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National Guard
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Katie Miller, a bookkeeper and accountant. She speaks loudly, quickly, and forcefully. Miller believes that talk of Black rioters targeting Korean stores isn’t entirely true. She suggests that the stores that were burned were owned by people who didn’t take the time to know the people who lived in their community. Miller also claims that it was Mexican people, not Black people, who looted in Koreatown. This is how it was during the 1965 Watts riots, too.
Miller tries to add nuance to the overgeneralized media accounts of the riots. She suggests that stores that were burned were targeted because their owners didn’t take the time to know or respect the communities they served—not because of race alone. While she tries to add complexity to the state of race relations between Black and Korean residents, however, she is quick to make generalized statements about Mexican people being solely responsible for the Koreatown lootings.
Themes
While Miller didn’t loot during these riots, she supports those who did. After things settled down, she walked through the neighborhood and came across Paul Moyer, a newscaster on Channel 4, out front of the Magnin store. When she turned on the news later, she saw Moyer reporting on the looting, referring to the looters as “thugs” and reminiscing about how he used to go into Magnin as a child. The comments enraged Miller, who wondered why Moyer thought it was okay for the looters to go into other stores, but not those he had a personal connection to—or stores where rich people shop.
Miller’s support for the riots comes from a deep frustration for the unequal treatment Black people receive in the eyes of the law and the media. She illustrates this latter point with her story about broadcaster Paul Moyer, who seems to place higher value on stores with which he has a personal, sentimental connection than the minority-owned businesses that were destroyed. Miller sees a double standard at play: the privileged classes are content to let minority-populated neighborhoods fall victim to economic disadvantage and violence, but the moment these social ills affect their neighborhoods, they consider it a tragedy.
Themes
