The difference in response between black people in the Watts area and whites nearby was striking. While 75 percent of white Los Angeles County residents said the riots “hurt the Negro’s cause,” only 24 percent of curfew zone residents said the same. Indeed, only 46 percent of the local residents identified the event as a riot at all, while 38 percent said it was a revolt, revolution, or insurrection. People who were arrested in the violence were particularly likely to use those more politicized terms.
Similarly, about two-thirds of the white group thought authorities handled the situation well, while two-thirds of the local black group said they did a bad job.
To the black curfew zone residents, it seems, the message of the riots was clear. A strong majority attributed the violence either to specific grievances like poverty and police mistreatment or to pent-up frustrations. Many thought whites would see it that way too—51 percent of the black sample said whites were more sympathetic to “Negro problems” after the riots. But there they were apparently mistaken. Only a third of the white group said that whites had become any more sympathetic, and 71 percent said the riots had increased the “gap between the races.”
Half a century later, the gap in black and white perceptions of US racism remains enormous. A Pew poll this year found that 38 percent of whites say the country has already made the necessary changes to give blacks equal rights with whites, while only 8 percent of blacks say the same. More distressingly, a full 43 percent of blacks say those changes will never happen. Given that we’ve been having this conversation for a half a century, it’s not hard to see why.