Monthly Archives: July 2022

On Friday, Live PD returns to television. The show had been canceled two years ago at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was always more about hating police than racial justice.

Live PDs new name will be On Patrol: Live, and its new channel will be Reelz. The show had been canceled by A&E in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, with the network saying that it was a critical time in our nations history and that it didnt know if there was space to tell the stories of both the community and the police officers whose role it is to serve them. And so, the network tossed police officers aside because this is what the movement demanded.

With it went half of A&Es audience.

Live PD wasnt the only show to get the ax. Cops was also canceled by Paramount after 32 seasons across three different networks. It was brought back last year by Fox Nation.

The cancellation of those two shows helped show exactly what the Black Lives Matter movement was about. Immediately after Floyds death, the movement pushed the idea of defunding the police to the forefront of the national debate. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) called on Minneapolis to abolish its police department, and the City Council initially agreed, requiring voters to vote the idea down. Other cities began cutting police funding, even as homicides and violent crime rose.

The Black Lives Matter movement did not just think that racism is an issue that must be addressed. Its most prominent activists, from Omar to Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) to washed-up former quarterback Colin Kaepernick, thought the entire institution of policing must be abolished. They demanded the police officers be removed from black neighborhoods, schools, and other areas of life. A&E and Paramount were happy to extend that anti-police sentiment to television, even if it meant losing viewers.

While On Patrol: Live looks to pick up where Live PD left off, the shows return should serve as a reminder of what the driving force of the Black Lives Matter movement always was. It was and is primarily a movement to demonize police officers, even at the expense of black lives. Its activists bludgeon those who dont support the movement into silence or compliance using accusations of racism.

More:

Live PD returns after Black Lives Matter forced it off the air - Washington Examiner

A far-left volunteer group in Portland, Oregon, is offering a free, radical social justice camp that has promoted Black Lives Matter-themed material, taught indigenous land maps and called for the abolishment of police in past summers.

Budding Roses is hosting the two-week camp that will explore social justice issues, youth leadership and arts activism for kids in fourth through eighth grades from July 25 to Aug. 5. The previous two years were held virtually as youngsters discussed race, gender and youth activism in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

The groups curriculum for the coming session is unclear, but its 2020 camp curriculum featured a Black Lives Matter At School coloring book and a What is Police Abolition section that imagined communities without cops.

How can we keep each other safe? the groups website reads. What does a world without police look like?

Budding Roses GoFundMe page says camp activities also include talk about racism, gentrification, student activism, gender, climate change, and mental health issues that Portland youth are already engaging with.

The camps website contains information from a Tear Gas for Portlanders publication and usage of the irritant by Portland cops during the fervent summer 2020 protests.

Learn about what tear gas is, how it was used in Portland, and ways to keep yourself safe if you get tear gassed, the site states.

The camps 2020 curriculum also contained a section on teaching budding anarchists how protest using songs and drum.

They are a way to express anger, our joy and our power, according to Budding Roses website. Write your own songs and make your own protest drum too!

Radio host Ari Hoffman said he was shocked they didnt offer a course on Molotov cocktails, but noted how the camps participants are being shaped into little activists, Fox News reported.

What they do learn is how to hate the police, Hoffman told the network Wednesday. Your child, if they go to this Antifa camp, will be taught how to be a little activist. Theyll be taught how to deal with tear gas, how to protest thats what parents are sending their kids to.

Campers were previously shown videos and materials detailing White Supremacy Reflection, an Indigenous Land Map and a history of radical organizing in Portland.

Our goal was to promote collective problem solving on issues of policing, abolition, and community safety by providing supplies and guidance to our campers, Budding Roses website reads.

The camp was founded as a project of Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Foundation, according to its website.

We believe in empowerment through education, while also understanding that mainstream education often reproduces structural oppression and disempowers youth, particularly low income and youth of color, the website continues.

Multiple messages seeking comment from Budding Roses were not returned Wednesday. The camps Facebook page, which was active earlier in the day, was no longer visible as of Wednesday afternoon.

Hoffman, an associate editor at The Post Millennial, claims Antifa and other far-left antifascist advocates have a firm grip on Portland since taking over the city during the BLM protests two summers ago.

