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Racial hate and discrimination are serious problems in California’s Inland Empire—and solving them begins at the most fundamental levels. This was the conclusion of a panel of people who study and fight against hate crimes at “How Does the Inland Empire Strike Back Against Hate?,” a Zócalo/California Humanities event at UCR ARTS in Riverside, California. The speakers agreed that acts of racism and hatred go underreported across the region, and that building strong institutions that promote understanding begins in schools.

The discussion was moderated by Brian Levin, professor emeritus at the Cal State San Bernardino School of Criminal Justice, who studies extremism and hate crimes. He opened the discussion by noting that hate crimes “increased at double digit levels in major American cities” in 2023. This year isn’t likely to get better given that hate crimes have increased in every election year since 1991. Levin asked the panelists to speak to how California—which perhaps should be “a shining city on the hill for the rest of the country”—is combating hate.

California State Assemblymember Corey A. Jackson said that his goal is to build anti-racist, anti-xenophobic infrastructure around the state. He pointed to two bills recently signed by Governor Gavin Newsom—AB 1078, which pushed back against book banning (and which Jackson wrote) and AB 1955, which bars schools from notifying parents about student gender identity—as well as the state’s Civil Rights Department’s Commission on the State of Hate as examples. “Overall, what are we saying in the state of California? Not on our watch. We are making sure we are upholding what other generations did for us. When hate, racism, [or] xenophobia raises its ugly head, we are going to beat it back in the shadows where it belongs,” he said.

Turning to Candice Mays, project director of Black Voice News’ Mapping Black California, Levin asked how local institutions are fighting hate, and what they can do to combat skepticism and distrust of law enforcement and government.

The first hurdle, said Mays, is “How do you tell the police on the police?” Currently, the responsibility to report an incident is on the victim—who may not want to report a violent interaction to the organization perpetrating it. And law enforcement itself might not tick the proper boxes to characterize a violent act as a hate crime. Who holds the people who are mandated to report hate crimes accountable for their reports? Mays asked. She added, “It’s not as much as, how do we fix the Black community’s opinion of law enforcement; it’s how does government hold law enforcement accountable, so it’s not on us to deal with that.”

Levin concurred, pointing out that over the last few years, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department—the nation’s 10th largest law enforcement agency—has reported just a handful of hate crimes each year, while the Los Angeles Police Department reported over 800 in 2023.

Xenophobia has a long history in the Inland Empire, said ACLU Southern California Inland Empire Office senior policy advocate and organizer Luis Nolasco. He sees his work as “ensuring that the Inland Empire is welcoming and is not anti-immigrant,” he said. “The hate comes from lack of knowledge or interfacing with the group.” He added, “A lot of that can be solved by talking to a person that’s an immigrant.” Some of his work has been with young people—including a lawsuit challenging how law enforcement and schools punish Black and brown students—but he is also working on recognizing racism as a public health crisis.

Mays said that unequal healthcare access is a major issue in both Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, though it’s significantly worse in the latter. She said that people by and large have health insurance. But new arrivals from Los Angeles County—many of them Black and brown, and without local networks—lack access to resources and providers. They often end up going to urgent care, for instance, instead of a primary care doctor.

Levin turned the discussion toward solutions. “What can we do to hone allyship?” he asked.

Jackson said that Black people are always at the top of any list of hate crime victims—but they are not alone there. “We are all on the menu. It depends what the dish of the day is. As a matter of fact, this is starting to become a buffet, when it comes to hate,” he said. He urged people to band together—but also to “hold onto your own humanity. Speak up against other people who are being targeted, even if you have nothing to win or lose.”

In the face of extreme hate, allyship has to be active, said Nolasco. “We’ve lost that sense of really putting ourselves on the line for our other communities,” he said. “This is something we all need to do for each other.”

Mays echoed that sentiment in response to a question from an audience member about helping people who want to fight hate but feel too overwhelmed to take action.

“I’m exhausted, too. I look at bad numbers all day,” she said. “It’s important to work in collaboration and connection with other people because then you’re restoring each other.” Surround yourself in community, she added, and remember that other people did this work before you.

