i. McG: Rate of imprisonment nub of black deaths problem, 22/11/89
1. McG: Race policies aggravate problem, 2-3/5/92
2. Devine: Brothers in victimhood, trapped in the ghetto, 7/5/92
3. McG: Home help teaches underclasses the art of escape, 8/5/92
4. McG: LA safe from religious poverty, 13-14/6/92

i.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Rate of imprisonment nub of black deaths problem,” The Australian, November 22, 1989, p. 2.

The issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody is a highly emotional one, and for good reason. It is intolerable to any civilised nation that the incidence of such deaths is so high, and it is important that every effort be made to account for the reasons for this problem.

This is, of course, the thrust of the investigations of the royal commission into this matter. Much to the distaste of some people, however, the commission has set about detailed investigation of the general issues rather than simply trying to allocate blame for individual deaths. If we really want to overcome the problem, it is first necessary to understand its nature and dimensions.

There might be some hope of designing policies which will overcome the problem. However, some of those who express their horror at these deaths seem to be more interested in making political and emotional capital out of them than in understanding precisely what the problem is.

One useful contribution to genuine understanding is the recent research paper issued by the royal commission’s head of research, Mr David Biles, and others on Australian Deaths in Police Custody 1980-88. This is a comparative analysis of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal deaths.

The first important result to emerge from this study is that more non-Aboriginal people died in custody than Aboriginal people. This is not the kind of impression one would gain from much popular discussion. That is, deaths in custody is a problem that affects the whole population.

However, “when allowance is made for age and their relative representation in the Australian population, it is found that Aboriginal people died in police custody at a rate more than 40 times the rate of non-Aboriginal people. The alarmingly high Aboriginal death rate is explained, almost entirely, by the over-representation of Aboriginal people in custody.”

In other words, the problem is that too many Aboriginal people are in custody — and that is the only reason the ratio of Aboriginal to non-Aboriginal deaths is high.

This point is so important it needs to be restated. The evidence is that there is no higher likelihood of Aborigines dying in police custody than non-Aborigines.

So the issue really comes back to the question of why the proportion of Aboriginal people in custody is so much higher than the proportion of non-Aborigines. Do the police set out to arrest Aborigines more often, and are Aborigines in general dealt with more harshly by the judicial system, accounting for the high proportion of Aboriginal people in the prisons? (There is a separate research paper on deaths in prisons.)

Again, perhaps surprisingly, the evidence does not support the belief that Aborigines are dealt with more harshly than non-Aborigines by the courts.

This was the conclusion of Mr John Walker — like Mr Biles from the Australian Institute of Criminology — in his chapter in the book Ivory Scales — Black Australia and the Law, edited by Ms Kayleen Hazlehurst.

“Very much to my own surprise,” he wrote, “I conclude that the courts cannot be held to blame for the high rates of Aboriginal imprisonment. On the contrary, they appear to be particularly lenient to Aboriginal offenders, especially when one considers that prior imprisonment record is regarded as a key factor in sentencing, tending towards longer sentences.

“In short, the criminal justice system is not likely to be responsible for high Aboriginal rates of imprisonment — it may be merely responding logically and even sympathetically to the offending pattern of Aboriginals.”

This does not deal, of course, with police custody as against prison custody. But unless one believes that police are deliberately arresting Aboriginals and murdering them before they get to the courts, the same conclusion applies. And the fact that the majority of deaths of all those in custody are non-Aborigines would not support such a belief. It is clearly the case that Aborigines are more prone to arrest than non-Aborigines as a result of factors other than police bias.

Drunkenness was the reason for being in police custody of 53 per cent of the Aboriginal deaths, as it was for 53 per cent of the non-Aboriginal deaths. However, while the other offences of the latter were pretty widely scattered, the whole of the remaining Aboriginal deaths were accounted for by those held for offences against justice procedures and “other good order”. But it is clear that a non-Aboriginal drunk is just as likely to die in custody as an Aboriginal drunk.

How did they die? Without prejudging the conclusions of the royal commission — and these statistics are based on police and coroners’ reports — it appears that “a higher proportion of non-Aboriginal people compared with Aboriginal people died from suicides (51 per cent compared with 35 per cent). Conversely, a higher proportion of Aboriginal than non-Aboriginal deaths were attributed to natural causes (40 per cent compared with 34 per cent). Deaths by hanging accounted for 95 per cent of all reported suicides, whereas hanging is the cause of death in only 13 per cent of suicides in the general community”.