Portland right now is controlled by Antifa, Hoffman told Fox News. They defunded their police, you still have riots on a regular basis, you still have protests on a regular basis. And these people think that theyve won.

Read the original here:

Portland camp imagines life without cops, features BLM coloring book - New York Post

Republican attempts to gain political support by promoting racist fear and hatred, reflexively siding with police in confrontations with African Americans and denouncing Black Lives Matter demonstrations are a prominent feature of our political landscape. But they're also nothing new. In many ways, the battle lines of 2022 can be seen forming in 1964. A letter published 58 years ago this week in the New York Times can help explain the underlying issues, both then and now.

As President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2, 1964, he called upon Americans to "close the springs of racial poison." Two weeks later, on the same night that Sen. Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican presidential nomination with an explicit endorsement of extremism, a 15-year-old African American was shot and killed in Harlem by a New York City police officer. The incident began after the white superintendent of a group of apartments turned a hose on a group of Black kids who often sat on the steps to the buildings. According to them, the superintendent shouted at them, "Dirty n***ers, I'll wash you clean." They responded by throwing bottles and garbage-can lids at the super, who retreated inside one of the buildings. A boy not involved in the original incident, James Powell, pursued him, and when Powell exited the building he was shot and killed by an off-duty policeman.

That led to an almost immediate confrontation between neighborhood young people and police. Over the following days, these clashes escalated into the first major urban "riot," or "uprising," of the 1960s. (Those two nouns were used by different sides to describe the same phenomena, the former by most white people, the latter by Black people and, as the decade went on, a growing number of whites on the left.)

By the night of July 18, thousands of Black people were in the streets of Harlem, breaking windows, looting stores and shouting at police, "Killers! Killers!" When a police officer tried to disperse one of the crowds by yelling, "Go home, go home," people in the crowd responded, "We are home, baby."

Over the next few weeks, northern urban uprisings spread to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn (then largely Black and low-income, today a zone of intense gentrification) to Rochester, New York; to Jersey City, Paterson and Elizabeth in New Jersey; and then to Chicago. At the end of August, immediately following the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, serious disorder erupted less than 60 miles west, in Philadelphia. As in the other cases, the underlying cause was a series of charges of police brutality, and the fraught or openly hostile relationship between cops and the African-American community. White policemen beating and killing Black people with impunity was, to be sure, nothing new in 1964. Nor was it unprecedented for such incidents to spark rebellion in the Black community, including property destruction and sometimes violence.

But street-level resistance by Black residents became much more common in 1964 and throughout the ensuing years of the '60s. As historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in her 2021 book, "America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s," the vicious policing that remains a principal battle line today has been the cause of many outbursts of rebellion by African Americans. White police officers are almost never convicted of murdering a Black person, more than a half-century later. The 2021 murder conviction of the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd provides hope for change on this front, but the police killings of Black people have continued, during and after that trial.

The 1964 hopes of Republicans and fears of Democrats about the political effects of racial conflict are also strikingly familiar. President Johnson feared the riots could help Goldwater win the November election. "If we aren't careful, we're gonna be presiding over a country that's so badly split up that they'll vote for anybody who isn't us," White House press secretary George Reedy said to Johnson after the Harlem riot had been going on for a couple of days.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Much as Democrats do today, Johnson felt the need to condemn the riots while simultaneously emphasizing the centrality of the pursuit of racial equality and justice. On July 20, he issued a statement on the situation in Harlem in which he declared: "In the preservation of law and order there can be no compromise just as there can be no compromise in securing equal and exact justice for all Americans."

The hopes of Republicans and fears of Democrats from 1964 are strikingly familiar. Lyndon Johnson feared the urban riots could elect Goldwater, and felt the need to condemn them while calling for racial justice.

The prospect that white "backlash" might turn the nation against Johnson and to Goldwater did not materialize in 1964 and Johnson was elected in one of the biggest landslides of American political history. It was to be the much larger uprising in the Watts district of Los Angeles in August 1965 which began five days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law that would wind up producing the sort of dramatic political backlash that Johnson had feared in 1964.

