Two Communities, One City
The Story of Black and Brown in L.A.
The Black and Latino communities of Los Angeles share an intertwined, yet distinct history of segregation, gentrification and misrepresentation in the U.S. Despite the tense history and divided communities, today’s political turmoil and the current Trump administration has prompted both groups to come together because of what Jasmine Richards-Abdullah calls,
“the same problems and the same hurts.” The same hurts, Richards-Abdullah said, “is what made me want to organize the people.”
And organize, she has. As the founder of Black Lives Matter Pasadena (BLM), Richards-Abdullah made history when she was the first Black woman in the nation to be convicted of attempted felony lynching for shielding a Black woman from Pasadena police during a “Peace March” that she organized with BLM Pasadena in June 2016.
Since then, Richards-Abdullah has continued to organize and protest police brutality, racial profiling and xenophobia by cultivating a community space for the Black and Latino community to discuss these issues and possible solutions.
One of these spaces, the Benjamin Franklin Branch Library in East Los Angeles, hosted a panel discussion titled “Past, Present, Future: Black & Brown L.A.” on Saturday, Feb. 25, 2017. Moderated by Los Angeles-based journalist Walter Thompson-Hernandez, the four-member panel, including Richards-Abdullah, discussed the developing relationship between the Black and Latino communities in Los Angeles as a response to growing tensions stemming from the 2016 presidential election.
The other three panel members, Alfredo Gama, a Chicanx activist and member of the Paplotl Brown Berets, Dr. Rebecca Romo, Ph.D., sociologist and professor at Santa Monica College, and Caro Vera, a graduate student at UCLA’s Urban and Regional Planning program, joined Richards-Abdullah to discuss issues ranging from the Black communities that were historically gentrified by the Latino population to the shared impact of the current Trump administration on these communities.
During the event, Richards-Abdullah discussed Trump’s immigration policies, encouraging cross-cultural support between the Black and Latino community to resist police brutality and deportation. “Do this because if we don’t do this, we’re going to die,” pleaded Richard-Abdullah. “Do this because if we don’t do this, my friend right here might have to go back home. And I can’t organize alone without Alfredo [Gama].”
Afterward, the panel went on to discuss the intersectionality of being Black and undocumented, with a spotlight on the Haitian refugee crisis in the United States.
“Black people are four to five times more likely to be deported because being Black in America means already being criminalized,” explained Gama. “Right now, we have a Haitian refugee crisis. Haiti went through a whole hurricane and right now they’re [undocumented Haitian immigrants] getting deported and we’re not talking about it.”
Romo, a sociologist who studied the “Blaxican” identity — people of Black and Mexican ethnicity, discussed the intersectionality of people who identify as Blaxican and shared her own experiences with anti-Black attitudes within the Latino community. Romo, who has two sons that identify as Blaxican, faced strong backlash from some of her Mexican family members when she started a family with a Black man 20 years ago. Despite the initial rejection, however, Romo went on to share, her family members changed their attitude once her son was born.
In addition to social attitudes and systematic issues facing the Black and Latino community, Vera, also a community organizer in the L.A. region, went on to discuss mental health issues. Centering on the lack of awareness and importance placed on mental health as another major issue affecting Black and Latino communities, Vera said,
“Why don’t we get the opportunity to have healthy, adequate mental health services? That needs to be something that needs to be a conversation for us because if the state’s not killing us, if the police is not killing us, we do things that end up killing us.”
Vera then went on to stress, “How do we find ways to support each other through our mental health? That is important — we deserve that.”
