—————————— I PULLED UP TO BOBBY’S HOUSE IN Inglewood and saw that it was an odd mirror of my parents’: the same Spanish style, when L.A. advertised itself to the country as a sunny ranch to escape the cold and gray of the old America. A plane flew overhead, splitting the air with its booming roar, then another. Of course LAX was plopped next to one of the few middle-class Black neighborhoods in the city.
I shut off the engine and felt the nerves along my neck tingle. Bobby, being retired, had agreed to meet me right when Mom called. I wasn’t sure what to say to this person, whom I barely knew except for those ominous Christmas party run-ins. But no cross-racial organizing story would be complete if I didn’t hear from him.
I rang the bell and a little dog began yapping. Bobby opened the door. His hair had grown whiter, his skin a little more papery, but otherwise his long face and goatee were just as I remembered.
“Reed, man, come on in,” he said. We shook hands. He pointed to my feet. “Don’t worry about the shoes. You probably don’t remember this, but one time I went over to your house for a party, and everyone turned around and yelled, Bobby! Shoes!”
Some of my nervousness dropped away and I smiled at this image of him learning this custom second nature to all the East Asians I knew—a custom he remembered all these years.
The little dog leapt up and ran its paws against my leg. I’d never known how to interact with dogs. Mom once told me she’d eaten dogs, in Korea, when they were poor, and the closest I’d had to a pet was Dad letting me name the crabs he picked up in Chinatown before he boiled them alive. I never repeated any of this to non-Asians, knowing it would confirm our barbarism in their minds. I mimicked people on TV and let the dog sniff my hand.
Bobby told me not to mind Jeanette. He picked her up and gestured toward the big couches in the living room. The wooden slat blinds were closed, so the room was dark and cool, another instance of the L.A. aversion to sunlight. I collapsed onto the sofa. Bobby sat across from me as Jeanette sniffed around my ankles.
“Thanks so much for meeting with me,” I said, putting a glossy red gift bag on the table. “From my mom.”
Bobby peered into the bag and removed the box of cookies inside, some French assortment that Mom knew he’d like. Bobby wagged a finger at me. “Your mom’s getting me into trouble with my doctor. Help me with this.”
I opened up the box and slid out the plastic tray full of wafers and chocolate-dipped shortbread and rolled, buttery sheets and appreciated the surreality of munching on them before discussing L.A.’s history of racial violence. Bobby went for one of the rolled cigars, downed it in three bites, then grabbed a second and let it hang from the corner of his mouth. I nibbled on my shortbread as I looked around the room. Behind Bobby was a bookcase with old photographs of his ancestors. To the right, just like in our house, was a fireplace of shiny, brown tile. A portrait of Malcolm X hung above the mantel.
“Take a closer look,” said Bobby, gesturing me up. “You have to excuse me. Hip problems. I’ve got to stay put.” Now that he was seated, he seemed immovable, like a statue of an ancient ruler.
I popped the cookie into my mouth and went up to the picture, which was made of thousands of ink crosshatches. Malcolm was in three-quarters view, pointing off to the left and biting his lower lip midword.
“My son did that when he was fifteen. He’s a little older than you now. I always told him to keep up the art, but, you know, there’s only so much they listen.” He flung a hand in the air. “How’s your grandmother?”
“Not so good,” I said. “It might be any day now.”
“And how’s your mother holding up?”
I paused and tried to summon an honest answer.
Bobby chuckled. “It’s complicated, I got it. So. You want some ancient history?”
“Yes,” I said. “You know, I’m working on the Akai Gurley campaign, to get justice for his family. And we’re running up against—”
“What I always explain to people,” Bobby cut in, “is that you need to say Black Lives Matter because in this country, they don’t. Not in my lifetime.”
“Right,” I said, taken aback by the interruption, and the explanation I already knew, but that must’ve been necessary for Bobby’s generation. “Totally.” I went on to describe the pro-Liang supporters, the rift in the Asian American community, and the reasons we needed to learn about the Black-Korean Coalition’s work. “Maybe you could start with how you and my mom started the Coalition? Is it okay if I take notes?”
“Sure, sure,” said Bobby, waving me forward and taking a third wafer. “The fundamental issue here is so-called racism and white privilege. To me, that’s it. It’s entrenched and engrained.” He opened his palm toward me as he talked, pulsing it back and forth for emphasis. “My people have internalized European values without access to European resources. On the continuum of Black to white, the closer to white you are, the better your chances of doing whatever you want to do.”
“Right, colorism,” I said.
“Now, I grew up so-called Creole in Louisiana,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard. “We’ve got to start there.” Bobby talked about growing up with six brothers, about leaving Louisiana with his family for Los Angeles “because L.A. schools were integrating. Then, on my first day of high school, I got to campus and the white parents had strung up a row of tar babies.”
I stopped. I’d been scrawling along, my hand cramping to keep up with Bobby’s fast speech. The image Bobby summoned hovered between us like a ghost and I realized I was holding my breath. Bobby stopped too, wearing a wry smile that almost didn’t look pained.
I exhaled. “So that”—I stammered—“so that shaped your understanding of race.”
Jeanette leapt up onto Bobby’s chair and lay across his lap. He stroked her pink underbelly, which seemed to relax both of them. “The so-called race issue is only a race issue because white people do not want to give up their privilege,” he said, starting another torrent of words. “It’s hard to deal with that reality, and so they don’t. People ask what they can do, but really, they know what to do. They just don’t want to do it.”