The causes of the 1964 rioting were brilliantly explained by a Black woman in Brooklyn named Barbara Benson, who wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times after the outbreak. Benson wrote that she wept "at the damage done to this city and the world by the Harlem riots" and was especially concerned that "this rioting may have made a Goldwater victory more likely." But she felt the need to try to explain what leads to rioting. Her words sound all too contemporary more than a half century later:

All minorities recognizable by the color of their skin have experienced the irrational quality of the police force evident in the slaying of the 15-year-old boy. Many of us have been stopped by police and, yes, many frisked for no other reason than that a Negro in a certain neighborhood "seems suspicious."

If there is no "irrational" fear of the black man operating within many on the police force, why is it that intelligent, collegeeducated Negroes like myself simultaneously fear any possible involvement with the police, even for our own protection?

Let no one be deceived. Many Harlem police are sadistic in their administration of the law, insatiable in their beatings, unable to discern men from children, and irrational in their fear of the black man, as well as incapable of telling one black man from another.

There was really no need for the various commissions set up from 1964 through the end of the decade most notably the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, popularly called the "Kerner Commission," set up by Johnson in 1967 to earnestly search for the underlying causes of urban uprisings. Benson's letter, then as now, pretty much said it all.

Read more

about policing and violence

Read this article:

Racism, policing, politics and violence: How America in 2022 was shaped by 1964 - Salon

All right. Here we go.

The opening lines of Ayo Agunbiades song that speaks about and to his late mother, Teresa Ann Ward, capture the musicians philosophy as he strives to impart meaning to life, loss and love. Although many of his songs pay tribute to an imperfect and sometimes painful past, Agunbiades eyes and heart are fixed in one direction: forward.

In a song titled Up, the hip-hop artist recounts a journey that has taken him from an impoverished childhood in Prince Georges County, Maryland, to academic and career achievements that once seemed out of reach:

I fell down sometimes and though it cost me

I couldnt be the best me without the losses, see

All these lessons that I learned made me wise up

They taught me even when Im down keep my eyes up

Today, as a senior academic advisor in the Poole College of Management, hes helping NCState students chart their own paths in uncertain times.

Ive made a career out of working in higher education because of how much I value education and how transformational it has been in my life, he says. When I went to college, I recognized that I needed to be successful there if I didnt want to go back home and sell drugs or pump gas, something like that.

Success in the classroom didnt come easy, but Agunbiade kept moving forward, earning a bachelors in communication and a masters in education.

Getting those degrees was the most gangster thing Ive ever done in my life, because I didnt have anyone ahead of me who took that path, he says.

His journey as a musician began in high school, where he participated in impromptu rap competitions.

Pretty much every day at lunch we would have these freestyle battles, and it was the best part of the day, he says. Somebody starts to hit a beat on the table, and its you versus whoever has the boldness to step up. Its you and your words against theirs, and the winner is the one who can come up with the cleverest lines and just keep the flow going.

Music took a backseat to football in Agunbiades life for a while, but after high school he found his voice and an outlet for his emotions in composing, recording and often producing his own original songs. Hes released two albums, Destiny in 2017 and Destiny Reimagined in 2018, as well as a slew of singles available on streaming platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify. And he appeared on a 2020 album, Deans List, produced by a rap collective called the Great Minds Alliance.

The name he writes and performs under iYo the Philosopher is a nod to his reputation for thinking deeply (or in the words of a friend, overthinking) about his life and the world around him.

A lot of my music is autobiographical, he says. Through music, Im able to process my own feelings and sometimes come out with something that I didnt quite expect. Sometimes, something that was deep in my soul just kind of pours out. I cant keep it all bottled up for so long.

Its more cost-effective than a therapist.

His mothers death in 2010 left Agunbiade struggling to cope with his grief and loss. It was, he says, a dark time.

My mom was my best friend, and it took me a really long time to properly grieve, he says. One thing that helped me through is understanding that even though my mom is no longer here in the flesh, she lives through me. I cannot be me without the impact that she had on my life.

In Teresa Ann Ward, a song celebrating her life, he marvels:

We never had a lot but it felt like plenty

How you raise a good kid in a mad city?

Worked all day, paid bills, made dinner

Even when I lost, had me feeling like a winner

The music video for the song, directed by Joey Gizzi, features the singer TreAlise, whose soulful vocals on the chorus float above Agunbiades somber rapping. The cinema verit work, shot handheld with available light in and around a desolate city park, was named best music video at the 2020 Longleaf Film Festival.