What caused the appointment of the royal commission was the dramatic increase in the number of deaths in custody, both of Aborigines and non-Aborigines: “In 1987 the number of deaths by hanging increased among the Aborigines and non-Aborigines with the rate of increase being greater among the Aborigines. The 1987 phenomenon was one of young people dying in custody, predominantly by hanging and predominantly male.”

Of all types of deaths, “the greatest increase in Aboriginal deaths, in terms of numbers and percentage increase, occurred in Queensland, which alone accounted for the high number of Aboriginal deaths in 1987. Conversely, in relation to non-Aboriginal deaths, NSW and Victoria were the jurisdictions with the highest numbers of deaths in police custody in that year.”

It has to be remembered that the total number of deaths in custody in 1987 was 41, of which 16 were Aboriginal (eight of them in Queensland) and 25 non-Aboriginal.

All this points to the conclusion that it is not police custody in itself which produces the high number of Aboriginal deaths in custody, but the high proportion of Aborigines in custody. Deaths in custody do not in general need any special explanation (although too many people of all kinds die in custody). What needs explanation is why so many more Aborigines, proportionally, are arrested and held in custody. Similarly, the courts do not exhibit bias against Aborigines. What needs to be explained is why so many Aborigines come before them.

This is clearly a major social problem, but it cannot be blamed simply on racism, the police or the judicial system. What makes Aborigines so much more likely to get into trouble with the law, and hence end up in custody, is something which springs from the malaise of their own lives. This malaise might be attributed to past maltreatment and present prejudice. But what needs to be explained is why this drives Aborigines to so much higher drunkenness and other offences against law and order, and what can be done about it.

As Walker says, “efforts should be directed at the parents and teachers of young Aborigines to help them keep their children out of mischief before they begin to collect criminal records”. For it is this predisposition to get into trouble, whatever its causes, which is the immediate reason for the high proportion of Aboriginal deaths in custody.

***
1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Race policies aggravate problem,”
The Weekend Australian, May 2-3, 1992, p. 2.

The appalling events in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the United States of the past couple of days will probably lead to all kinds of assertions about the need to cope with the potential for racist violence in Australia, too.

But it is a moral certainty that most of the tut-tutting in Australia will slide over the fact that what we have seen in Los Angeles is a demonstration that the policies designed to deal with racism in the US over the past 30 years, all the ideologically sound and politically correct nostrums urged on governments, have missed the point and improved nothing. Indeed, they may have worsened the situation.

Nothing can excuse the brutal beating which was handed out to be driver of the speeding car stopped by the Los Angeles police. The jury verdict to acquit seems inexplicable in the face of the disgusting and disgraceful behaviour of the policemen concerned. The driver may have been drunk (his blood alcohol was .19, the equivalent of about 11 middies of standard Australian beer), he was, it seems, large and defiant of police orders. But that does not excuse the level of violence. To beat a man like this can be excused in no civilised society.

Inevitably it will be compared with examples of police violence towards Australian Aborigines in extreme situations, and reference will be made to the Aboriginal deaths in custody royal commission, which at great expense established no more than that there are too many Aborigines in custody who suffer from much the same rate of deaths as all people in custody. The real problem is why so many Aborigines find themselves in custody.

Most of the policies and expenditures of the past, and those proposed in the official response to the royal commission report, do not begin to grapple with the problem of why the majority of Aborigines in our society are in a state of poverty, despair and hopelessness.

But most of the remedial policies advanced for the Aborigines in Australia seem to derive from study of the problems of blacks (or whatever the politically correct terminology is now — Afro-American is popular) and also those of indigenous peoples. The two problems are of course completely different.

What has become clear, and the more honest sociologists and other policy analysts are admitting it, is that the policies of the past 30 years — that is, ever since Martin Luther King’s great “I have a dream” speech — have cured none of the problems.

