2022
April
26
Tuesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

April 26, 2022
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Ali Martin
California Bureau Writer

I was away at college in the spring of 1992, when Los Angeles – my hometown – erupted in violence, generations of anger and frustration boiling over at the acquittal of four white police officers who had beaten a Black man named Rodney King. 

I grew up in the Valley, 20 miles and a world away from the heart of the riots in South Central, but my parents and grandparents were also native Angelenos, and to see the city tearing itself apart tore at us too. My memory holds clear snapshots of the violence I saw on TV that week – but even clearer is the sound of my mom choking up when she called to tell me, “Our city is burning.”

That was my awakening to the persistent, crushing weight of institutional racism. There was an undeniable dissonance between the dark, grainy video that showed Mr. King under relentless attack, and the void of accountability.

The Monitor’s Francine Kiefer went to South Central – now called South Los Angeles – to see what we’ve learned in the 30 years since. Amid the rubble of still-vacant lots, justice is emerging. It’s too slow, and it’s too little – but it’s there, and it has momentum.

Justice takes a lot of forms in South LA: a public swimming pool, commercial investment, a safe and well-resourced school. But the progress is complex, and some obstacles, obstinate. The police brutality behind the South Central uprising 30 years ago, and the Watts uprising nearly 30 years before that, echoed unmistakably when police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd two years ago. 

It’s hard not to be cynical when you see a cycle. But Francine takes us beyond cynicism, on a tour of South LA that shows hope and agency at work – seeds of justice that will need a hand from respect, partnership, and opportunity in order to thrive.

Thirty years later, Rodney King’s simple plea “Can’t we all get along?” is more poignant than ever.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

A deeper look

Paul Sakuma/AP/File
Smoke rises from a shopping center burned by rioters, April 20, 1992, in Los Angeles. South LA exploded in violence after four police officers were acquitted of the 1991 beating of motorist Rodney King.

This week marks 30 years since the race riots in South Central Los Angeles, ignited by the acquittal of four white police officers for beating Rodney King, a Black man. In today’s South LA, we found setbacks mixed with progress, and stories of hope that reveal a path toward justice.

David W Cerny/Reuters
Yulia Fedulova and her daughter Sofi speak with Ukrainian refugee Yulia Sarycheva and her sons Sergey, Sava, and Serafin, inside Ms. Fedulova's house in Prague, March 30, 2022. Ms. Fedulova and her husband are Russians hosting Ukrainian refugees.

For the Russian-speaking diaspora, the war in Ukraine has brought a strong desire to help Ukrainian refugees – and soul-searching about whether and how they still think of themselves as “Russian.”

A letter from

Air Force One

Interacting with presidents in person always generates a more nuanced impression. Our reporter shares some observations after a recent trip to the Pacific Northwest with President Biden.  

Points of Progress

What's going right

In our progress roundup, a forest-turned-desert that is being reclaimed by its Indigenous community is one example of how deliberate care, slow handiwork, and patience are improving environments on land, in the water, and in cities.

In Pictures

Guy Peterson
Professional circus performer Mamadu Ido executes a handstand, with the rest of the Sencirk troupe holding him up below.

A circus troupe in Senegal dedicated to helping abused children provides not only an opportunity for employment, but also a new way for the boys in its program to work together.


The Monitor's View

AP
A worker tends a community-supported rooftop garden in Brussels, Belgium.

Much of the world’s conversation about climate change rests on a premise of victimization. Big carbon-emitting nations are imperiling developing nations. Fossil fuel companies dupe governments and consumers. Today’s generation is harming tomorrow’s generation by its carbon addiction.

Yet another conversation is happening that shies away from grievance to what Amory Lovins, a longtime apostle of energy innovation, calls “applied hope.” This is a pragmatic conviction that individuals “acting out of hope can cultivate a different kind of world worth being hopeful about ... expressed and created moment by moment through our choices.”

This approach can be as deceptively simple as a can of paint. In Indonesia, for example, the San Francisco-based ClimateWorks Foundation has funded local projects to paint corrugated roofs with white reflective paint to cool homes and schools. In one factory, the paint reduced inside temperatures by 20 degrees Fahrenheit on the warmest days. That kind of cooling, scaled across the world’s hotter urban regions, represents massive potential savings in energy costs.

The project by ClimateWorks represents a big shift among philanthropy organizations. After decades of lobbying governments or backing ambitious high-tech solutions to mitigate climate change, these environmental leaders are refocusing on grassroots adaptations geared to individual energy users.

“I saw firsthand how the big climate funders were directing the vast majority of their grants,” said Erin Rogers, co-director of the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, in a recent interview with The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “It was a very siloed approach, a very insider, technocratic, policy-driven approach that I think we’ve all come to see is failing.” Climate change, she said, needs “solutions that are people-centered, more connected.”

Climate change philanthropy is suddenly flush with cash. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos created a $10 billion Earth Fund in 2020 and has already doled out more in grants in less than two years than ClimateWorks has in nearly two decades. Other billionaires and their foundations – such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Mr. Bezos’ former wife, MacKenzie Scott; and the Musk Foundation – have dedicated fortunes to promoting green energy and biodiversity. Nine funders pledged $5 billion toward addressing climate change at United Nations meetings last fall.

As this money is spent, its value may be measured less by the policies or technologies it promotes than by the extent to which it lifts individuals above the enormity of the challenge of climate change to a recognition of their ability to embrace new ways of thinking and acting.

“Sometimes a problem can’t be solved not because it’s too big, but because it was framed so narrowly that its boundaries don’t encompass the options, degrees of freedom, and synergies needed to solve it,” Dr. Lovins, a Stanford University professor, wrote in a recent tweet. 

A shift like the one in climate philanthropy toward individual empowerment and a people-centered approach represents a new type of freedom, one that may yet help communities and governments act with new creativity and resolve.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

It’s natural to want to help when we see conflict. Acknowledging God, divine Love, as the communicator of infinite goodness and grace opens our thinking to know what to say that will bring comfort to the individuals involved and healing to the situation.


A message of love

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
A close-up of a monarch butterfly's wings in the Butterfly House at Peace River Botanical & Sculpture Gardens in Punta Gorda, Florida, April 17, 2022.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us. Come back tomorrow. Staff writer Scott Peterson will be reporting from Ukraine about how two months of war and collective hardship is forging a unified national narrative.

More issues

2022
April
26
Tuesday
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