In Relative Opacity - #1

A letter on the gap between the California we imagine and the city we actually live in, and on what it means to write from inside that gap.

Each generation must, out of relative opacity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.

FRANTZ FANON

On a Thursday afternoon in March, at four o'clock, in a hearing room of the Board of Public Works at Los Angeles City Hall, seven commissioners sat at a long table preparing to vote on the future of the largest line item in the city's budget. Seven, barely a quorum. The other six commissioners, the ones absent, were presumably doing what most Angelenos were doing at four on a Thursday: working, sitting in traffic, picking up children, surviving the day. The hearing had been buried at the back of the agenda. It had taken six months of intense advocacy, working alongside LA Forward, DSA-LA and others, just to get the question of police accountability heard at all. Forty people sat in the audience, give or take. Three of them, of whom I was one, had spent those six months making the meeting possible. We were citizens, not staff and not lobbyists, whose interests had converged on this question and who happened to have the time and flexibility to put in the face time and the research. We had met one on one with the commissioners for months, drafted the reforms, built the coalition that pushed them forward.

What happened in the next hour was, by the standards of how American cities are usually governed, a small thing. The Charter Reform Commission voted nine to nothing to recommend that the Chief of Police be granted the authority to terminate officers, and that the City Council be permitted to send ordinances and advisory action on policing to the Board of Police Commissioners. Two more commissioners had arrived during the debate, late, by which I mean they had driven through Los Angeles at four in the afternoon to make a hearing on the future of LAPD oversight. By the standards of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the vote was an earthquake. By the standards of how a city of nearly four million people decides who polices it and on what terms, it was the work of a room you could fit inside a small restaurant.

The vote was the conclusion of a maneuver none of us had seen coming. Two commissioners had been communicating in private. One was the panel's most conservative voice, a former developer and longtime fixture of City Hall commissions. The other was a Black professor and preacher whose family carries the memory of a lynching. Weeks earlier, in a subcommittee meeting, the former developer had moved to strip the police reforms entirely and pass forward a recommendation for another Christopher Commission, after the body convened in 1991 to investigate the LAPD in the wake of the Rodney King beating, whose recommendations on use of force and officer discipline were partially implemented and then largely subsumed by the department's pre-existing institutional culture. The Rampart scandal, the federal consent decree, and the discipline system in which officers are almost never fired for serious misconduct: this is the record commissions have been asked to study for thirty years and have, mostly, declined to disturb. The proposed reforms before the Commission were ordinary in cities far less progressive than Los Angeles imagines itself to be. The political price of doing nothing about a department consuming half the General Fund would land harder than the political price of doing something. Somewhere in that pressure, two unlikely commissioners had started writing a motion together.

They called a recess after public comment. They printed copies of a motion none of us had seen and walked it around the room. We had ten minutes. The three of us read it standing up, conferred quickly, decided what was salvageable and what was not, and walked back to the commissioners. They looked over at us before they voted, because they had been working with us for months and knew our judgment on the reforms was as close to a coalition position as the room was going to get. We gave a thumbs up. The motion passed.

You could feel the air go out of the room. It was a glorious moment, and it was also nothing. The recommendations now go to the Rules Committee, then to the full Council, where the same arguments must be made again to a different set of people, most of them elected, most of them weighing the same calculation about the LAPPL that the commissioners had been weighing. We are already meeting with their offices. The room reopens.

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I write this because most Angelenos will never see the inside of this room.

Fanon's line is the one I keep returning to. Each generation must, out of relative opacity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.¹ The opacity is not a metaphor. The hearing room on a Thursday at four is opaque. The Council file system is opaque. The question of who actually wrote the motion that determines whether a police officer can be fired for dishonesty is opaque. The opacity is not a failure of civic attention; it is the structural condition under which decisions about a city of nearly four million people are made by a few dozen, witnessed by a few dozen more, and felt by all the rest. To work inside that opacity, to be one of the few in the room, is to feel acutely the gap between what a democracy is supposed to be and what one actually is.

This is also the gap I want to write about. California is imagined, by people who do not live here and many who do, as the country's progressive bastion. The films the state exports, the senators it elects, the lawn signs that announce what is believed inside the house, all conspire to maintain that impression. That impression is not entirely false. It is also not the whole picture. This is the state that produced Reagan and the tax revolt and the carceral expansion of the 1980s. This is the state whose constitution, through Article XXXIV, still requires a public vote before low-rent housing can be built in any community, a clause written in 1950 to keep neighborhoods white and never repealed. And Los Angeles is where the gap between the imagined California and the actual one is widest. More billionaires live here than in almost any city on earth, and tens of thousands of people sleep on its sidewalks, and the political class treats this as weather rather than policy. California is liberal. California is not socialist. The distance between those two words is the distance this publication is interested in, and Los Angeles is where I am writing from because Los Angeles is where the distance is most visible.

