When I Was A Kid and Los Angeles Burned on TV

Perhaps my earliest memories in my childhood of anyone overtly talking about race involved seeing footage from the L.A. Riots.  

In May of 1992, I was finishing second grade in a quiet Midwestern town.  Nearly all the children in my life were white, the adults and authority figures in my life even more so (a reality demonstrated by the fact that I never remember actually hearing anyone talk about race until I was in second grade and the conversation was only provoked by a national news story).  Between church activities and the religious school I attended, most of those adults were Christians.

Here’s what I remember.

I remember the adults in my life talking about the riots in gatherings where kids listen in on the things adults are saying without the adults realizing or caring.  I can’t remember much of what was specifically said.  I’ve strained in the last few days to remember specific comments.  I can’t. I can only hear bits and pieces, and I remember where I was when I heard them.

But I do remember the sum total of what was said and what I absorbed.  In totality, it rings in my mind like a tsk-tsk and a disappointed, shaking head.  A scolding of lawlessness.  A fear about the moral disintegration of our nation.  A shaming of people - black people - practicing disorder in the streets.  “Rioting is wrong.”  That came through loud and clear.

Of all the footage from the riots that spring, I have one clear memory.  It was of white truck driver Reginald Denny being beaten nearly to death by four black men as news helicopters flew overhead.  It might be the only actual scene from the riots I remember from the news, I’m guessing because this was one of the things the adults in my life offered commentary on the most.  It’s interesting to me that this beating, far more than Rodney King’s, is what sticks out in my mind.

I don’t remember much overtly racial talk.  But the rioting was discussed, and the rioting was bad.  Also, that neighborhood was talked about as being bad (just look at what happens when white people drive into it).  As an adult I look back and realize everyone I overheard at school and church events and picnics that spring and summer were talking about race even if they weren’t.  And this boy was listening.

I don’t recall any adult sitting down with me to intentionally talk about what was happening.  If anyone did, it would have been my mom (she was quite good at this kind of thing).  But I don’t remember it.  If it did happen, it was crowded out by the disapproving head shakes of the adults in my life.  That’s what I remember.

There’s a lot I could say as I reflect on this.  I’ve been reflecting on the way a middle-class, white boy’s perception of race and class was being formed, maybe unintentionally, by the adult figures in his life, about how nothing is caught more than taught more than fear, about the lasting impression that certain places (and the people that lived in those places who looked different than me) were dangerous.  

But I really just want to make one observation here.

The environments I grew up in were literally saturated with the Bible.  School, home, church - for me, every space I stepped into was filled with people sincerely serious about Scripture.  I’m grateful for this.  I still love the Bible.  

I love the Bible because I believe Jesus to be the Word of God.  Truth is a person - Jesus, sent from the Father to us.  The Bible, from beginning to end, is the story of Jesus, the Alpha and Omega, the One who is Himself Beginning and End.  

In this story, we find our stories as well.  The deep brokenness of humanity with its bent toward self-destruction and isolation, the addiction to empire and the reality of its oppression, our pride rooted in rebellion and insecurity.  

When Jesus appears in the biblical narrative, He comes announcing a Kingdom.  A new order of righteousness, peace, and joy.  The Kingdom is wherever God is making what is wrong, right and whatever is disordered, ordered under His gracious and benevolent rule.  Wherever.  This Kingdom is for everything.  In the New Testament Gospels, we see this Kingdom is for broken bodies and oppressed people.  It’s for the outcast and forgotten. It’s for sinners. It’s for relationships infected with pride and those exhausted in the pursuit of empire’s empty promises.  This Kingdom is other-worldly, but it’s for everything in this world.  There’s nowhere it doesn’t want to fill and heal.  It touches everything with the restorative power of divine love.

What a story.  So rich.  I grew up in environments literally saturated with it.  It makes me wonder why I was left with such depleted resources to makes sense of what was happening in Los Angeles.  

Rioting is bad.

Some neighborhoods are dangerous.

The end.

Twenty-five years later, I watched a documentary on Netflix.  Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 explores the events and conditions leading up to the riots.  It’s especially powerful because it includes interviews of many of the people who were faces on the news during that time, including some of the men involved in beating Reginald Denny.  The film is incredibly humanizing.  In it, people express their pain, frustrations, regrets, and lingering resentments.  These are people - white, black, Asian - experiencing the reality of poverty, oppression, fear, and anger.  

It’s a sad documentary.  If the Gospel is good news, the story of the riots in L.A. are filled with bad news - bad news that is both personal and systemic; individual and communal.  It’s bad news that is layered on top of bad news - complex with no easy answers.  It’s the bad news of one group of people coming into conflict with the bad news of another.  It’s the bad news of both the oppressed and the oppressor.  

