Riot Music: Black Korea
47 seconds. That’s the length of ‘Black Korea’, Track 15 of Ice Cube’s 1991 sophomore solo album ‘Death Certificate’.
47 seconds. That’s all it took to show the world the racial tension bubbling in Los Angeles circa 1991.
47 seconds.
Ice Cube wrote and recorded these 47 seconds in response to the shooting of 15 year old Latasha Harlins by 51 year old Korean liquor store owner Soon Ja Du, a murder premeditated by an intense racial distrust between the African-American and Korean populations of the local area. An inter-minority conflict that would end up costing Los Angeles millions.
Hit the jump to understand the murder and the mentality that lead to both this track and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.
Here’s a play-by-play of the murder courtesy of Wikipedia;
Du saw Harlins putting a bottle of orange juice in her backpack. Du erroneously concluded that Harlins was attempting to steal, evidently not seeing the money Harlins was holding.
Du attempted to grab Harlins by the sweater and snatched her backpack.
Harlins then struck Du with her fist three times, knocking Du to the ground. After Harlins backed away Du then threw a stool at her.
Harlins then picked up the orange juice that dropped during the scuffle, threw it on the counter and turned to leave.
Du reached under the counter to retrieve a handgun. Du then fired at Harlins from behind at a distance of about three feet and shot her in the back of her head, killing her instantly.
Du’s husband, Billy Heung Ki Du, heard the shot and rushed into the store. After speaking to his wife, who asked for whereabouts of Harlins before fainting, he dialed 9-1-1 to report an alleged holdup.
Harlins died with two dollars in her left hand.
For this heinous overreaction, and bare faced lying in court, the jury recommended a 16 year manslaughter sentence. The newly appointed judge decided instead to hand down 5 years of probation, 400 hours of community service and a $500 fine. This judge was soon barred from presiding over felony cases, but the damage was already done. With the murder coming less than two weeks after the Rodney King incident, LA’s melting pot was beginning to bubble over. This track can be taken as both provoking and responding to the fact.
How was ‘Black Korea’ responding?
That’s an easy answer; Cube wasn’t rapping in a vaccuum and wasn’t painting a fictional story of a people perceiving themselves as an underclass. The Latasha Harlins murder seemed like a coming together of two oppresive forces on the black community; the economic oppression of the Korean store owners, and the legislative oppression of the Los Angeles legal system.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, picture in your minds eye that you are a member of a poor, homogeneous, community. Now consider the avenues of social mobility immediately available; a major one is economic self-improvement, perhaps opening up your own store.
Now imagine that every storefront in your local vicinity, with the homogeneous citizenship, is owned by an outside group; culturally, geographically and, yes, racially. Those outsiders then control everything from the food immediately available to you to the prices you pay for it. In economic terms, they’re funneling your community’s money out of your community and investing it where your community will see no benefit.
They control the economic power in your community. You never see them outside of terse business encounters, they have no desire to be involved with your community. They don’t even hire any of your people.
While in their store, imagine that they watch every damn move that you make, readily racially profiling you and adding to the, already considerable, weight of institutional racism on your shoulders.
Imagine one of these outsiders then murders a little girl from your community.
Now, imagine that this same homogeneous community, of which you are a member, has for decades lived in a state of distrust for the police and legal authority figures. A scandal has just erupted; that police force that you ab-so-lutely. do. not. trust. has been found to be abusing its authority and this time, there’s undeniable evidence. Your fear and distrust has been justified. The police are viewed as the foot-soldiers of the legal system, so your distrust goes all the way to the top, all the way to judges.
Imagine one of these judges just let that same outsider off for that murder, with a slap on the wrist.
Welcome to Ice Cube’s mind, circa 1991.
Black Korea was reactionary, racist, and incendiary… and a true reflection of the mindstate held by some elements of the African-American community in buildup to the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
How was 'Black Korea’ provoking?
It stands to reason that a track this incendiary, from an artist as popular as local-boy Ice Cube and contained on a major release could have an impact on the mind-state of the people affected by these perceived injustices.
In reality, the Koreans were not actively trying to keep the black community down. They were simply pursuing the American dream and beginning their pursuit where they could afford to. They worked long hours in potentially dangerous conditions and simply didn’t have the kind of turnover necessary to hire local workers. Soon Ja Du’s fatal suspicion was not indicative of the norms of Korean-African American relations; it was, as Anthony Choe puts it, “one merchant against one customer.”
It’s entirely possible to take Choe’s argument that Ice Cube, taking up his position as South-Central correspondent for the “ghetto CNN,” acted irresponsibly in his position and created a feedback loop of confirmation bias; every perceived slight to an African-American from a Korean became an artifact of a larger racial conflict with this song as the soundtrack. Eventually this conflict would escalate into the riots that saw Koreans holding the deeds to 1,867 of 3,100 of the businesses destroyed or looted.
The problem is that this attitude existed outside of, and long before, Ice Cube’s 47 second tirade. The track codified the tension that sparked the riots, but it did not create them.
Black Korea: A true reflection.
Taken on it’s own, it could be pretty easy to blame the riots on this song. Could be. We don’t need to rely on Ice Cube, however, less poetically-inclined residents had similar things to say in the wake of the riots;
Johnny Magee, 39, of Lynwood said of the Korean business owners; “They make you feel alienated. There`s a plan to bring the Koreans and Japanese here to buy up the property. They want to make us poor and them just richer.”
Leonard Brown, 30, of South-Central claimed; “It`s their attitude towards people. They`re rude. You can be big, small, a man or a woman-it doesn’t matter. They just see you as black. We’re supposed to be stupid, so they treat us that way.”
An unnamed African-American man in his 50’s is quoted as saying “Quite a few of the Koreans have a preconceived notion of what a Black person is or isn’t … to me, many, not all, many of them perceive Blacks as a non-entity. We are treated as if we do not exist.”
These statements were all taken in the wake of the riots, and from demographics outside of Cube’s younger. more militant, audience. They echo the lyrics of Black Korea, but they’re hardly word for word repetitions - the overriding theme here is one of perceived disrespect from Korean store owners. This building and constant interminority tension is the reason Los Angeles burst into rioting in 1992, not 47 seconds of rhyming.
Further reading
For a revealing behavioural and psychological breakdown of the racial tensions between African-American consumers and Korean store owners circa 1992, be sure to click over to this essay published in Discourse & Society in 2000;
Benjamin Bailey - Communicative behavior and conflict between African-American customers and Korean immigrant retailers in Los Angeles [Google Docs link]