In Los Angeles, race is the very heart of the gang problem

View of LA from the Hollywood hills, by Ramon Duran

One hell of an op-ed this week in the LA Times, by Lee Baca, the Sheriff of Los Angeles county:

So let me be very clear about one thing: We have a serious interracial violence problem in this county involving blacks and Latinos.

Some people deny it. They say that race is not a factor in L.A.'s gang crisis; the problem, they say, is not one of blacks versus Latinos and Latinos versus blacks but merely one of gang members killing other gang members (and yes, they acknowledge, sometimes the gangs are race-based).

But they're wrong. The truth is that, in many cases, race is at the heart of the problem. Latino gang members shoot blacks not because they're members of a rival gang but because of their skin color. Likewise, black gang members shoot Latinos because they are brown.
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I would even take this a step further and suggest that some of L.A.'s so-called gangs are really no more than loose-knit bands of blacks or Latinos roaming the streets looking for people of the other color to shoot. Our gang investigators have learned this through interviews in Compton and elsewhere throughout the county.

Why don't we hear more about this in the general media?

Simple answer: because it's minority vs. minority violence. If it were white vs. minority, the press would be talking about nothing else. We live in a world where even the most innocent comment made by a white person that might be construed as racist gets the full media blitz, but the real racism right under our nose is ignored because it doesn't fit the image of "racism" that the mainstream media wants to present to the world.