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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 Paul Parker, Chairperson for Free the LA Four Plus Defense Committee. It’s October 1993. Smith and Parker, who is dressed smartly, sit in Parker’s girlfriend’s Westwood house. While Parker wore African clothing in court, he wears “Ivy League clothing” here to fit in.
“Ivy League clothing” signifies the style of dress deemed acceptable by America’s wealthy, educated elite. Parker wears these clothes to gain acceptance from the dominant culture he has to work with to advance his grassroots campaign.
Themes
Parker describes how Gates and the police department were criticized for attending a benefit banquet while the rebellion took place outside. He sees this as proof of how far Gates went to “get these brothers.” When the police came for Parker’s brother, Lance, they sent two SWAT teams, one to Lance’s residence and the other to their mother’s. There were cameras everywhere, and police were spreading the rumor that Lance was a notorious gang member and drug dealer. In reality, Lance is college-educated and employed at a law firm. Yet, the media attacked him, accusing him of shooting Reginald Denny and blowing up gas pumps. They brought up Parker’s father’s death in the streets a decade ago and tried to frame it as “black-on-black crime.”
Parker is referring to former LAPD police chief Daryl Gates’s decision to attend a benefit for opponents of Prop F (an amendment that would impose term limits on LA police chiefs) at the time the verdict for Rodney King’s Simi Valley trial was announced. Parker views Gates’s absence as symbolic proof that Gates is more invested in political ambition than serving the community. Parker’s critique of law enforcement’s campaign against his brother focuses on the misconception that Black people are naturally criminals. There’s an assumption that Lance must have been involved in Denny’s attack because his father was a criminal, and it was a given that Lance would follow in this path, too. These assumptions clash with Lance’s reality, which Parker construes as a success story of upward mobility.
Themes
Parker refused to let the police continue their smear campaign against Lance. He tells Smith about how he quit his job with law enforcement (Parker had been with the Army for six years) and took up advocacy full time. He was elected chairperson of the Free the LA Four Plus Defense Committee and has worked there ever since. Parker argues that the LA Four were targeted because Denny is white. Were he a person of color, Parker argues, nobody would care. There are a lot of people who get beaten every day, yet no news stations report it. In contrast, Denny is paraded around the nation, invited onto talk shows and celebrated.
Parker’s talk of law enforcement’s smear campaign against Lance resonates with Angela King’s earlier monologue about law enforcement’s campaign against Rodney King. Both cases try to impose some moral or character flaw onto their target to validate their own bureaucratic misconduct and poor policing. The smear campaigns directly contrast the media’s depiction of Denny, whose beating is condemned with no questions about his private life or personality. Parker suggests that Black people are held to a higher standard to have their injustices taken seriously. They have to be upstanding citizens to matter, whereas white folks need only exist.
Themes
Parker doesn’t feel empathy for Denny because so few people feel empathy for Black people, who are regularly pulled over, made to exit their cars, and sit idly on the curb while the police rummage through their cars, all while knowing they are innocent. Parker argues that Denny should be happy he’s alive, since many Black people who didn’t attend the riots would wish him dead. Meanwhile, the state did everything they could to convict the LA Four.
Parker can’t sympathize with Denny because he sees the public outcry over Denny’s attack as a blatant example of the double standard of pursuing justice Black versus white people. He tries to illustrate how society bends over backward to pursue justice for white people but seems to believe that the Black people ought to accept some degree of injustice or unfairness in their lives.
Themes
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Parker recalls speaking out on April 29, describing the moment as “good for the soul.” He ran track and played other sports that day, and the feeling the riots gave him was better than any wins he’d ever achieved in an official athletic competition. He has many awards and trophies from his days as an athlete, but April 29 made him feel better than any of the trophies ever could. They lost 700 million dollars.
Parker’s description of the riots as being “good for the soul” casts the violence as therapeutic. It speaks to the level of oppression the Black community experiences that violence and chaos becomes restorative. His comments also speak to Parker’s philosophy on justice. He interprets seeking justice as making the oppressor pay for the harm they’ve done to the oppressed.
Themes
Next, Parker responds to claims that Black people “burned down your own neighborhoods.” In reality, most stores burned down belonged to Korean people, who Parker states are “like the Jews in the day.” He recalls demolishing droves of Korean businesses—of accomplishing “more in three days than all these / politicians been doin’ for years.” Now, everyone feels free and vindicated, having shown the world that Black people are done accepting the world’s injustices.
Parker’s discriminatory remarks against both Korean American and Jewish people shows how systems of oppression gain power by pitting marginalized groups against each other. This way, marginalized groups remain in the dark about who their real enemy is (Smith implies that the enemy is the broader institutions that keep everyone in check) and instead, fight with each other.
Themes
Next, Parker discusses the meaning of his movement’s motto: No Justice No Peace. When he has his own house one day, he vows to dedicate one room to the motto. Its walls will be decorated with newspaper clippings and other mementos so his son can see what his father accomplished and what it takes to be a strong Black man. To Parker, No Justice No Peace means that if there’s no justice for Black people, their oppressors will have no peace. A person might have escaped with only “a dent in [their] head from now on,” but it may be that their daughter or someone else down the line suffers more severe consequences. Parker vows that when he dies, he won’t die peacefully if there’s no justice. He sees himself as “one brother / doing the work of / on brother.”
Parker’s riot room tribute differs greatly from the riot room Denny described in his earlier monologue. Denny’s room emphasizes compassion and forgiveness while Parker’s highlights violence, retribution, and unrest. However, his motto “No Justice, No Peace” makes an important point, and one that others throughout the play make in different ways: that until something happens to improve conditions in LA’s poorer communities, everyone is going to continue to suffer.
Themes