Agunbiade first teamed up with Gizzi in 2017, when the pair worked on a music video for the song Riot, an antiracist anthem inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.

There was a string of Black men getting killed on camera, and I had this song on one of my old mixtapes that dealt with that, he says. I put an ad on Craigslist looking for somebody to shoot the video, and Joey responded. He charged me basically nothing because he was just getting started.

It turned out to be a really good video, but even more interesting is the fact that after that video, Joeys skill and his talent just sort of skyrocketed.

Since then the pair have worked together on several other video projects and won more awards. Its a rewarding collaboration that seems to come easily to both. Ill have an idea and Ill share it with Joey, and hell just take it to the next level, Agunbiade says.

His focus on racism and other social issues in his music reflects his struggle to make sense of the times.

Im a little lost in terms of where we are as a society, he says. It doesnt even feel real; it feels like a dream that maybe one day well wake up from. But theres so much going on, and the tensions are so deep. I dont ever remember a political moment in my lifetime that was so polarized.

People cant hear each other anymore.

Its one of the reasons Agunbiade values his work at NCState, where hes part of a small percentage of Black men in leadership roles. Working as an academic advisor gives him an opportunity to counter racial stereotypes and support the schools efforts to promote a welcoming environment for everyone.

Most of my students dont look like me, he says. And some have told me that its their first time interacting with a Black man in a position of authority. So I get to introduce them to someone who is supportive, reliable, accountable all these good things, but with a different skin color.

For Black students, Agunbiades visibility sends a positive message.

I appreciate that the students who do look like me have someone who actually looks like them on the staff, he says. Because there arent a whole lot of us in the college or across the university.

Not all of Agunbiades music deals with weighty issues or unresolved emotions. Butterfly, a catchy 2021 single, is a sweet and sometimes spicy ode to his wife, Rachel. The couple met working together in the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes.

Girl, youre so fly like a butterfly

I couldnt let you fly to another guy

All up in the sky you be so high

You got the right mind and youre so fine

My life philosophy that theres joy to be found, and we have to find it, he says. No matter what were going through, we have to work our way back to it.

View original post here:

Rhyme and Reason | NC State News - NC State News

On a block of L.A.'s skid row where the tents cluster corner to corner, theres a store that most people know as the place with a little of everything.

When May and Bob Park took it over in 1995, the store was called Best Market. The Parks tried to stock it all, and if they didnt have it, they were known to drive to the warehouse after hours to get it.

After their son, Danny, joined the business in 2015, he renamed it Skid Row Peoples Market. Its the latest of many names over the years, and the everything store tries to live up to all of them, stocking food, drinks and items geared toward life outdoors, such as drink mix, tents, cups of ice on hot days, warm socks on cold ones.

Danny Park, 38, stands in front of Skid Row Peoples Market in Los Angeles. When his parents took over the store in 1995, it was called Best Market.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Danny wants the store just south of Little Tokyo to be more than its inventory. His new mission statement is hand-painted high up on the wall in English and Korean: A safe space for Skid Row community to heal ourselves and develop healthy identities and, below it, Food is medicine not only for the body, but spiritual connection to history, ancestors and the land.

On a given shift, employees might serve as therapists, social workers, confidants or mediators. The store tries to help customers build self-esteem, express themselves, display their art, even take steps toward building credit.

We all believe, in whatever work we do, that we are doing some kind of good for humanity no matter what it is, Danny said. So why cant that be the product?

Column One

A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times

The story of why the everything store tries to do so many things has a lot to do with Danny, but it really started long before, on a Saturday morning in 1991, when Korean American shopkeeper Soon Ja Du fatally shot Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl, at a South Los Angeles liquor store.

Many Angelenos remember Latasha whenever a young Black victim is denied justice. And when they remember Latasha, they also remember it was a Korean shopkeeper who shot her.

A photo of Latasha Harlins, right, who was killed by Korean shop owner Soon Ja Du in 1991, is part of a community altar in Danny Parks Skid Row Peoples Market in Los Angeles.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Danny was a kid then. Now 38, he knows that no matter his intentions, someone will see the store as just another Korean American business profiting from a mostly impoverished Black clientele.

