For many L.A. residents who were dissociated from the riots by physical and/or social distance, the riots were more a spectacle than a threat. Most of their information came from media coverage of the event, including a 1992 Los Angeles Times published May 2 that covered a group of armed Korean merchants protecting their store.
The primary factions described in the article are “the Koreans” and the faceless mob that make up the looters. They are never named directly, but through describing tensions between Korean merchants and black and Latino customers, the article implies the racial composition of the looters. One Korean man describes the looters as “beasts.” There’s an emphasis on interracial strife and the ways in which this man mimics white racism. “Firebase Koreatown” is filled with barricades and “scores” of armed vigilantes patrolling darkened parking lots. Inner city conflict is portrayed as self-contained and fueled by an interracial hatred between nonwhite groups. Looters (and by extension, black and Latino Americans) are depicted as a dangerous mob threatening to surge past armed lines.
Descriptions of barricades made of “luxury sedans and battered grocery trucks,” “from tiny liquor stores… to upscale boutiques,” call on simultaneous images of Asian Americans as wealthy and hard-working store owners. By contrast, now “elite Korean marine veterans” are putting out calls for help on Korean-language radio stations, and store owners barricade the entrances to their stores with bags of rice and cabbage. Such details underscore the distinction between the inner city and the rest of Los Angeles, and emphasize the spectacle of violence between communities of Others.
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