Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

“‘Why do I have to be on a side?’” 

This rhetorical question, issued by the former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, hangs over the entire play. It is with this question that Sheinbaum questions the wisdom of the “Us v. Them” outlook, particularly within the realm of justice and law enforcement. If Salas saw the police as his enemy, here the LAPD sees the gangs as theirs. When they ask Sheinbaum “which side you are on,” he sees the problem whole: the willful perpetuation of sides,divisions, and oppositions.

“What we do have is an opportunity to keep struggling and to do research and to organize.” 

Here is Zinzun’s positive program for change in the face of harsh, fresh evidence of systematic failure within the justice system. It is a vision rooted in his experience as a member of the Black Panther Party and in the successes he has achieved as an activist against police brutality. The struggle must go on, it must have a clear agenda, and it must take each temporary defeat as “an opportunity to keep struggling” in the name of justice.

“Who’s they?” 

Here is yet another simple, direct, rhetorical question, which demands to be held in mind throughout the play. Deciding and acting upon conceptions of “They” and “we” is one of the most crucial decisions anyone can make. In making it, one accepts one’s identity, group pride, and a sense of belonging and security in constant juxtaposition to an Other, an outsider, often enough an “enemy” who represents what one is not. Thinking in this way delimits and clarifies—it appears natural and easy—at the same time it short-circuits, distorts, and occludes genuine understanding, common humanity, and avenues for cooperation and friendship.

“[T]his is a city at war with its own children.” 

Davis sees the problem as a generational one, afflicting black and white and urban poor and suburban affluentalike, as community elders shy from talking directly to kids about what their needs are, what their dreams are, what obstacles they face and what opportunities they possess. The “city,” meaning presumably those in political and economic power, “refuses to talk to those children, [a]nd the city doesn’t want to face these kids” and they leave the inner-city blacks (blithely labeled as “gang-banger” and “looter”) to decimate themselves and the “white privileged kids” with no greater “freedom of movement” or purpose than “mall shopping” (31). 

“It’s the color, because we’re Black.” 

With perfect simplicity, Allison takes a bead on the situation. She has experienced it personally. Her sons have been killed and jailed without cause by police andhave been shipped (as young boys) out of their own neighborhoods and into gang zones to be attacked and perhaps killed. And because of this condition of blackness, it is permissible: “The woman that killed Tiny, she [has] a big plaque—woman of the year! Yeah, she shot him in the face […]” (38). There is little doubt here, and in other testimonies throughout the play, that being black welcomes not only discrimination but warrants police brutality. 

“The best we can do is hold up a bloodstained banner of a black struggle that is rooted in moral vision.” 

Here is Professor Cornel West’s partially resigned, yet undefeated declaration in favor of continuing the long “power struggle” to at last institute “fundamental […] change.” The struggle has been, and continues to be, marked in blood and punctuated with violence. West asks that “moral vision” lend justice to the bloodshed.

“We weren’t raised like this. We weren’t raised with no black and white thing. We were raised with all kinds of friends: Mexicans, Indians, Blacks, Whites, Chinese. You never would have known that something like this would happen to us.” 

King’s plea is not merely for racial tolerance but colorblind harmony. Unlike Reginald Denny’s call to see a “person,” not a “color” (112), King’s is not a retrospective awakening but a simple part of her upbringing. Here we find a very different narrative from either that of segregation or of Black Pride, the twin pillars of mid-twentieth-century black experience. Instead, King offers an alternative picture of racial diversity which reaches beyond the limited and limiting prism of American race relations which tends to see in mere black-and-white. King looks to her own vanished past and, in the process, offers us a possible future.

“‘You took upper-body-control holds away from us. Now we’re really gonna show you what you’re gonna get, with lawsuits and all the other things that are associated with it.’” 

Duke is putting in words what he believes was the general attitude of police chief Daryl Gates and the LAPD Command staff toward new regulations imposed by the Los Angeles City Council and Police Commission, regulations which took away chokeholds as a viable use-of-force and replaced them with implementing batons. It brazenly suggests a vendetta within the law enforcement community was destined to play out on the bodies of innocent victims.

“We just feel like we were pawns that were thrown away by the system.” 

Victimization knows few bounds in the Rodney King affair. Here a juror in the original Simi Valley case highlights the faceless brutalization of the justice system, one which makes pawns of criminals and law-abiding citizens alike. Assisted by the mass media, it seeks convenient scapegoats to mask its fundamental flaws. Instead of examining the system itself, individual police officers and individual jurors are made out to be the problem.

“You want to believe the officers, because they are [supposed] to help you, the law-abiding citizen.” 

Garcetti, explaining the “magic” of police officers’ courtroom testimony, hints at a breakdown between private hopes and civic ideals, a systematic failure evidenced by the reality in the streets. It has left citizens with an ongoing desire to believe,even in the face of dismantling proof. Garcetti also draws a clear line between whom this myth serves and protects and whom it does not. Whether the color of one’s skin is enough to place one outside the category, experience, and protection of “the law-abiding citizen” is a question Garcetti does not ask but which the surrounding interviews do, in a variety of ways.

“[T]his is not my United States anymore. This is sicko […] This is like being in a war zone.” 

Here is the unabashed voice of white resentment, aghast at being seemingly dispossessed of a city and a country over which it had assumed absolute control. The implicit suggestion is that one or another group deserves to lay claim to the nation and that, without this claim, the nation itself is unrecognizable. To see how this logic might already look from the other side appears to be beyond Tur’s ability to reason. Instead, the very face of resistance appears “sicko,” forcing white victims into a war-zone setting. (Tur’s is the first account in the text to invert the narrative of black victimhood during the King exposure and trials and replace it with white victimhood during the riots.) 