Another audience member asked the panelists whether anti-hate, anti-racism movements needed better marketing—slogans like “Occupy,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Defund the Police” are triggering, or easy to push back on.

Mays didn’t deny the need for better marketing but pointed out that “desegregation” and “integration” got pushback in the civil rights era. “Whatever we’re going to push for next, no matter how we word it, is going to upset people, she said. “Honestly if it’s not, I don’t think we’re pushing the right things or pushing hard enough.”

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For over 25 years I have asked my students in U.S. history courses the same questions about Jim Crow:

“Where does Jim Crow ‘live’?”

“When did it begin?”

“How does it work?”

Their answers almost always focus on Southern states. I have taught in California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota, places with well-documented histories of racial segregation and discrimination. A wealth of scholarship shows Jim Crow was everywhere. Still, students cling to a belief that the history of white supremacy is a Southern history.

To push back against these simplified notions of racial discrimination in the U.S., I’ve made it my job to write and teach about Jim Crow in unexpected places—including California. The state embraces its reputation as a site for progressive thinking, the birthplace of the hippies and the Black Panthers, and a “free” state from its 1850 inception. Yet the state also developed innovative methods for containing and restricting people of color in public and private spaces—methods that continue to stoke racism in California and throughout the U.S. today.

One of the most successful people who fought back against those methods was Loren Miller, a lawyer who worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Los Angeles. Using Miller’s mid-20th-century career as a lens to examine Jim Crow in California offers a sense of the breadth of this discrimination—and of the importance of acknowledging and understanding it.

Miller was born in Pender, Nebraska, in 1903 and earned his law degree from Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas, in 1928. By the time he moved to California in 1929, the NAACP had been the leading civil rights organization in the nation for two decades, fighting to end discrimination, segregation, and lynching. The organization established a branch in Los Angeles in 1914.

In housing, neighborhoods, and schools, California had always excelled at creating white-only institutions. Its history of segregation began in the 1850s, when the state adopted so-called Black codes. These laws and practices kept African Americans out of a variety of places, from streetcars, theaters, and restaurants to political parties and witness stands, where they could not testify against white people until 1863. The state was especially proficient at creating white-only neighborhoods as it applied restrictive covenants and lending practices with aplomb.

Miller’s legal career took off quickly, fueled by the sheer volume of discrimination to fight in California. Between 1938 and 1948, when the Great Migration pulled thousands of African Americans to California, Miller appeared as the attorney in approximately 75 lawsuits involving discriminatory real estate practices. In December 1945, he won the Sugar Hill case, a decisive victory at the California Supreme Court that deemed restrictive covenants a violation of Black homeowners’ 14th Amendment rights. The case received extensive media attention, in part because one of the plaintiffs was the Academy Award-winning actress Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind. In 1954, along with Thurgood Marshall, Miller argued Shelley v. Kraemer, a landmark Supreme Court case in which the justices declared that the enforcement of racial restrictive covenants was unconstitutional.

Miller became the NAACP’s foremost expert on restrictive covenants’ legal intricacies and harmful effects in the U.S. In lectures to civic and human rights organizations around the country, he argued that the answer to most of the problems confronting Black Americans was “to find a solution to the complex housing problems that plague the urban Negro,” as he told a National Urban League audience in Pittsburgh in 1954. Housing discrimination led to other anti-Black practices and segregation, Miller noted—which kept Black people from achieving equality in education, the workplace, and beyond.

Miller never missed an opportunity to emphasize how dismal the situation was in his home state. “[M]ore Negro children attend all-Negro schools in Los Angeles than attend such schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Jackson, Mississippi, combined,” he told an audience at the Lake Arrowhead Conference on Equal Employment Opportunity, in a 1963 talk titled “The Problems of The Negro in Southern California.”

And Miller knew, firsthand, that California’s Jim Crow, despite its legalistic and genteel packaging, could be as violent as that of the South—and as hard to combat. In 1946, his law firm had taken on one of the state’s most devastating instances of racial violence.

