Erin Aubry Kaplan

Illustration by Shino Arihara IT IS BOTH MONUMENTALLY FRUSTRATING AND ODDLY COMFORTING TO BE reminded that, a year after the terrorist attacks, Americans haven't lost any of the cluelessness or cultural myopia that shapes our national character and makes us grate -- on nerves -- the globe over. In bad......

WHEN THE OSCAR JOEL BRYANT Foundation emerged in 1968, the need for a fraternity of African-American police officers within the LAPD and law enforcement in general was painfully clear. Squad cars and patrol beats were segregated, racist attitudes and behavior tolerated if not downright encouraged, promotions of blacks to command......

All right, this is getting personal. I thought I was done mixing it up with those who would suggest that Inglewood is the second coming of Florence and Normandie, and further suggest that its recent hard luck newswise isn‘t luck at all but merely the natural order of universes populated......

The BBC called to inquire what I thought of the Rodney King--style police beating that happened in Inglewood last week. My immediate thought was that the Brits, a continent and a half away, actually recognizing the difference between L.A.-adjacent Inglewood and L.A. itself -- a recognition many of us here......

Several months ago I caught a discussion on nonprofit radio about a book that analyzed the success of Brown v. Board of Education, the 48-year-old landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that desegregated public schools. Such an examination might at first seem entirely unnecessary -- certainly nobody‘s been barred from attending......

Of all the shirts, socks, knickknacks, books, hand-lettered poems and office doohickeys I’ve presented to my father over the years of Father‘s Days, none of them counts for nearly as much as the little gray pebble turtle with green felt feet that I made for him in kindergarten or thereabouts......

Secession, it hardly needs to be said, is not an idea that resonates positively with black folks. The current secession movements are entirely local, the issues many generations removed from slavery and states‘ rights, but that doesn’t change a general black uneasiness about race being the controlling subtext of separation......

Last week’s L.A. Weekly feature story on Joe Hicks and his 30-year journey from the netherworld of black radicalism to the fold of uber-conservative David Horowitz was, as they say in Hollywood, irresistible material. Black man finally bites leftyliberal dust and goes where all of his brethren fear to tread......

It hit me earlier this month as I rolled up to a stop at the crest of the hill that is Centinela and Florence avenues. I take in this intersection at least a dozen times a week, and on about the sixth time one particular week I realized what was......