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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
This is the situation the LAPD does not want to happen. They do not dig this gang truce. They want to keep them separate. Once you sit down with twenty thousand guys who used to be fighting each other in groups of five or five hundred, and you set them all together, you've got some kind of new phenomena
THEORY
Everyday History, Everyday Racism
Racism, nationalism, and xenophobia are likely to increase during critical periods in the history of a society. Racism appears not only in written or spoken texts but also in acts. David Theo Goldberg has argued that there is no generic racism and that therefore one has to historicize the different racisms:
There is no single [set of] transcendental determinant[s] that inevitably causes the occurrence of racism - be it in nature, or drive, or mode of production, or class formation. There are only the minutiae that make up the fabric of daily life and specific interests and values, the cultures out of which racialized discourse and racist expressions arise. Racist expressions become normalized in and through the prevailing categories of modernity’s epistemes and institutionalized in modernity's various modes of social articulation and power.
Racism is more than just a reaction to problems and difficult passages in the life of individuals and groups. It is a fact of life, even in stages of relative economic stability and social equilibrium. Two examples that stem from different historical backgrounds explain this. According to a poll taken by Der Spiegel, in 1992 one-third of Germany's population believed that Jews are at least partly responsible for the hate crimes committed against them. Studs Terkel's book Race has demonstrated how deeply the “American obsession” with racial matters is ingrained into everyday culture. Racist assumptions about people believed to be the “Other” are tenacious and often lie below the surface of conscientious behavior.
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