The state of the black poor in the US is, if anything, worse than before, largely as a result of the breakdown of the black family and the spread of drugs in the ghettos. The social policies of the past 30 years have successfully fostered the creation of a black middle class, but they have not improved the lot of the majority of blacks, who suffer if anything more severely from extensive unemployment, welfare dependency, aimlessness, drug dependency and violence.

The impact of all this on the white community has been largely negative. There is a huge law and order problem in American cities, there are places which, even before the LA verdict, were no-go areas for whites, white police included. Now that will be worse than ever before.

This has produced a degree of fear and paranoia in the white community which undoubtedly contributed to the beating of Rodney King and to the acquittal by a white jury of his police assailants. The thing that has to be recognised is that the policies of the do-gooders have made things worse, not better.

This is at least being admitted by the more honest and perceptive analysts of American social policy, such as Christopher Jencks in his recent study Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty and the Underclass.

This shows that policies such as affirmative action have made most blacks worse off (while benefiting a minority); for example, it is the case that “among college graduates, the ratio of black to white employment declined fairly steadily from 1965 to 1981. These dates coincide almost exactly with the period when employers worried most about meeting federal affirmative-action requirements. Black men who found steady jobs were better off than ever before, because their wages rose relative to white norms. But a growing minority of black men could not find steady jobs. They were worse off than before.”

And the reason for the decline seems to have been substantially that affirmative action acted as a disincentive to the employment of blacks. (I am quoting from The Atlantic Monthly for May.)

All the “enlightened” policies of the past 30 years have led to a worsening of just about every indicator of black welfare in the US while the bill for “welfare” has grown uncontrollably. There is now a greater degree of social discontent among blacks, and a greater degree of insecurity, fear and resentment (of the perceived lavishing of funds on black welfare) among whites than ever before.

It would be pleasing to think that those who talk most about social policy in Australia with regard to Aborigines and other disadvantaged groups were studying the failures of US social policy. But instead, all the evidence is that they are bent on slavishly reproducing the mistakes of the Americans. Meanwhile, they attack the bad behaviour of the police here (who, despite events in Redfern, Moree and elsewhere, are not nearly as bad as the Los Angeles police) without contemplating the forces acting on the police force. That is, as social order breaks down among the underclass, the pressures on the police produce irrational and violent reactions.

There are no obvious solutions, here or in America. Part of the problem is the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family and of traditional religious and moral indoctrination by parents and teachers of the children. It is certainly the case that where older style religion has survived the communities are better off. Part of the problem must be the debauching of the black communities by alcohol (and, in America, by drugs). Part is in the failures of education and training systems to prepare and acclimatise young people for the workforce, and to give them the skills to survive in a rapidly changing economic environment.

The usual cop-out among American “liberals” (what we would call here the Left) is to blame everything on president Ronald Reagan, the Vietnam War or whatever. But the policy problems are much deeper.

But what can the Americans do, and what can we do? Perhaps the social problems of the US are insoluble, and are symptoms of a society in the course of inexorable decline and breakdown. Even if traditional morality or a non-religious substitute for it, were a solution, no one has the faintest idea of how to persuade people to return to it — least of all the churches. The fashions and fads that sweep our society these days are clearly out of government control.

But the least we can do is to try to avoid making the problems worse. In the Los Angeles context, this would have to mean on the one hand abandoning the welfare, affirmative action and other programs which have been demonstrated to make blacks worse off rather than better off. On the other hand, something has to be done about the police forces which are in effect at war with the rest of the community, or at least with the black community. A good start would be to disarm them, of clubs, guns and other weapons. The same goes for our police.

***
2.
Frank Devine, “Brothers in victimhood, trapped in the ghetto,”
The Australian, May 7, 1992, p. 11.

The Los Angeles riots offer four warnings to Australia, and we will get to these in due course.

But as vivid and frightening as the violent images from Los Angeles were, I think they communicate to outsiders less of the reality of black life in the United States than the following story:

Not long ago, an American of my acquaintance was in a small neighbourhood restaurant near Columbia University in New York when three armed black men came in and stuck up the place.

The stick-up men cleared out the cash register and told the customers to empty their wallets and handbags. A middle-aged black woman dining alone started to comply, but one of the gunmen said: “Not you, sister.”

