roof of our duplex to scan the troubled horizon as helicopter search lights strafed the area. It was hard to believe that we were bringing a newborn into a world so full of strife.
A week after our son arrived, I decided that it was time to come to terms with what had happened. There were reports that the Korean community had borne the brunt of the looting. I drove down La Brea on a glittery Saturday morning while a Metropolitan Opera broadcast blasted out of my car radio. Encountering the blackened rubble of the very buildings that I had dreamily driven past only weeks before, I wept. This was the USA, not Jakarta. It all seemed so foreign, otherworldly. I wondered what strange, fire-breathing dragon had caused the devastation.
Living in LA during 1992 had begun to become a challenge for us. The riots, floods, fires and earthquakes seemed almost biblical. We decided to flee to the safety of the leafy suburbs of Connecticut (ironically moving only five minutes away from a similar slow-burning neighborhood in Bridgeport), where we hoped the plague would spare us. But the fang-toothed monster continued to haunt us, intermediated by the nightly news of ghastly crimes against humanity, year after year after year.
Eventually through a twist of fate, we became friends with Anna Deavere Smith and began to follow her incisive explorations of the fraying social fabric of America. As she delved into the civil rights movement, the challenges of our healthcare system, and the school-to-prison pipeline, it became evermore apparent that a complex web of competing personal truths underlie our inability to find common ground. As individuals witnessing or participating in the events of our day, we develop narratives of our experience that often do not encompass and acknowledge the perspectives of others. Under these circumstances, a reconciliation between all the parties is implausible. An uneasy, resignation that there were things that we might not be able to change set in.
It was therefore a complete surprise that Ms. Smith’s current, ensemble production of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 at the Signature Theater in NYC, a verbatim re-enactment of her conversations in the aftermath of the riots, has unleashed a sense of visceral outrage in me.
Where does this outrage originate? Certainly, some of my anger arises out of the realization that thirty years later not enough has changed. But most of my ire derives from pure exhaustion with the high-pitched rancor of our current “civil” discourse. The real dragon in the room (for me) isn’t a particular form of discrimination. It is our inability to have productive dialogue.
This point was hammered home as the ensemble cast of Twilight quickly shape-shifted in and out of a myriad of characters. Every individual raised their voice to be heard, commanding our loyalties in such rapid succession that it was challenging to know where one stood. Like the characters on stage, we are no less incapable of having civil conversation with disastrous consequences.
Ms. Smith depicts both our need for dialogue (and our inability to engage in it) in the play’s new scene “Dinner Party That Never Happened”. Although a broad-minded range of views is charmingly articulated by Alice Waters, (Jin Ho Lee) a shop owner, Paul Parker (Chair, Free the L.A. Four Plus Defense Committee), Elaine Brown (Former Head of the Black Panther Party), Bill Bradley, and Tom Choi (Pastor, Westwood Presbyterian Church), none of the participants in this imaginary “discussion” really seem to listen. Rather, they expound their positions as the dialogue moves around the table.
The root problem here is that listening requires that we use relational capacities that are conditioned out of us, because most men and women subscribe to a dominance-based culture of masculinity that prizes power and aggression. We very seldom witness the impact of leaders who understand that real strength arises from the ability to form community and connection. We are doomed to be a nation of warring tribes until we figure out how to listen first, then respond and act.
The question is how. If our capacities to be good listeners are diminished because our society values and rewards dominance, how can we recover the skills that we so desperately need, especially when they are not being modeled by most adults? I believe that listening is a habit of mind, an attitudinal position that we can cultivate in many domains of our personal experience, and it must start early. As parents and teachers (and later as mentors), we can help the generations that follow us understand that optimal performance in life is not about dominating the conversation with “the right” answers, but asking good questions and working collaboratively with others to frame innovative solutions. As couples struggling to find a dynamic equilibrium in our relationships, and as any good marriage counselor will affirm, we experience success only as much as we deeply listen and carefully respond to our significant others with loving-kindness. If developing our relational muscles is a challenge with our life partners, there are additional ways to improve. My son took an acting class, others do improve to advance their skill in responding to the material that we are given by their colleagues to play with. Or we might pick up jazz, learn to cook, dance. If all else fails, we certainly have a deep-seated incentive to cultivate our listening skills through the free exchange of creative ideas in bed. Am I suggesting that our nation’s leaders need couples therapy? Perhaps.
At the end of the performance, I found myself sputtering with indignation as never before. When will this nation finally have a real conversation, not a shouting match, about race, economic injustice, climate change, the fragility of our democracy, and stolen elections. It’s long past time that we learn to listen to each other, airing our grievances respectfully, with consideration, kindness, and compassion, and work towards accommodations that we can all accept.
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This post was previously published on Equality Includes You.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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