Remembering Latasha Harlins (July 14, 1975 – March 16, 1991)

March 16, 2017 1:42 AM

As its subtitle suggests, part of the project of Brenda Stevenson’s The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Race, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots is to recover the central role that Harlins’s death and Du’s light sentence played in the lead-up to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.  Although a different legal ruling — the not-guilty verdict for the LAPD officers who were filmed brutally beating Rodney King — provided the riots’ immediate instigating event, Rodney and Latasha’s names were often invoked in the same breath: “Tell me what’s a black life worth / A bottle of juice is no excuse, the truth hurts […] Ask Rodney, Latasha, and many more,” Tupac Shakur rapped in “I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto". -- Common Ground: Brenda Stevenson’s “The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins” By Rachel Monroe

Brenda Stevenson discusses her book on C-SPAN's Book TV

How the killing of Latasha Harlins changed South L.A., long before Black Lives Matter

Tupac said her name
The rapper never forgot Latasha Harlins, who was killed on the streets of Los Angeles before the O.J. Simpson trial

posted by Room 641-A (3 comments total)

Thank you. Excellent post.
posted by Lisitasan at 7:16 AM on March 16, 2017

Thanks for posting this. This was a turning point for me as a kid of Korean immigrant parents. I really had to grapple with how prevalent anti-Black racism was/is, the privilege-and-trap of model minority status, and the process by which immigrants are taught racism and racial hierarchies. The L.A. Riots were described as a coming of age for my generation of U.S. born Korean Americans.
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:08 PM on March 16, 2017 [2 favorites]

Voluntary manslaughter? A $500 fine? Jesus. Thanks for the post; I didn't know about her.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:49 PM on March 16, 2017