LATER, TOOKIE
Just about an hour ago, word came down that the fate of reformed gang leader and convicted murderer Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams has been sealed. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declined to grant clemency and has ordered the death sentence for Mr Williams — first imposed 24 years ago following his conviction for several murders — to be consummated one minute past midnight tomorrow. The Governor’s decision comes as no surprise. Despite vocal and widespread support for sparing the life of a man who had devoted the past quarter century on death row to various redeeming activities (he wrote a number of books aimed at children extolling the straight and narrow and warning against the pernicious influence of gangs and violence), the old bugbears of racism and punitive capitalism — always a salient feature in southern California, especially — predictably carried the day. And, the condemned man’s supporters, mainly has-beens from an era when the plight of black people occasioned some worry among the powerful, now seem arcane, even quaint.
Anyway, sun-up tomorrow will find Mr Williams having gone on his way and the rest of us moving on in ours. Or maybe not. When I heard the news of the governor’s demurral, I thought of Latasha Harlins, the 15 year old girl who was shot in the back in 1991 in Los Angeles by a Korean storekeeper after giving up an argument over the cost of a bottle of fruit juice. Though a surveillance tape clearly showed the young girl leaving the store as she was shot, her killer, a middle-aged woman, was given five years probation. The Judge in the case, Joyce Karlin, cited the climate of “fear’ that prevailed in the Korean-American shopkeeper community due to marauding blacks. Apparently, a climate of fear engendered by the activities of an alien race constitutes extenuating circumstances in some places. And, anyway, the shooting down of black youth, in its sheer ordinariness, hardly seems worth noting anymore. Plenty more where they came from.
I am glad that Latasha has at least her own home page. Mr Williams and Latasha have a connection of sorts. She was murdered ostensibly because of an epidemic of fear occasioned by the Crips, a gang he helped found more than a decade before. He is to die largely for killing a family of Korean immigrants who ran a flea-bag motel. She died negotiating with a member of that community who made her money selling stale bread and overpriced canned goods to Latasha and countless thousands like her denied access to lower-priced supermarkets far from their neighborhoods. Latasha’s story, and that of Mr Williams, has been emblematic of their community long before the Crips or the Koreans or governors who put pandering to the worst instincts of our insidious racism above all else.
So, Stanley Willliams is to die. Was he sincere in trying to be a model White America could have pity on? I don’t know. Maybe if it had saved him. It didn’t. Fittingly, most of America will be asleep when Tookie, finally, solves the Great Mystery. For Tookie, and for Latasha, a moment of reflection, please. And draw your own conclusions.