In December 1945, refrigeration engineer O’Day Short, who was Black, moved with his wife Helen and their two small children to a previously all-white part of Fontana, in California’s San Bernardino County, to take a job at a Kaiser Steel mill. Days after the Short family moved into their home, a menacing posse warned them to leave the neighborhood. The Shorts stayed put. On December 16, their house burned to the ground. Helen and the children died from “shock from extensive burns” shortly after arriving at the hospital; O’Day died several weeks later.

The threats, arson, and murders of the Shorts were almost certainly the work of Ku Klux Klan vigilantes. The so-called Second Klan had been active in the area in the 1920s and months after the fire at the Shorts’ house, the group staged a major recruitment drive in San Bernardino County.

Miller and his law partner Ivan J. Johnson worked diligently on the Short case, but it never went to trial. The San Bernardino County Coroner quickly ruled that the deaths were caused by a fire of “unknown origin,” refusing to admit the threats against the Shorts as evidence.

Rumors circulated among white neighbors and local law enforcement that the Shorts had started the fire when they lit their stove; the Black press, including the California Eagle (which Miller later purchased), devoted considerable coverage to debunking that claim. An interracial coalition of civil rights workers, labor unions, and religious leaders pushed for justice, turning the murders into a rallying cry to stop residential segregation and the revitalized Ku Klux Klan. In 1946, California Attorney General Robert W. Kenny promised an independent investigation into the murders, but the grand jury adjourned without issuing a report.

Miller and Johnson had a stellar record fighting Jim Crow in the Golden State. But in the Short case, there were no victories. As the Black newspaper the Los Angeles Sentinel put it back in 1946, “All the Shorts are dead…Only Jim Crow is alive.”

When I teach my students about Miller and the Shorts, they begin to see that white supremacy had—and has—a long reach. The violence that Black Americans face today is rooted in their own backyards, and not just in the South. Understanding the pervasiveness of white supremacy and its “strange career” in unexpected places is crucial if we are to understand its resurgence today.

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The songs I’ve selected for this collective “Diaspora Jukebox” come from those parts of me that are activated by moments when I was moved, both literally and figuratively. This includes the many times I was moved from one place to another, which happened a lot with my musician parents—from the Philippines, to Hawai’i, back to the Philippines, and eventually to Southern California, which I’ve been lucky to call home since 1983—when I was 10 years old—with only a few excursions north and east.

These songs are also the irresistible hooks and beats that moved me: Songs that made me acutely aware of love, even if I wasn’t on the receiving end of it. Songs that made me anxious with lust, or that offered the first stirrings of queerness before I ever gave myself the permission to be who I was destined to become. This music forced me to overcome my butch awkwardness and lack of aptitude for choreography to get on the floor and move with the people who would eventually become my community, my world.

Love songs do a lot of work, but now, squarely in middle age, I recognize the cycles of longing that evolve inside and around us. When I was young, I’d hear these songs and say, “I hope to feel that way someday.” When I became a full-fledged adult, I said, “I know now what it means to feel that way.” As someone older, wiser, happily settled into who I am, where I am, and who I’m with, now I hear the life-and-death ardency in this music and say, “Oh, to have once felt that way.” While I’m grateful that my limbic system is no longer flooded with that level of anxious uncertainty, re-inhabiting these songs sends me through and across time and space, tumbling through that cycle of unknowing, knowing, and back again. I invite you to hear it too.

“Mr. DJ,” Sharon Cuneta (1978)

This voice belongs to one of the Philippines’ grande dames of cinematic love teams and saccharine song-stylings: Sharon Cuneta. “Mr. DJ” was her breakout hit back in 1978, the year my mom and I first left the Philippines to move to Hawai’i. I was 5, and Sharon was 12.

Sharon Cuneta was my first unrequited crush. Her crooning on “Mr. DJ” sounds mature for its age, yet it’s still a little coltish. She asks Mr. DJ (quite politely, peppering her refrain with lots of thank yous and apologies) to play her favorite love song, just in case her dear-heart will hear it and remember their time together. Sadly, her beloved is with someone else now, and the song itself has grown old.