So another thing he wants the store to do is remember that history. Danny keeps a framed photo of Latasha at the front and a printout in his office, taped at eye level when he sits at his desk.

Even if it hurts, even if youre ashamed, Danny said, you have to keep the images close, because thats how we heal. Because by remembering, thats how we learn.

Latashas photo isnt alone. A stately row of framed headshots reminiscent of a Day of the Dead ofrenda meets you at the door. Theres Grandma Bessy, Cecil, Uncle Rock, regular customers who passed away. Next to them, faces grown too familiar: George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, victims of police violence.

Above the register is a set of clay figurines of each member of the store staff made by a customer, Kevin Kidd.

Above the register at Skid Row Peoples Market is a set of claymation figurines of each member of the store staff made by a customer, Kevin Kidd.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The staff is half Korean, half Black, half skid row locals and half Korean immigrants hired through an ad in the Korea Times. The oldest employee is in her 70s, the youngest 35.

And in the narrow closet that serves as Dannys office, swimming under paperwork, is a studio portrait of a Korean American family. Danny, a young man refusing to smile against marble-blue backdrop, stands behind his father, whose suit looks crisp, especially his tie, which somehow accommodates a map of Korea.

Dannys family has operated stores as long as he can remember. His grandfather managed a store when he came to the U.S. in the 1970s, and so did several of his uncles.

We all believe, in whatever work we do, that we are doing some kind of good for humanity no matter what it is.

Danny Park, Peoples Market owner

Sometimes it was a liquor store in Silver Lake, or a laundromat in Gardena, but it was always a business, one small step toward an ever-distant American dream.

Korean Americans owned more than 30% of non-chain liquor stores in Southern California in the early 1990s. In many cases they took over stores previously established by largely Jewish entrepreneurs who were eager to leave the citys south side, where gang violence bled into the fabric of everyday life.

May Park, 67, speaks with a customer in a wheelchair as she works at Skid Row Peoples Market in Los Angeles. May helps run the store with her son, Danny.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

In South Los Angeles, the Korean entrepreneurs met Black communities battling crack and gangs, impoverished by redlining and abandoned by larger retailers for fear of street violence. Robberies were a constant problem, and it was especially dangerous for those rumored to be cooperating with the police, like Soon Ja Dus family.

At least 19 Korean shopkeepers were killed in Southern California in the decade before 1992, largely by Black assailants. But when shopkeepers began to arm themselves, an untold number of their customers became innocent victims too. A few weeks after Latasha died, Lee Arthur Mitchell, a Black man and popular boxing coach, was shot and killed by Tae Sam Park, a Korean American shopkeeper.

Danny was born in 1984, a time when the violence between Korean shopkeepers and their customers was making national headlines. He speaks quietly and is prone to long silences, short sentences and clothing with protest slogans such as Black Lives Matter and No justice, no peace. His face reveals emotion easily, and he listens intently, as if words must be chewed before understood.

He attended UC San Diego and studied sociology, but without much focus. He went to art school, studied graphic design and found a job doing that. A large tattoo of the Gustav Klimt painting Life and Death covers his left forearm. On his right arm are a Dodgers hat, ball and glove for his dad, who always seemed happiest at Dodgers games and a portrait of his grandfather.

Residents pass by as owner Danny Park, center, fist-bumps employee Phillip Kim while waiting for customers at Skid Row Peoples Market in Los Angeles.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

He is sincere to a fault. When he was 27, he jogged the nearly 1,000 miles between Los Angeles and Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., to hand-deliver his application and illustrate his desire to work there. (He got the job.)

He grew up not knowing much about the Harlins case, but the archetype of the racist Korean shopkeeper had become a staple of films and TV shows depicting Black life in cities, most famously in Spike Lees Do the Right Thing.

For example, Danny didnt know that in Dus letter to Judge Joyce Karlin expressing remorse, she offered condolences to Latashas mother, unaware that the mother was dead. Or that a few months before Dus acquittal, another Korean shopkeeper had received jail time for fatally shooting a dog, and that many in the community wondered why a dogs death carried harsher consequences than Latashas.

But he loved hip-hop, and wrote a college essay about how it shaped him. He listened to Tupac and Immortal Technique, loved the movie Dead Presidents and slept in a bedroom with a Martin Luther King Jr. poster on the wall.

