TPPM Watts: (12) Any mystery to Watts?

[Paul Nightingale]

"Yet in the daytime's brilliance and heat, it is hard to believe there
is any mystery to Watts. Everything seems so out in the open ..."

Paragraphs 8-11 describe in great documentary detail the 'reality of
Watts'. Or rather: they report as documentary, ie 'this is what
documentary looks like', the yoking of documentary realism and
street-dirt (for want of a better phrase).

Hence, that "it is hard to believe there is any mystery to Watts" could
refer to the way this kind of writing echoes documentary writing
traditionally and conventionally. This is what an impoverished
working-class area looks like.

Moving on, or rather back to the sentence that closes paragraph 7:
"Watts [we recall] is country which lies, psychologically, uncounted
miles further than most whites seem at present willing to travel".

Cf:

"On the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United
States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the
majority of descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether the Black
poor live or die seems to merit only haughty disinterest and
indifference. Indeed, in terms of the life-and-death issues that matter
most to African-Americans -- structural unemployment, race-based
super-incarceration, police brutality, disappearing affirmative action
programs, and failing schools -- the present presidential election might
as well be taking place in the 1920s."

See the rest of Mike Davis' brief article, dated Sept 24th, at
www.motherjones.com