“Mr. DJ” was the score for my many movements back and forth across the Pacific before I finally made it to the mainland in 1983. Even though it is in Tagalog, something about it always anticipated “America” for me. Maybe it’s the lilting, waltzing heartbreak that could very well be out of a Doris Day song. Cuneta’s scooping, mellifluous voice is on the verge of falling completely into rubato, like the old timey voices on the radio she sings about. That resemblance makes it a song accented by empire—by that ’50s All-American girl next door, as well as by her more wan, cinematic echo in 1978: Olivia Newton John as Sandy in Grease. But there’s also something undeniably and persistently Pinay about it. Maybe, the lilt is not simply a waltz, but the doubled upbeats of a folk dance from the Visayas.

“The Ghost in You,” Psychedelic Furs (1984)

When I was 11 years old, only a year into living in a tract home in Riverside, my parents saved up to buy me a banana yellow 10-speed from Sears with a brown pleather seat and handlebars. I deeply appreciated the fact that my dad insisted I get the boys’ version of the bike with the bar that ran straight across, instead of the girls’ with the scooped frame, which I always found weirdly patronizing—one’s femininity shouldn’t be threatened by throwing one’s leg over a bicycle bar. But then again, I was never the type to wear a dress or skirt while riding a bike.

Once—I don’t remember why—we were somewhere in the woods, and my parents let me ride freely across the flat trails with my Walkman on. I’d recorded this song off the radio and listened to it over and over and over again as I rode, flush with my first sense of freedom while simultaneously lulled into contentment by Richard Butler’s accented British voice telling me that “ayngels foll lyke rayn…”

“A Ray of Sunshine,” Wham! (1983)

I’ve never quite sorted out whether my love of Wham!, and of George Michael specifically, marked the dawn of my homosexuality or the peak of my heterosexuality. At the very least, my adolescent lust for George was an elaborate pantomime of what I thought straight behavior was: thirsting over a naturally hirsute man who was meticulously manscaped to show off his tanned, toned leg muscles.

A child of the ’80s, I didn’t know much about disco, and knew nothing at all of the leather gay aesthetic of Tom of Finland, so, I didn’t register that the “boys like you … so bad through and through,” white-rapping like they were Blondie on tracks like “Bad Boys,” were actually disco-dancing leather daddies in capri jeans who “woke up every morning with … a bass line, a ray of sunshine.”

Now, I joke that George Michael was my first gay love. This song taught me so much about myself and my desires, and it continues to do so.

“Lover to Fall,” Scritti Politti (1985)

Green Gartside’s voice—legibly post-pubescent, yet indeterminately gendered—became my proto-queer siren song in the mid-1980s, as I was transitioning out of my pubescent attachment to the tortured, whiny virility of New Ro’ tenors like Simon Le Bon and, of course, George Michael.

When music writers gush about Cupid & Psyche ‘85, the album “Lover to Fall” appeared on, it’s for its airtight samples and soulful-but-robotic pop sound that would become ubiquitous by 1988. But relatively little is said about the strange power of Green’s voice, an oddly thin and flaccid one for a white male singer to brandish in the pop landscape of the mid-1980s, which was ruled by the turgid Miller-Lite rockism of Huey Lewis and his Sports-bros.

Green gushes in “Lover to Fall” (which bears a spiritual resemblance to Madonna’s 1989 song “Cherish”): “I found a new hermeneutic; I found a new paradigm; I found a plan just to make you mine.” This song made seduction as a wordy enterprise part of my proto-queer toolkit, showing me how to transpose gender trouble into beautifully gnarled, stupefying phrases (like this one). It’s a tool I still use today as a queer scholar and writer.

“Good Beat,” Deee-Lite (1991)

I became a bona fide queer when Deee-Lite came into my life. Though “Groove is in the Heart” was the track that became an unofficial anthem for my 1991 high school graduating class—alongside Color Me Badd’s “I Wanna Sex You Up,” and C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” which was performed at my grad night at Disneyland—“Good Beat” wins a spot on this list because it created the occasion for my gayness to fully blossom.

