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The Unheard
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 Maxine Waters in Waters’s office in Los Angeles. It’s the winter of 1993. Waters’s original office was burned down during the riots. She speaks of how out of touch Washington is with “what really goes on in the world.” It’s more than just being “insensitive” or indifferent: “they really / don’t / know.” She laughs as she recalls the ways she forced her peers to see their ignorance. For instance, when she heard about the White House’s plans for an “urban package,” she was shocked that they wouldn’t involve her or the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, John Lewis. In fact, she only heard about the meeting on television.
In emphasizing Washington’s ignorance about the inner workings of life in the U.S.’s urban centers, Waters shows how powerful government institutions struggle to govern effectively because they’re so removed and impersonal. She portrays this ignorance in a detached manner, framing it as less a nefarious example of racial prejudice and more a systemic flaw. Put another way, she suggests that the oppression of minority communities is less a cause of calculated racist behavior as it is the consequence of a system that upholds racism as the status quo.
Themes
When Waters called the Speaker to ask why she wasn’t invited, he claimed not to control White House invitations—that’s the president’s job. When the Speaker told her he was on his way to the meeting, Waters, infuriated, announced that she was, too. When she arrived at the White House and asked where her seat was, the room was silent. When the president arrived, he appeared confused but acted cordially. After some back-and-forth about the bill, Waters told the president about all the things the recently destroyed, hopeless city of Los Angeles needed to recover: job programs, stipends, and help for the young people who have dropped out of society.
It's unclear whether Water’s absent invitation to the negotiations for the White House’s “urban package” was a calculated decision or a mistake. Either way, the oversight demonstrates how institutions inhibit effectual change at structural and operational levels. Waters’s background as a Black woman who grew up in urban poverty puts her in the unique position to combine her firsthand knowledge of urban struggle with her institutional connections to create changes that could actually help Los Angeles’s communities in crisis.
Themes
Waters told the president he should ask Jack Kemp, who was working on housing projects, to vouch for her statements. Kemp protested, claiming it wasn’t his department and would be better addressed by Secretary Lynn Martin. Martin was absent from the meaning, but her representative, a Black man who didn’t look Black, addressed the president and confirmed the accuracy of all of Waters’s statements. The president appeared uncomfortable, fixating on another point Waters made about the Justice Department never doing anything about the excessive force police inflict on cities. Martin’s representative from the Department of Labor turned to the President and confirmed Waters’s words, stating, “This country is falling / apart.”
The president shifts focus away from Los Angeles’s suffering communities to police brutality because police brutality is more easily addressed via symbolic gesture, i.e., banning choke-holds to appear invested in fixing corruption while not doing anything to fix it at the broader, systemic level. Martin’s representative, meanwhile, implies that no matter where one puts their focus, the problem is the same: without changing something and doing more to serve poor urban communities, the country will continue to disintegrate.
Themes
