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Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, by Nancy Abelmann and John Lie. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, 272 pp. $29.95 paper.
The City of Angels has a long history that is studded with frequent racial riots. As early as 1871 a mob action was taken against defenseless Chinese residents whose homes and shops were destroyed by whites who felt the Chinese were responsible for their unemployment. The riots that broke out in 1965, often labeled the 1965 Watts Rebellion, were certainly part of the long legacy of a city plagued by racial and ethnic conflicts resulting from unjust discrimination. The most recent race riots that Los Angeles experienced in the spring of 1992 were not unique when viewed within the context of race relations in the past. The main characters may have changed, but the stage remains almost the same.
The 1992 Los Angeles riots were triggered by people who felt that an injustice had been committed in the verdict of the Rodney King case. Although the rioters may have initially been motivated by a desire to seek vengeance against whites, they quickly turned their anger against Koreans, thereby making the riots appear to be a racial conflict between African Americans and Korean Americans. The media, in their constant search for exciting and unusual coverage for national and international broadcasts, capitalized on this aspect, no doubt contributing to the widespread public perception that the riots were exclusively a conflict between the two minority groups. The authors reject this misconception and attempt to put the 1992 riots in wider historical, sociological, and political perspective. Three major themes, (1) the transnational character of the Korean diaspora, (2) the heterogeneity of Korean Americans, and (3) a critique of American ideologies, run throughout the book, which is divided into six chapters.
Chapter 1, "The Los Angeles Riots: the Korean American Story," argues against the notion that the 1992 riots were a repetition of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. When the former is viewed within the context of the latter, then the place of Korean Americans is not only minimized, but also lost. The notion that the 1992 riots were nothing but a reprise of the 1965 Watts Riots distorts...