My friend David Diaz introduced me to Deee-Lite. I’d known him for as long as I’d gone to school in SoCal. When we were in sixth grade together, people tried to pair us up, assuming that his effeminacy and my tomboyishness would make for an appealing and respectable straight couple. But neither of us would surrender to the social pressures of bearding. By the time we started community college together, and just before I transferred to UCLA, we were having house parties all night, transforming ’80s-era Spanish-style tract homes in the Inland Empire into mini rave dens, where we flaunted our thrift store finds and consumed Boone’s Farm by the gallon.

It was on one of those nights, riding the high of “Good Beat” in my sequined “wizard dress,” that I first kissed a girl and liked it very much.

“First of the Gang to Die,” Morrissey (2004)

No matter how you cut it, Morrissey was going to end up on this list. And if my California-inspired Anglophilia wasn’t problematic enough (read all about it in the Inland Empire chapter of my first book, Relocations), I’ve picked a song on the cusp of the “Bad Morrissey” era, when he began to speak all too freely about his disdain for immigrants and pop artists of color. Writers like Melissa Mora Hidalgo and others have gone deep into why his music and his popularity endure amongst the communities he insults most, so I needn’t go into that here.

Suffice it to say, this song made it to my playlist because it captures the moment I returned to Los Angeles after seven years of graduate school in the Bay Area, where I lost touch with the queer-of-color worlds that had nurtured me in my Southern California adolescence. Animated by new friendships, especially with writers and performers like Raquel Gutiérrez, Claudia Rodríguez, and Mari Garcia (who collaborated on a performance project called Butchlalis de Panochtitlan), I spent those first few years back in Los Angeles reveling with them in the lights that never went out, watching “the stars reflect in the reservoirs …”

“Maroon,” Taylor Swift (2022)

Like any basic butch, for the better part of the last 17 years I benignly appreciated Taylor and enjoyed most of her hit songs. But it wasn’t until March of 2023, when my sister-in-law invited me to my 5-year-old nephew’s first concert—the opening night of the Eras tour in Glendale, Arizona—that I fully blossomed into a “Swiftie at Fifty.” Not only was I properly stunned by the breadth and depth of Taylor’s oeuvre, I was impressed by her capacity to entertain us for over three hours, with a set of 44 songs that barely scratched the surface of her catalogue.

Shortly after that, I spent some time in Australia as a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney—including several nights out on the town during World Pride, dancing at the Stonewall Hotel to remixes of Taylor, Miley, and, of course, Kylie. Building on my transcendental experience at the Eras tour, these excursions morphed me into one of those most twisted and passionate over-readers of the Swiftian universe known as “Gaylors.” While it’s unlikely I—or anyone—will ever truly verify Taylor Swift’s “gayness,” the veracity of such claims is far from the point. Listening to Taylor Swift’s music feels gay to me because it keeps bringing me back to myself: to the longings, hopes, disappointments, and painful outcomes irrevocably bound up with some of our happiest moments.

In this sense, Taylor Swift is a consummate writer of torch songs. More than a century ago, Oscar Wilde committed many clever and intricate sentences to describing how romance and realism are interwoven. “Maroon” does this splendidly, elevating “your roommate’s cheap-ass screw-top rosé” into an accidental totem of intimacy that reaches its peak just before it spirals toward a shattering end. “That’s a real fucking legacy to leave.”

“Getting to Know You,” Julie Andrews (1992)

In her final hours, barely able to open her eyes, my grandmother Linda Katindig waved one of her hands in the air in time with the music on a playlist I had made of her favorite songs. A smile crept over her face as she gently slipped away into the embrace of a familiar melody. Or at least that’s what I told myself then, to soothe my unbearable grief.

Call me morbid, as Morrissey used to say (before we knew what he really thinks about to eschew the earworms he wrote), but I’ve been thinking a lot about what songs might welcome me when I am eventually “called home.” I don’t necessarily mean when I die, though I don’t NOT mean that either. I’m talking about the music lodged in our unconscious. The tunes that live “rent free in our heads,” as the youth (or at least people younger than me) like to say—in the inner landscapes of ourselves. These unconscious terrains of attachment, longing and love are also, at least for me, the pathways to material environs: the real places and hardscapes that shape our lifetimes.

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