He went on like this, letting loose a stream so steady and quick that instead of keeping notes I jotted down key words, though I wondered if I’d ever refer to them, if I could use any of them in our movement. He went back and forth in time: Trump race-baiting Obama—achievement gap Black students—redlining of South Central—Watts ’65—Hillary ignores Black people. He mixed in details from his life: stint in army—played trumpet until broken finger—worked as parole officer—raised three children. He didn’t get to the Coalition.
I looked up at Malcolm and his furrowed brow, pointing like he held the millions of unsatisfied people who followed him in that finger, and remembered again the emergency we were in. The country, just like then, was on fire.
“Ah—” I interrupted, trying to sound as polite as possible. “Can I ask you specifically, though, about the Black-Korean Coalition?”
Bobby paused, let his hands fall, and then just as quickly burst forth with a different stream. “Korean-Black problems were intense. It started because Korean merchants and Black residents were at odds. Tensions were heavy—I mean heavy. Shootings.” His hands rose and fell like a fountain set to music. “High emotions on both sides.”
I interrupted again. “Like, what were you hoping to accomplish? With the Coalition?”
He cocked his head to the side, perhaps annoyed. “We were providing space for people to express themselves,” he said, “away from all the bullshit.” He held his nose for emphasis.
I smiled at the resemblance between his language and Mom’s but still felt impatient. I’d gone to panels with elder activists where, though the speakers were engaging, there were no details about what they actually did. I heard stories about how X met Y, I heard grand outlines of the work, but never got the details, the daily life of organizing. I wondered what about activism made it so hard to record.
“So, strategically,” I tried again, “what did that mean?”
Bobby frowned at me and then, as if understanding what I wanted, a small smile cracked across his face. “You want the strategies? The analysis?”
“Yeah,” I said eagerly. “Like, who were you reading to understand the cross-racial politics of the moment?”
Bobby nodded in confirmation. “Let me ask you this: How much time have you spent in South Central?”
I went blank. I scrambled to form an answer that was both not a lie and didn’t prove my ignorance. “Like, recently?”
“Ever,” Bobby offered, lobbing me a softball. Then he laughed and wagged his hand. “I’m not trying to put you on the spot. What would an Ivy League kid from the Westside be doing in South Central?” He nodded in approval of his own question. “Same with these politicians who read a poll, then breeze through, talking about how to fix the streets, these academics who’ve studied the statistics but don’t know how to talk to the man working the auto shop. There’s your big strategy: go talk to people and find out what they need.”
I blushed at this simple, most cardinal rule of community organizing, thrown at me as if I’d never heard it. I’d fallen right into the trap of academia, trying to understand this history at a safe, critical remove from the place, from the person right in front of me.
“Totally,” I stammered. “We’re also all about on-the-ground organizing. That’s why, actually, I’m dropping out of college.”
Bobby’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that, now?”
Jeanette’s head shot up, ready to meet some danger.
“I’m tired of wasting time in college, going in circles, and want to focus on what you’re talking about—the grassroots.”
“No, no, no.” Bobby wiped the air with his fleshy hand. “Not another young one ready to throw it away. The movement needs people with skills, who know how to write, to think.”
“Honestly,” I said, my voice breaking, “I learn more about that in organizing than in class.”
“Uh-huh.” He stared at me now, his deep brown eyes magnified through the lenses of his glasses. “You want to ask me the one question?”
I stared back. “What?”
“What’s the one question everyone has when they hear about the Black-Korean Coalition?”
I suddenly knew what he meant—it had occurred to me the second Mom mentioned the Coalition. I now had two irreconcilable stories in my head: Mom and Bobby’s, and the one everyone knew. And the one everyone knew was so dominant that it was synonymous with Korean America, as in the single time Koreans appeared in my six-hundred-page U.S. history textbook: a shopkeeper standing on an L.A. rooftop, wearing a red polo and the widest grin I’d ever seen on a Korean man, pointing an AK-47 into the baby blue sky.
“Okay,” I said. “If you were working on this issue for so long, why’d the tension with Koreans blow up during the riots? Why were their stores burned down, and why did they form militias?”
“Very good question,” Bobby affirmed. “You may not like the answer.”
I looked somber, trying to show that I was ready.
He held up his palm again and ticked it to the side with each word, speaking deliberately. “Whether or not we succeeded was not the motivating factor. We had to do it—had to try.”
“If you’re not going to succeed,” I said, “why try?”
Bobby chuckled to himself silently and his shoulders shook. Jeanette sat up and panted, her long tongue quivering.
“Doesn’t that mean I should give it everything?” I pressed. “That you don’t know how it ends, maybe, but you push as hard as you can?”
A spasm went through Bobby’s body. He jabbed his wafer cigarette in the air. “Young people, these so-called revolutionaries, think they have some key, some big plan that’s going to save us. But what it took me a long, long time to understand is that you have to give up winning. Give it up! You think you give up your diploma now, and you’re gonna get some other trophy tomorrow. No.” He shook his head mournfully. “I watched them burn Watts in ’65. I wasn’t out there, but I was a young man and I understood in my bones why they did it. You know that kind of knowledge?”
I shook my head, defeated again.
“And then I watched them burn half the city in ’92, all the way to La Cienega. Even when we warned them, and even after all we did. This is a long, long road, and we’re not at the end yet. I bet you look at an old man like me and think I figured something out.”
His eyebrows arced over his glasses, and I felt my face betraying my disappointment.
Bobby nodded. “It’ll probably burn again and again, until we learn the hard lesson.” He slid a palm across his face as if to reset it. “Let me ask you. Your mom know about this dropping-out idea?”
“I told her, but—”
“Let me tell you something. Your mother. Is one of the best I’ve met. In all this time, I have met very few who know how to connect with people like she does, who get the issues and have integrity. She told you to stay in college, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
Bobby threw up his hands and flopped back into his big chair. “Well?”