“You gotta look at history, baby, you gotta look at history […] Anything is never a problem ‘til the black man gets his hands on it. It was good for the NRA to have fully automatic weapons, but when the Afro-American people got hold of ‘em, it was a crime!”

Here we find expression of the historical consciousness of the racial double standard, in which white fears of black power lead to a manipulation of both the justice system and the narratives which sustain it. Power, even violent power, is only bad when it is black. 

“There is no who. Whaddya mean, who? No, just they […] It almost didn’t matter, it’s irrelevant. Somebody. It’s not us!” 

This is perhaps the clearest expression of the Us/Them mentality in the entire play. An obvious companion of Jason Sanford’s more general question (“Who’s they?”), this one makes clear how definitively lines are drawn in answer to it. Once the “they” and the “us” are established—not matter how that is done—there is simply no further need for further consideration. It’s simply “irrelevant.”

“The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, riot is the voice of the unheard.”

In a system of inequality, with the unequal ability to speak truth to power, those “unheard” may only be able to express themselves by infrequent and extraordinary means. When it happens, perhaps violently and seemingly without rationality, we must yet attempt to recognize the vision and hear the message. 

“[I]t’s not enough to say they’re insensitive or they don’t care. The really don’t know […] they really don’t see it, they really don’t understand it, they really don’t see their lives in relationship to solving these kinds of problems.” 

Waters is highlighting the fundamental experiential and ideological distance between everyday citizens (and their local problems) and the consciousness/consciences of their appointed representatives in the nation’s capital. It is a knowledge and empathy gap which prevents the need for serious change from ever being deeply acknowledged, much less amenable to decisive action. 

“[Y]ou didn’t hear about the Lopezes or the Vaccas or the, uh, Quintanas or the, uh, Tarvins. You didn’t hear about them, but you heard about the Reginald Denny beating, the Reginald Denny beating, the Reginald Denny beating. This one white boy paraded all around this nation to go do every talk show there is, get paid left and right. Oh, Reginald Denny, this innocent white man […] a white victim, you know, beaten down by some blacks. ‘Innocent.’” 

Parker’s anger at the disparity in the valuation of white lives and those of everyone else exposes just how many victims the Reginald Denny incident put out of sight—many of whom were Hispanic, a point only lightly emphasized in the play (see Elvira Evers and Julio Menjivar, e.g.). Parker shows not only the frustration of a system wherein whites have more power but also that the victims are not strictly black. In the process, he tacitly suggests the solution—a lending of voice and representation—will need to be broadly inclusive. 

“This isn’t somebody else’s house, it’s our own house. This is the city we are living in. It’s our house […] start a fire in the basement and, you know, nobody’s gonna be left on the top floor. It’s one house. And shutting the door in your room, it doesn’t matter.” 

Sellars offers recognition of the absurdity of ever assuming one can shield oneself from others’ problems. We cannot cordon off certain geographies (the ghetto, for instance) and institutions to effectively place ourselves outside (perhaps above and beyond) the “system.” It is a riot-prompted reassertion of the founding motto, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” 

“It was, I think, a media fest of making white people scared of the African-American community […] and nothing had changed.” 

Weinstein strikes a tone of despair over how the Rodney King incident managed to invert itself. What had initially highlighted the issue of police brutality disproportionately visited upon the black population became, through the riots,yet another opportunity for whites to engage in scaremongering. Joined to a long, long legacy of racial distrust and animosity, it was easy to see that “nothing had changed.” 

“[I]t happened before. That’s what I’m telling you. It happened before. There was just as much commitment, there was just as much passion and violence and hate. See, after the Watts riots there was something called the McClellan Commission. Fine. That was for two years and we forgot about Watts. So here we are again.” 

Chandler clarifies Weinstein (and re-emphasizes Maxine Waters) in his caution against the failure of historical memory and the lessons of the past. Bearing witness to history repeating itself, Chandler makes a demand for more than mere functional and perfunctory responses: a new commission, speeches, and so on. 

“I think that all one has to do is ask the Vietnamese or Saddam Hussein about the power and weaponry and the arsenal of the United States government and its willingness to use it to get to understanding what this is about.” 

True to the Black Panthers’ “internationalist” vision, as Cornel West depicts it, ex-Panther Elaine Brown neatly lends a global vision to the events in Los Angeles, raising a serious question about U.S. racial politics and the meting out of justice on a worldwide scale. “Be conscious” and look at the big picture, she demands. Look beyond one’s own little corner to grasp the magnitude of the problem and the breadth of the resources against which one must mobilize. 

“We have to interpret more in twilight, we have to make ourselves part of the act […]”

This, in essence, is what the entire play is about: the moment to reinvest, the opportunity to reassess, to re-engage, to become “part of the act.” It is the twilight moment on which the ultimate meaning and significance of the event depends. 

“Is it the truth of Koon and Powell being guilty or is it the truth of the society that has to find them guilty in order to protect itself?”

Braun takes measure of the process of convenient scapegoating. To find individuals guilty is, in many cases, to spare a fuller accounting of deep-seated flaws within society itself, for which a sharing of blame and accountability becomes necessary. It’s easier to find two officers guilty than to find ourselves guilty. 

“The fire is still there […] It’s still dere. It canuh burst out anytime.” 

For Korean-Americans, who were disproportionately targeted during the riots, there remains a visceral sense of uncertainty and personal danger. There is fear in the air: “Everybody’s scared in L.A.” (213)