Then Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. Danny found himself in the streets, attending protests and rallies. For the first time, he learned the details of the Harlins case, and he was ashamed by what he found.

May Park, left, with her son, Danny, at Skid Row Peoples Market in Los Angeles. The Park family has operated the store since 1995. Danny renamed it after he joined the business in 2015.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

On his right forearm, Danny Park has a tattoo of his grandfather, who managed a store when he came to the U.S. in the 1970s. So did several of his uncles.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Danny and his father never talked about these issues. Korean Americans were leaving the liquor store business in droves, and the family was struggling to stay afloat. A screen-printing business flopped, and the Parks filed for bankruptcy. They left their home in Fullerton and moved in with Mays mother in Downey.

And in 1995, they took over the lease for what they named Best Market.

His father drank and from a young age, so did Danny. Bob Park drank mostly because he was angry he often beat Danny and he was angry for the same reason so many immigrant fathers are: because failing at a business in America made him feel like a failure as a man.

Both men struggled with addiction. Danny was arrested three times for public intoxication, he said, and when his dad came to pick him up, he was as likely to weep as to become violent.

Liquor stores, as businesses, offered great risks, painful side effects and few rewards. An uncle and a grandfather lost their businesses, struggled with alcoholism and died by suicide.

For years, all Danny can recall doing was trying to reach greater states of inebriation. He tried sobriety, religion and meditation retreats. He traveled and wrote. Even after landing his dream job, working in design at Nike, he felt restless.

Employee Mark Burton, left, works the cash register as Danny Park stocks the counter baskets with food at Skid Row Peoples Market in Los Angeles.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

At work, he kept thinking about this book he was reading, Father Gregory Boyles Tattoos on the Heart, which speaks of compassion and forgiveness. In his spare time, he volunteered at a soup kitchen.

When his father contracted cancer and died in 2018, it felt like a sign. Danny quit his job at Nike and took over the store.

For the first time in his life, he felt as if he was where he was supposed to be. He had found peace with his father before he died, and wrote about it in a June 2018 Facebook post:

Growing up my dad would every once in awhile tell me its okay for you to cry. If you need to cry, go take time to yourself and cry. And when youre ready, come back. Come back, ready and strong.

Best Market became Skid Row Peoples Market on an overcast morning in 2018. Danny and the staff painted the store a cheerful yellow, though the landlord repainted it in beige to match the rest of the building.

Down came the all-caps RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE and NO REFUNDS signs and up went inspiring words (Joy is an act of resistance) and quotes such as How can we truly be sovereign people if we cannot feed and nourish ourselves?

A woman and a man lie on the sidewalk outside the entrance of Skid Row Peoples Market. Danny Park sees the homeless crisis outside his doors in terms of sickness and a struggle for health in mind and body.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Danny imagined creating a space where he could apply the knowledge gained from a life of trauma and addiction, a place that would be a member of the community and take on the communitys problems.

He sees the homeless crisis outside his doors in terms of sickness and a struggle for health in mind and body. So the best way he can describe what hes trying to do inside the store is thus: to offer medicine in the form of healthful food, kindness, a creative outlet, a supportive work environment or whatever else the day calls for.

We look at these societal problems as failures of individuals, but its not that way, Danny said. Its all an ecological relationship. We are all this one web of light, this collective organism.

Can an open heart find solutions that a police baton and ballot box cannot? Can small interactions at the store stop a disagreement, a fight, a bullet? Save a life?

Danny doesnt know, but he wants to find out.

So whatever the problem, the staff tries to help or at least listen. Sometimes its a phone charge, an address to receive mail, or some advice from the staff, who know the neighborhoods maze of public assistance programs. Some aspiring artists display their work on spare patches of wall, and theres a community bulletin board that anyone can use.

May Park, 67, speaks with a customer in a wheelchair as she works at Skid Row Peoples Market. She was the one who first showed Danny that a store and its customers can be a community.

(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)

Jin Kim, 68, restocks shelves at Skid Row Peoples Market. The store tries to be a refuge of civility and safety in a place where both are in short supply.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

But most of all, the store tries to be a refuge of civility and safety in a place where both are in short supply. And the key to that has been Dannys mother, May, and the stores best-known employee, Mark Burton.

