THE BIG RETHINK
Racism: A White Man’s Journey Through Compton
God’s love has many faces, not just the ones you recognize
Language Warning: I tell these stories as they happened, in the mood and language of the day. If you are easily offended, don’t read this article.
There is only one reason that I (an early 20s middle-class white man from the suburbs) would ever step into the Los Angeles ghetto community of Compton, CA.
Money.
Economic recessions mean you go where you have to go to survive, and in 1992, Compton is where The Company sent me.
By reputation, Compton was not a place for white suburbanites to wander into. If you stumbled into it by accident, the impression I had was you would be raped or killed just for asking directions.
Let me set the backdrop for you.
In the early 1990s, it was urban chic to be “gangsta.” Movies like Boyz n the Hood were being nominated for Academy Awards, making gang culture a pop-culture urban force. Also, music, such as N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, cemented gangsta rap and hip-hop into bonafide musical art forms in the broader American psyche, further fueled by the explosion of the West Coast-East Coast hip-hop rivalry within the record industry…
