After the Great Depression, the majority of America was in need of affordable housing after the loss of property and wealth. Housing projects across the country were developed by the Federal Housing Administration to account for this urgency, where living spaces were developed for both Blacks and whites, segregated of course. Both flooded with working-class families and people, with industry accompanying the cities they occupied. This eventually led to a vast waiting list for Black families in need of housing--as there wasn't enough space--and vacancies within the white accommodations. Eventually this became overly apparent and thus the whites-only projects became opened up to African-Americans. While this may be flagged as a good thing, with this, the industries left the city and the projects soon evolved from working-class people to poor, marking the transition of public housing from a general good to one with crumbling infrastructure--drawing in police and eventually the distribution of crack cocaine into black neighborhoods by the Reagan administration.
This policy and practice has come to be known as "redlining". In a country that has historically associated property with worth, the ability to gain wealth and achieve equity has been deeply influenced by this policy--one that began in the 1930's (on paper) with its effects still vastly apparent in 2018. This practice of segregation bled into not only economic opportunity for Black Americans, but into mental and physical health too. With the circulation of guns into the projects (U.S. government again) violence and crime rates rose, and with it a higher likelihood of death--aligning with R.G. Gilmore's definition of structural racism and the vulnerability to premature death.
State coercion remains a immense factor in the development of rage. Through these segregated housing projects, Black communities grew more and more poor; creating a distraction in many ways from assessing the true source of the injustice. Discriminatory policy on the basis of race structurally created these conditions, as well as perpetuating them through the intense stresses of poverty and violence and hatred toward non-whites in general.
Thus we get to the 90's, with sixty years of discrimination and "justice" blanketed by "change", the rage of the unheard had grown from bubbling to boil. In LA neighborhoods that were still so deeply segregated and blocked from equal opportunity, anger toward the corrupt police and government could not be contained--or hidden--any longer.
A final quote from John Ehrlichman, the counsel and Assistant to President Nixon, spoken on his death bed:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
-Avery Evans
Source: A Forgotten History of How the U.S. Government Segregated America, Terry Gross https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america
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