My acquaintance says he is, and expects always to be, haunted by the expression of misery that transformed the woman’s face — reflecting a mixture of humiliation and rage. To be addressed as “sister” by a thug in front of her peers, mostly middle-class whites from the university. To be granted by the thug’s lordly exemption a form of complicity in his crime! The shame was unbearable.

The woman sat silently at her table, head bowed over he unopened handbag, symbol of her humiliation. As soon as the restaurant door closed behind the gunmen, she paid and left.

Contemporary black society in the US is varied and complex. As a black, you can become mayor of Los Angeles or New York. Very rich. A senator or State governor. A justice of the Supreme Court. Danny Glover. Chief of the General Staff.

Your brains and scholarship are embraced by the most distinguished institutes of learning. No club would admit to excluding you on account of blackness, and it is likely that no authentically elite one would actually do so.

Nor is the very top the only desirable niche available to black Americans. In 1980 — these are my latest statistics, but the situation has not altered significantly — some 30 per cent of blacks earned the national median income of $US32,000 ($42,200), or did better.

About 28 per cent had had some university education, and 12 per cent had completed four-year first degrees at least (compared with 38 per cent and 21 per cent for whites). Moreover, the percentage of blacks attending universities had risen from 20 during the 10 years from 1980.

The proportion of media-and-slightly-above black earners stayed about the same during the decade — but so did the median income and the percentage of whites in the same bracket.

Significantly, and maybe ironically as well, the Reagan-era outcome of the rich getting richer applied, proportionately, more to blacks than to whites. Between 1980 and 1989, the percentage of whites earning more than $US50,000 rose from 22 to 26, of blacks from 9 to 13.

The point of all these statistics is to demonstrate that the US has a large and growing black middle class. What is more, my observation over 30-odd years of intermittent residence there is that black and white members of the middle class are comfortable with one another, and that intimacy is no longer uncommon.

“Big deal,” critics of the US will say, pointing to the obvious inequities.

But big deal it is — an enormous deal. It is only 40 years since Americans began to rid themselves of the vicious innocence that had shaped their race relations. Alone among the nations of the world, they effectively addressed as a moral issue the underclass status of a racial minority.

In his book Hearts and Minds, Harry Ashmore, celebrated editor of the Arkansas Gazette, remarks that “simply by being present”, blacks have constituted for Americans “a challenge not only to our moral standards but to our basic concepts of governance”.

Blacks, too, saw their oppression in terms of national morality, especially in the South where Christian belief caused them to perceive the oppressed as a nobler person than the oppressor. Ashmore recalls the future black Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall saying to a companion as he rode a late-night train to yet another appearance as a lawyer in a civil rights case: “Sometimes I get awfully tired trying to save the white man’s soul.”

In 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson arm-twisted through the Senate his epochal civil rights Bill, Senator Engel, of California, near death from a brain tumour and unable to speak, raised his hand to his eyes from his wheelchair to signify an “aye” vote. Such was the depth of the American passion to make amends.

But confirming the constitutional rights of blacks was the easy part.

Coincidentally, technology had begun to eliminate the unskilled and semi-skilled jobs that had provided reasonably full employment for blacks. Johnson attempted to resolve this problem by deluging black society with virtually uncountable billions of dollars. He fudged the cost of the Vietnam War to get the billions.

The money flood was a disaster. Construction programs anchored ghettos in place, where urban “renewal” did not lead to yuppification of inner-city neighbourhoods and the economic expulsion of blacks.

The social worker became the monarch of disintegrating black communities, as the welfare blitz destroyed the already fragile black family structure. Black men suffered most as the State showed itself to be a far more reliable provider and more ubiquitous mentor than the black husband and father.

Nearly 45 per cent of black families are now headed by lone women. In some city ghettos it is around 90 per cent.

Almost 30 per cent of black families live below the poverty line. The majority of inhabitants in some ghettos are third-generation members of one-parent families that are in the third generation of living mainly, if not entirely, on welfare.

These frightful consequences of mismanaged social engineering have been exacerbated by the development of the pernicious doctrine of victimhood. As a victim, you have no responsibility for your criminal or destructive acts. Society made you what you are, so society bears the guilt.

Congressman Ronald Deluma demagogically asserts that the US is “a nation of niggers. If you are black you are a nigger … Blind people, women, students, the handicapped, radical environmentalists, poor whites, those too far to the Left are all niggers …”

But blacks are by far the most ravaged victims of victimhood. In his new book Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, Paul Hollander describes “a drive to diminish personal responsibility and magnify social responsibility” that has eroded all moral values.

