Notes

1. bell hooks, "Eating the Other," Black Looks (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 34.
2. Ibid., 35.
3. Ibid., 26–27.
4. Boris Marighela, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, Robert Moss, trans., Adelphi Papers 79 (1971): 36. Significantly, Marighela also states, "It is necessary for every urban guerrilla to keep in mind always that he can only maintain his existence if he is disposed to kill the police and those dedicated to repression" (p. 21).
5. Ibid., 42.
6. Mike Davis emphasizes this point again and again in his brief history of the Crips (whose name, at least one source claims, originally stood for "Constant Revolution in Progress"). He quotes Sonya Sanchez as saying, "The drug-taking, apathetic young Black people we bemoan today are the result of our failure to protect and cherish the Black Panthers during the Sixties." Quoted in Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London–New York: Verso Press, 1990), 293.
7. The money expropriated during the bank robbery for which she will now serve time was intended for the Black Panther Party.
8.  I borrow this title from an editorial called "L.A. Riots:  Cartoons vs. Reality," by Michelle Shocked and Bart Bull, Billboard  (June 20, 1992): 6. The subtitle is "Gangster Rappers Preserve White Myths."
9. Dre lays out the antipolitical position of the gangsta when he raps, "no medallions, dreadlocks or black fist/it's just that gangsta glare, etc." He also seems to be critically addressing Da Lench Mob when he raps, "Some niggas like lynchin', but I just watch em hang."
10. Quoted in Jonathan Gold, "One Nation under a G-Thing," Rolling Stone 666 (September 30, 1993):  124.
11.  Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," Prisms, Samuel and Shierry Weber, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 31.
12. Quoted in Shocked/Bull.
13. Houston A. Baker, "Scene . . . Not Heard," Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, Robert Gooding-Williams, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 46.
14. Ibid., 48.
15. Ibid., 46.
16. That is, about 3,492 Latinos as compared to 2,832 blacks. See Virginia I. Postrel, "The Real Story Goes beyond Black and White," Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1992, A11. Cited in Melvin L. Oliver, James H. Johnson, Jr., and Walter C. Farrell, "Anatomy of a Rebellion," Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, 121.
17. An "other" that has been celebrated by modernist authors from Sade onward.
18. Marighela, 34.
19. Davis, 253. The space program to which he refers was the idea of former LAPD chief and current state senator (from Orange County) Ed Davis. Ed Davis wanted a geosynclinical satellite to be placed above Los Angeles to take surveillance techniques into the twenty-first century.
20. Davis, 233.
21. Mumia Abu-Jamal, "The Prison-House of Nations," Still Black, Still Strong, Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones, Sylvère Lotringer, eds. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993), 156. Former political prisoner Dhoruba Bin Wahad states that 85 percent of those on death row are "black or people of color." Dhoruba Bin Wahad, "The Cutting Edge of Prison Technology," Still Black, Still Strong, 91.
22. Quoted in Charles Aaron, "Sir Real," Spin (October 1993):  54.
23. Dhoruba Bin Wahad points out that the strip search is a form of disciplinary rape because, after all, rape is defined legally as the insertion of any object (including fingers) into any orifice without the individual's consent. I don't know if judges have decided that incarceration itself already implies consent. "It is done by prison staff and prison guards in an impersonal and very cold and calculated way designed to destroy your self-esteem." Bin Wahad, 96.
24. Marighela, 20.
25. Rolling Stone 666: 101.

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