Readers of The Scrapbook will recall the recent item about L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, where some locals mounted a campaign against an art gallery, claiming it represented an intrusion of gringo culture into the predominantly Hispanic community (see “White Out,” March 6, 2017). The activists are back at it, this time doing their best to drive out a coffeehouse that poses a gentrification threat.
The Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement led the effort against the small and short-lived nonprofit art gallery PSSST, confronting the gallery’s patrons, yelling at the artsy interlopers to go away, spray-painting the building with racist slogans such as “F— White Art.” We noted at the time the threat posed by art: “First come the art galleries and, before you know it, the local bodega has been replaced with an artisanal boucherie.” And yet, even though a gallery has been successfully hounded from its digs, the vanguard of the hipster hordes has come on nonetheless—in this case in the form of that most insidious of white culture stalking horses: the coffeehouse.
Weird Wave Coffee Brewers is a groovy sort of place. The shop’s website promises “chill vibes.” Alas, the vibe isn’t chill enough to keep the neighborhood activists from attacking. First they picketed, protesting the June opening of the shop with such charming signs as “F— White Coffee” and “AmeriKKKano to go,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Then came a physical attack: Early Wednesday morning, July 19, someone in black clothes and a black mask hurled a rock through Weird Wave’s glass door. Not cool.
But how is it that such violence continues to be treated as activism? Shouldn’t violence, in the context of sustained racial vitriol, count as a hate crime?