Hollander derides Norman Mailer for claiming that “the most daring, the most enterprising and the most undefeated of the poor” are sent to prison, and white clergymen for their “indiscriminate compassion” for both black criminals and their prey. Hollander sees no virtue in being unable to separate the brutalised from the brutish.

In particular, Hollander deplores the way that victimhood has smashed American education standards. Repeatedly, blacks have been patronised with an easy ride on the grounds that society’s mistreatment has made them incapable of achieving general community standards.

Tests have been revised or abandoned as “culturally biased” without any consideration of the motivation, attitude or values of failing students. Throughout the education system there has developed a reluctance to cultivate the talented for fear of offending or undermining the confidence of society’s victims, principally blacks.

By robbing young blacks of a sense of personal responsibility, says Hollander, espousers of victimhood have transferred to them their own “deep uncertainty about the social order and its values”.

While looters and bashers are portrayed as society’s helpless victims and stick-up men claim without shame fraternity with decent people because of shared skin colour, few new Supreme Court judges and commanding generals will emerge from the ghetto. (The self-determining black middle class will provide them, though.)

As for Los Angeles’s warnings to Australia, here are the four ways of creating our own rioters: (1) isolate the poor of whatever race in enclaves with substandard infrastructure; (2) cultivate welfare dependency in them, so parents and family lose all authority; (3) devalue education so the least able students set the pace; (4) encourage the advance of the already well developed social science of victimhood.

It is not hard, looking around, to see our own little Los Angeleses already in the making.

***
3.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Home help teaches underclasses the art of escape,” The Australian, May 8, 1992, p. 11.

One of the least pleasant aspects of the riots in Los Angeles was that much of the violence and looting was directed against not white property but the property and shops of immigrant communities, especially Korean.

It seems that much of the resentment by the blacks in America is directed most against those who have in the recent past been even worse off than they, but for various reasons have been able to begin building prosperous new lives. This was brought out graphically in Spike Lee’s film of a few years ago, Do the Right Thing. It was clearly manifested in the violence directed against Hasidic Jews in New York last year, when an Australian Jewish student was killed.

The intractability of the problem of the black underclass in the United States is emphasised by the fact that immigrant groups like the Indo-Chinese and the Koreans, most recently, and the many other waves of immigration of the past hundred years, have so often performed better than the blacks.

A recent study published in Scientific American (February 1992), summarises the evidence that the children of the Indo-Chinese boat people are performing on average much better than not just black children but the whole school population. This higher performance is most clearly manifested in subjects like maths and science, where linguistic factors are less important.

The secret of this superior performance is essentially to be found in the degree of parental and family support with a very positive attitude to education which is typical of the Indo-Chinese community. This is able to overcome all the disruption and disadvantage to which these people have been subject in the recent past. The authors write:

Nowhere is the family’s commitment to accomplishment and education more evident than in time spent on homework. During high school, Indo-Chinese students spend an average of three hours and 10 minutes per day; in junior high, an average of 2.5 hours; and in grade school, an average of two hours and five minutes. Research in the US shows that American students study about 1.5 hours per day at the junior and high school levels.

After dinner (in weeknights) the table is cleared, and homework begins. The older children, both male and female, help their younger siblings … The younger children, in particular, are taught not only subject matter but how to learn. Such sibling involvement demonstrates how a large family can encourage and enhance academic success. The familial setting appears to make the children feel at home in school and, consequently, perform well there.

Parental engagement included reading regularly to young children — an activity routinely correlated to academic performance … It is important to note that the effects of being read to help up statistically whether the children were read to in English or their native language …

Egalitarianism and role sharing were also found to be associated with high academic performance. In fact, relative equality between the sexes was one of the strongest predictors of GPA (numerical grade point averages on a scale from 4 down to 1). In those homes where the respondents disagreed that “a wife should always do as her husband wishes”, the children earned average GPAs of 3.16. But children from homes whose parents agreed with the statement had an average GPA of 2.64. In households where the husband helped with the dishes and laundry, the mean GPA was 3.21; when husbands did not participate in the chores, the mean GPA was 2.79.