I would argue that the good news of the Kingdom that Jesus announced is built even for this bad news.  I’m not suggesting the answers are simplistic and easy; if we fall for that trap we’ve only minimized and perpetuated people’s pain.  I’m just saying I think it’s possible to locate the story of the L.A. Riots within the story of Jesus and His Kingdom and then wrestle with the implications.  What does the story of a peasant King - part of a minority people oppressed by empire, announcing a new Kingdom not dependent on the false idolatries of empire and in opposition to the demonic principalities and powers that animate it - what does that King and this Kingdom have to say to Los Angeles in 1992?  What does this story have to offer the black men and women, white police officers and politicians, and Korean shop owners in Let It Fall?   

Maybe I don’t fully know, but I bet it’s more than “rioting is bad.”  Isn’t this story richer than that?  Doesn’t it have more capacity to engage, wrestle, and sit with the pain? Can’t it imagine more redemptive possibilities?  Surely, the crucified King of the Jews has more to say than, “Rioting is bad.”

I’m not trying to be overly judgmental about the adults in my life in the early 1990s.  Many of them loved me well and imparted to me things that I’m still grateful for, including my love of Scripture.  And memory is a fickle thing.  Maybe I’m not recalling things right.  

But I do wonder why it feels like so many of the Christian adults in my life had so few resources to really wrestle with what was happening when they held such a rich story in their hands and taught it often.  Why couldn’t they see the raw honesty of Scripture’s narrative about how empire oppresses the poor and steals the rights of the oppressed and drives wedges between people?  Why couldn’t they see that when Jesus stood up in the synagogue that day to read from the scroll of Isaiah and declare that His anointing was for the liberation of the oppressed it might have something to do with what was happening in the neighborhoods on TV?  And if they could see it, why didn’t I hear them talk about it?  I learned the story, but the story was never quite connected to the story happening on the news.  Rioting is bad.

Maybe it’s because for some of us, if we find ourselves in the story of the Kingdom’s liberation from oppression, we might fear to face where we are located in that story.  The story finds us, and wherever it locates us, we have to repent from there.  “The Kingdom of God has come near.  Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15) True repentance is always accompanied by action - repenting of our complicity with injustice looks like proactively getting involved in justice. It’s easier to tell other people to repent instead of facing our own need for repentance.  True for me, at least.

Yesterday an African-American friend called me to discuss a passage of Scripture she had been exploring.  It had to do with Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane - that night when empire, in its religious and pagan forms, began to rage with satanic power against the Son of Man.  We talked together about what these verses could mean for Minneapolis and George Floyd, for white people and black people, for politicians and police.  I don’t know that we reached solid conclusions, but I think we both knew this story - in black and red letters on the pages of our Bibles opened before us - is a story for our time.  In fact, we have to locate the stories in our Facebook feeds within that story or we’ll succumb to hopelessness, abandon the cause of the oppressed, and be totally irrelevant to the real pain in our communities and nation.  

If you’re a Christian, the story you hold is too rich for “rioting is bad.”  I want to develop more capacity to see the pain and brokenness caused by empire and the implications of the Kingdom’s rule in opposition to that empire.  

Rioting is a sociological fact, a result of empire’s delusions in every age of human history.  Certainly this can be observed in the historical record, but we can see it in our Bibles too.  The Bible is so honest.  Rioting is a fact like so many other things are a fact because of the brokenness of this world - a fact like sin, sickness, and violence in all its forms wielded by both oppressed and oppressor.  You could wish it wasn’t there, but it is there for a host of complex reasons.  In fact, it can’t be wished away or even moralized away any more than the rest of broken creation could ever get better by just preaching at it to reform.

It needs a Kingdom and a King who actually saves.  It needs power that can actually break cycles and chains - from streets to halls of power.  And Jesus has told us this Kingdom is here - actually here now - even while we wait for its future fullness.  

Tonight, I plan on talking about the riots with my kids around the dinner table.  I’m going to show them some pictures and videos.  They need to see what’s happening.  They need to acknowledge the violence of empire against George Floyd.  But I also want them to know the story I teach them and they hear me preach about and we sing about in church is so much richer than “rioting is bad.”  I want them to know Jesus doesn’t for a second avoid neighborhoods because they are perceived to be dangerous.  In fact, He came for the very places where flames and tear gas and weeping manifest our broken systems.  He’s still coming to these places today.

And I want them to believe that His Kingdom is for this.  If it’s not, I’m not sure we believe in anything, and my kids might someday understandably question if we do.  I want them to wrestle with our place in this story as a white family that has experienced the historical, temporary, fleeting, imposter benefits of empire even as we try to be sojourners, people of the Kingdom.  I want them to ask questions.  I don’t care if we arrive at all the answers; we won’t.  I just want them to see that the story I hold out to them is built for this. It’s a story that means something for racism, policing, poverty, and violence.

I’m keenly aware that in 1992 I was listening to the adults in my life as they talked about a riot.  My kids are listening too.