May, 67, who shares a ready smile beneath a spray of salt-and-pepper curls, was the one who first showed Danny that a store and its customers can be a community, back when he was small and spent evenings on a stool in the corner.

She treated customers with the care reserved for families, until friendly customers outnumbered the troublemakers. Now even the troublemakers are wrapped around her finger.

Good morning, Mrs. Park, said a thin man in sweats and a durag on a recent weekday. I like your outfit today.

May, in a classy polka dot dress, smiled through her mask.

Over by the door, Burton was holding court as he downed an energy drink. Burton, 35, is a micro-local celebrity who works the register and hands out change with jokes. He stands 6 feet tall and then some, and hes often wearing cornrows, shorts and scrupulously white Nikes.

Employee Mark Burton, 35, looks out over skid row while waiting for customers. He a micro-local celebrity who works the register and hands out change with jokes. He knows everyones name and lectures patrons who end up admitting that they should know better.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Cant wait to get the day started, Burton said. Its gonna be a good day.

He sang the chorus to the R&B song Slow Down to a customer who rushed out and left his groceries at the counter, prompting a snort of laughter. He teases people about their sneakers and commiserates with people about life on skid row.

I realize Im lucky, he said. I get to come to work and have a job. Not everyone gets that.

Burton has lived in skid row for nearly a decade, and he was a regular at the store. One day, a fight broke out while he waited in line. Fights were nothing new to him, so he paid and left. But that day, he turned around.

And all of a sudden, he recalled, I was breaking up the fight and pulled the guy off the other guy.

Once he got to know Danny and his family, he found they had far more in common than he realized.

People, they dont understand and nor do they have the respect to understand. They think these guys are rich, but they take the bus here, Burton said. Were all suffering here, the customers, the staff, even Danny.

Burton knows everyones name. He can throw down a lifetime ban without rancor. He lectures customers who end up admitting that they should know better. He can sense when trouble is brewing and can eject misbehaving customers with just two words: No. Out.

But whenever a customer needs a favor or some special consideration, its Dannys decision. Perhaps a customer is hungry but has no money to buy food, or needs an address to apply for a job. If they can help, Danny usually says yes.

Hey, man, your soup is ready, he told a customer who borrowed some hot water for ramen.

A few minutes later, a customer in a Chicago Bulls jersey handed Burton a dollar. Danny had treated him to a Coke the other day, and he wanted to pay back the favor.

The stores goodwill is often repaid, Danny said. In a crinkled spiral notebook under the register, he has a rudimentary micro-loan program in which customers who are respectful are allowed to run a tab if theyre short a few cents. The amount they can borrow increases to almost $100 if they pay back on time, and if they are respectful.

One day, a woman named Stephanie rolled in a generator and, in a standing deal with the shop, plugged it in to recharge it. Stephanie is the blocks de facto mayor, a woman in her 50s who holds court from a tent on the corner across from Dannys store.

Shes known to some as the Harriet Tubman of skid row, helping to supply tents, food and phone charges to her neighbors. She appreciates what Danny is trying to do, but she says helping people is harder than just being kind, because kindness can run out.

I will help a person every now and then, if its one time or two times, Stephanie said. But if you keep coming back every day, gimme gimme gimme, thats no good.

One day, I asked Danny why he seemed determined to do things the hard way. Lending money to a population of largely homeless addicts cant be profitable. Nor is offering free power and water.

Is it harder? Is it actually harder? I would question that, Danny replied. Do you actually feel better when you have nicer, shinier things, or is there a kind of spiritual emptiness that comes with that?

One day a man ambled through the markets doors, playing the blues on his guitar. He offered no introduction beyond theatrically raised eyebrows and a teasing smile, and he swayed and hammed it up until people started laughing and dancing in line.

The impromptu concert doesnt help them make rent or payroll, but in some ways, it is what the employees work so hard for.

His name is Danny, said Danny, smiling proudly. Hes here like every week.

Changing his parents store has helped Danny realize that his job was not to transcend or disavow the history that has loomed over his life, but to carry it forward.

Go here to see the original:

How a skid row store faces the tensions in Black-Korean history by discussing its bleakest chapters - Los Angeles Times