This is a remarkable argument for the feminist view of equality in the home; it also validates the blindingly obvious fact that children who have a happy and supportive family background in which the parents foster education and learning will perform better in school. Interestingly, those families who reflected American values such as “seeking fun and excitement” and “material possessions” also tended to produce lower academic performance.

In the crudest terms, it does not matter how bad living conditions are if the parents are prepared to turn off the television while their children study.

These results should be of some consolation to the schools, too, so often treated as the source of educational problems. The authors point out that their study confirms that American schools have retained their capacity to teach:

We believe that the view of our schools as failing to educate stems from the unrealistic demand that the educational system deal with urgent social service needs. Citizens and politicians expect teachers and schools to keep children off the streets and away from drugs, deal with teenage pregnancy, prevent violence in the schools, promote safe sex and perform myriad other tasks and responsibilities in addition to teaching.

As the social needs of our students have moved into the classroom, they have consumed the scarce resources allocated to education and have compromised the schools’ academic function. The primary role of teachers has become that of parent by proxy; they are expected to transform the attitude and behaviour of children, many of whom come to school ill-prepared to learn.

In other words, even though there is plenty of room for improvement in the schools, it is not fair to blame them for social problems which are not of their making. An essential element in improving the school performance of the disadvantaged is to deal with the source of the disadvantage. It does not help to pretend that somehow the children can be compensated for this by policies in the schools.

This is not an argument for lowering standards in the schools, or for rejecting system-wide assessment of performance on the grounds that it is not “fair” to the kids. The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, has recently criticised this view. Some of the critics of assessment, he writes:

say that a new assessment system won’t be fair until we make sure all mothers have proper health care while they are pregnant. Or it won’t be fair until all kids are able to participate in high-quality early childhood programs. Or until every school has the same amount of money to spend per child and all our schools shape up. Other people say that we shouldn’t go with new assessments until we’re sure they are valid.

These are not trivial considerations. We should pursue these goals. But if we have to wait until we attain them before trying to establish national standards and assessments, we’ll wait forever. It’s like saying we have to wait until our society is perfect before trying to improve it.

So there we have the quintessence of research and expert opinion on schools and education performance. The best schools policy is to concentrate on the teaching function of the schools, while assessing their and the children’s performance individually and comparatively. The best policy for education performance (and preparation for the workforce) is to foster stable, supportive, education-oriented family life. Sounds like a Utopia, doesn’t it?

***
4.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “LA safe from religious poverty,”
The Weekend Australian, June 13-14, 1992, p. 2.

Los Angeles: One of the strangest aspects of all the descriptions and analyses of the Los Angeles riots at the end of April, with all their profound analyses of the tensions due to race, poverty and immigration, is that none of the descriptions matched with what I have seen this week.

There was the place all right — the immensely long Vermont Avenue with burnt-out shops dotted along it, the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues, which most of the world has seen in the footage of the truck driver who was pulled out of his truck and beaten up by the rioters. There were the blacks and Hispanics walking on the streets.

But where were the slums? Whatever the reality of poverty by American standards, the housing on Vermont Avenue and surrounding streets is not bad. Indeed, it is reminiscent of some of the poorer parts of Sydney, comparable with the wooden houses one can see on the way to Sydney airport — not good, but not all that bad.

On the way, I had passed through Baldwin Hills, a black district where a shoe store had been burnt out in the riots — and was taken aback to find that it was quite an attractive suburb, quite as good, with as good a housing standard, as most ordinary suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.

Is this the underclass that is in revolt against racism and poverty? There were schools which, seen from the outside, seemed as good as the ordinary Australian State high school; in Vermont Avenue, there were many badly maintained buildings, but the same can be said of Beverly Hills, not normally considered a deprived area.

But the one fact which struck me powerfully, which I have not seen or read about in any of the reports, was the omnipresence of religion.

In the main stretch of Vermont Avenue, roughly from 51st Street to 87th, I counted more than 100 different churches before I gave up.

Most of them were not what we would think of as a church — large, dedicated free-standing structures with plenty of land. No, these were big or small store-front operations, evangelical for the most part, with names in English or Spanish.