Liberal California polices its image carefully. Socialism remains, in the official imagination of the state's political class, a slur or a curiosity even as the conditions that produce socialist analysis (housing as commodity, healthcare as commodity, water as commodity, labor as commodity, life as commodity) compound around us. The work of removing the mask is not the work of denouncing California's liberalism. It is the work of taking seriously what the liberal frame cannot see: that a state which lets its largest city fail to house its workers, fail to police its police, fail to decommodify the basic conditions of life, is failing on terms its own self-image refuses to acknowledge. To name that failure structurally rather than as scandal, and to imagine the alternatives that the liberal frame renders unthinkable, is what I mean by socialism here. Not a program handed down from elsewhere. A practice of pulling the aperture wider until what was unthinkable becomes visible, and then, with luck and work, possible.

This is also why the publication is called what it is. Most American socialism has been theorized from the dense industrial cities of the Northeast, against the backdrop of factories and unions and tenement blocks. Los Angeles fits that frame poorly. It is a sprawl city built on water theft and racial covenants and the entertainment industry, a city of single-family lots and freeway commutes and a working class scattered across two hundred miles. Mike Davis spent a career arguing that the apparent strangeness of Los Angeles is in fact exemplary, that the contradictions worked out here arrive everywhere else later.² If that is true, then the work of building a socialist politics adequate to Los Angeles is not a regional project but a general one. SoCalism, said with a wink and meant in earnest, is the name for that work.

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A word about what this publication will and will not be.

It will not be a venue for takes. It will not be a feed of breaking news from the charter reform fight or any other fight, though both will appear here when there is something worth saying about them that cannot be said in a thread. It will not pretend to expertise it does not have, and it will not perform the kind of confident authority that political writing on the left often mistakes for seriousness. The truth is that I do not have most of the answers. I am reading, sitting through hearings, talking with organizers and electeds and neighbors, watching the city, and writing in order to think. The writing is the discovery, not the report on a discovery already made.

What I can offer is attention. I have spent hundreds of hours in rooms most Angelenos will never see, and the texture of those rooms matters. I have read the documents and sat through the public comment and watched the procedural choreography of a city deciding what kind of city it wants to be. I do this because I believe Los Angeles can be a different city than it is, and because I believe the work of imagining that difference cannot be left to the people already in the rooms. If the opacity is structural, then the writing has to be a small act against the opacity. Not a claim of transparency, which would be dishonest. A claim of attention.

The publication has two sections. The longer essays will appear when they are ready, and not before, because the form requires it. They are the pieces in which I try to work out something structurally: the political economy of housing in California, the genealogy of the LAPD as an institution, the question of what democratic socialism could mean in a city like this one. They are written for educated readers who care about these questions and who can tolerate footnotes. The shorter notes, gathered under Marginalia, are the workshop. They are what I read this week, what hearing I sat through, what someone said at a meeting that snagged on something I had been thinking about, what the next essay is starting to look like before it is an essay. They run on the metabolism of attention rather than of argument. They will sometimes be wrong. They will sometimes change my mind in public. That is the point.

Both sections will be free. There will be a paid tier for readers who want to underwrite the work, and the pitch is exactly what it sounds like: this is reader-supported civic writing, and if you can help keep it going, please do. Nothing will sit behind a paywall, because the politics of paywalling civic analysis cuts against everything I would want this publication to mean.

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The hearing on March 5 was step one. The room reopens at the Rules Committee, then at the Council, and the same arguments must be made again, and the political calculation about the police union must be confronted again, and the people in the next room will be elected rather than appointed, which changes the texture of the argument without changing the structure of it. I will be there. I will write about it here. I will also write about a great deal else, because the charter reform fight is a single front in a much larger contest over what kind of city Los Angeles becomes in the years just ahead of us.

Fanon wrote his line in 1961, in a context utterly different from this one, and yet the line travels. Each generation, in conditions it does not choose and through opacity it cannot fully clear, has to decide whether to discover its mission or betray it. The mission of this generation in this city, as I see it, is to refuse the comfortable lie that California's liberalism is enough. It is not enough. It has not been enough for a long time. The work of imagining what would be enough, and then of building toward it, is the work this publication exists to take part in.

Come think with me.

1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 145. The line appears in the chapter “On National Culture.”

2. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990).