The Pandemic and Protests Have Exposed the Truth About California - The New York Times

PASADENA — California, the novelist Wallace Stegner wrote, is like the rest of America, only more so. That truism has played out in recent days in scenes of triumph, anguish and incongruity, a mirror of the country seen through a distinctly California lens.

Peaceful demonstrators were clubbed, sprayed, injured with rubber bullets, zip-tied and detained for hours on charges that have already been dismissed. In the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, the National Guard patrolled the streets. After a three-hour debate about civil liberties, a divided Berkeley City Council extended the city’s curfew; a week later, the Council banned the use of tear gas in demonstrations.

The overwhelming images were of young, multiracial crowds that multiplied by the day. Freeways that had just begun to see traffic again after weeks of eerie emptiness filled with protesters. In the tiny Gold Country city of Sonora, hundreds rallied for hours, dispersing only after the sheriff and police chief took a knee in solidarity. On the sixth day of demonstrations in Oakland, when protesters defied the curfew, the tear gas and stinger ball grenades of previous nights gave way to dancing in the streets.

Just as events have shattered assumptions about American exceptionalism, the pandemic and protests have exposed fault lines that render California more similar to the rest of America than many might prefer to believe. For all its claims to exceptionalism, California has an anything-but-exceptional history of institutional racism, fueled by decades of redlining, exclusionary zoning, criminal justice policies that disproportionately hurt black and brown men and failing public schools. Black people are far more likely than white people to die at birth, to be stopped by the police, to be homeless, to be in jail or prison.

The coronavirus has exacerbated racial inequities in health and wealth, disproportionately affecting blacks even as the economic free fall endangers services on which they depend. In Los Angeles County, where blacks are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as whites, a primary source of care is threatened by state budget cuts. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital is the successor to a hospital opened in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, a response to the abysmal lack of health care in the predominantly black community. Today, one of the most frequent operations performed there is amputation, a consequence of the high diabetes rates.

As the state faces a deficit of more than $50 billion over the next budget cycles, draconian cuts in services will compound the misery for those with the least to fall back on. In Los Angeles, a 2016 study found black and ethnic Mexican households had about 1 percent of the wealth of whites.

That stark reality, as Black Lives Matter protesters point out, is inextricably linked to the criminal justice system they are now trying to dismantle. California averages between 100 and 200 deadly encounters with the police per year. Two have taken place since the protests began. As thousands paid respects to George Floyd in Houston, a crowd gathered at an Oakland school to mourn one of its former students: Erik Salgado, shot by California Highway Patrol officers in a car with his pregnant girlfriend, who was wounded. A few days earlier and a few towns over, another death: A Vallejo police officer with reportedly a history of shooting incidents fired through his windshield and killed Sean Monterrosa, on his knees, unarmed, in the parking lot of a store that had been looted.

Response to the deaths, and protesters’ broader demands, has been muted among those elected and appointed to lead. In this respect, too, California has proved unexceptional. Public officials took knees, met with community leaders in black churches, issued news releases. They struggled to find meaningful words or actions, apologized for stumbles, defended decisions, led from behind.

“I thought it was beautiful,” said Mayor Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, after hundreds staged a die-in near his house. “I would call it one of the more impactful evenings of my entire career.”

“This is not just about words,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles.

“I am the mayor, but I’m a black woman first,” London Breed said at a rally on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. “I am angry. I am hurt. I am frustrated. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. I don’t want to see one more black man die at the hands of law enforcement.”

“I recognize foundationally and fundamentally that so often people in my position are inadequate to the moment,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom. “So often we try to meet the moment with rhetoric. … Program-passing is not problem-solving. You’ve got to change hearts, minds. You’ve got to change culture, not just laws.”

Because it is America, only more so, California may yet lead that revolution. Its size alone bestows gravitas and often sets precedent. In a culture still steeped in frontier tradition, change often occurs with lightning speed, qualities that led Mr. Stegner, in 1967, to call the state an “experimental society.”

“This is indeed where the future will be made,” he wrote, with all “the noise, smog, greed, energy, frequent wrongheadedness and occasional greatness of spirit that are so American and so quintessentially Californian.”

There have been glimpses of profound challenges to the status quo that might again shape the future, ideas rejected for years now suddenly embraced.

After days of protests, Mayors Garcetti and Breed both agreed to shift money from police budgets to community programs. The relatively small amounts hardly placated those demanding radical reform, but were a major victory in a political system where police unions and their budgets have been sacrosanct. (The union was so shocked that it suggested Mr. Garcetti needed mental health counseling.) Leadership of the union representing teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District for the first time endorsed the idea of abolishing the armed police force that patrols the second-largest district in the country.

But perhaps the most striking actions, and the most inspirational, have been taken by those with the least official power. Early protests were orchestrated with sophistication by the Black Lives Matter movement leaders, but the teenagers soon took over.

Simone Jacques, a high school junior, started one of San Francisco’s largest demonstrations through an Instagram group. “We are here to acknowledge the black people who built this country against their will,” she told a crowd of thousands. “We call on your spirits to protect us and propel us through this march and the beginning of this revolution.”

Alaysia Lyons, 19, ended her first-ever protest in tears, arrested by the Los Angeles police. Days later, she addressed more than 1,000 young people at a campus rally: “Me as a little girl would never expect this many people to come out. But you’re standing up for what you believe in, and I thank all of you.”

In Oakland, another 19-year-old, Xavier Brown, home after his first year at college, used social media to organize a march that drew 15,000 people. He said, “We are disrupting the peace with our words.”

The future of California’s exceptionalism is in their hands.

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