It is a mixed Afro-American and Hispanic area, with a strong concentration of Koreans towards one end. I saw nothing which I recognised as a Korean church or temple. Not so many Catholic churches. There is one significant large church in the middle of the riot area, the Afro-American Community Presbyterian church.

(This church had a queue alongside it for food handouts — many of the food shops were destroyed in the riots — and, as my driver, married to a black woman, cynically observed, a brand new Buick parked in front.)

Clearly, religion looms large in the lives of the “minority” residents of Los Angeles. There was not a single block along Vermont without one or more churches and sometimes there were as many as seven or eight in a block.

As well as the standard denominations, there were many odd little evangelical or fundamentalist outfits, many of them one-offs with bizarre names.

It would be easy to sneer at these with the usual stuff about religion being the opium of the people and make references to the electronic preachers of California, notorious for their mercenary and hypocritical behaviour. But here is clearly a deeply religious people.

There are nearly as many liquor stores as churches and, unlike the churches, many were destroyed in the riots. The hope is frequently expressed that not all of them will reopen. The greater number of small shops which were attacked seemed to have been owned by Koreans, widely hated by the other two groups.

Further down the avenue towards “Koreatown”, the burnings come to an end as the Korean language signs become thicker and thicker. The impression is that a rising tide of incursion by Korean shopkeepers into the black-Hispanic stretch has been one of the elements in the conflict.

On an ordinary day, the district seems at peace, as it must be normally. Despite high rates of unemployment, there were not many people sitting on doorsteps or porches, although it was warm and some sun was penetrating the universal LA smog.

There was the normal amount of life one might see in an inner-city suburban shopping street mid-week — rather more than is normal for the richer parts of Los Angeles, where nobody can be seen on the streets at all. They have the eerie, deserted air of Canberra suburbia.

So what happened? Obviously, the outrage at the acquittal of the police who delivered an unbelievably brutal beating to Rodney King was the spark which set off the riots.

But, as even locals observe, why did the residents of Vermont Avenue and the surrounding districts turn on themselves? Why were they not sophisticated enough to invade Beverley Hills — where, in Rodeo Drive, there is a concentration of shops selling the most expensive “designer” garbage in the world — or downtown LA, with its concentrations of jewellery wholesalers and retailers, etc?

One answer, which is not as silly as it sounds, is simply that the rioters were not pop psychologists looking for simple political messages rooted in the discredited kindergarten Marxism of the 60s and 70s. They do not use words like “underclass”, with all its patronising overtones.

Some were reacting to the clear injustice of the jury verdict; many more were opportunistically riding the wave of burning and looting — Hispanics, who no doubt have no more reason to love the LA Police Department than the blacks, were prominent.

But what were the good people of Baldwin Hills, a suburb which would be acceptable on appearances to any wage-earner in Sydney or Melbourne, doing pouring out of a shoe store with armfuls of shoes? It may be a ghetto, but it is a gilded ghetto.

It is clear that there is a malaise in American society among the “minorities” — although not a minority in toto in LA, it is predicted that by the end of the century Hispanics alone may well comprise more than 50 per cent of the population of the city. That there is widespread unemployment, drug-taking, poverty and lack of hope for the future is also clear. But the reasons for this are not at all clear.

It is not enough, as the smug white residents of Beverly Hills, Simi Valley — where Rodney King’s assailants were acquitted — or the other high-income areas like to do, not to mention their counterparts in Balmain or Carlton, to condemn the system, to fall back on the scapegoats of racism, capitalism or some other mysterious and intangible conspiracy that makes the poor poor.

Racism undoubtedly exists but there is a growing black middle class whose members, while justifiably resenting discrimination when they encounter it, are doing perfectly well within their own enclaves, watering their lawns and polishing their cars just like anybody else.

To understand what makes the black and Hispanic communities of LA tick, it would be necessary to pay attention to their own concerns and solutions. This is why I find it odd that hitherto there has been little or no reference to the one most obvious and unusual social phenomenon of Vermont Avenue — its religiosity.

This has always been a feature of black communities, perhaps, but it is shared by Hispanics.

The huge number of words poured out about the riots by correct-thinking people have preferred to dwell on the policies and solution which have been shown not to work. It is not fashionable among those who are accustomed to dismiss popular religion and its solaces to take account of what people really think and feel.