With voting for the June primary well underway, mayoral candidate and reality TV star Spencer Pratt is resurrecting one of the most painful chapters in Korean American history in Los Angeles — and he’s not getting the details quite right.
On social media this week, Pratt’s campaign claimed Bass is racist and accused her of “Asian hate” as she “cheered on the destruction of Koreatown in the riots” — a reference to controversial comments she made after the 1992 unrest about liquor stores in South Los Angeles.
The campaign’s claim blurs two distinct parts of the 1992 story: the devastation Koreatown suffered during the unrest and a separate debate over the oversaturation of liquor stores in South LA. While Bass’ comments in 1992 were tied to the latter, they have long been a source of pain for the Korean community, as many of those stores were Korean-owned at the time.
In November 1992, Bass told the New York Times that it felt like “a miracle” that many of the liquor stores community activists had wanted to close in South LA were destroyed during the unrest.
Her comments have come up repeatedly in local politics, including during the 2022 mayoral race, when Bass apologized to a group of Korean American liquor store owners during a private meeting.
Bass’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Pratt’s campaign said he was traveling and unavailable to provide comment.
“The night before the uprising, a lot of us were in a meeting discussing how we might reduce the number of liquor stores in South Central, and a few days later, like a miracle, a large chunk of the stores we wanted to close were burned to the ground,” she told the New York Times in 1992.
“That’s not the way we wanted it to happen, but the rioting accomplished in a few days what we have spent decades working to achieve.”
She did not celebrate the destruction of Koreatown as Pratt’s campaign said on X.
Some Korean Americans say they’re sick of their community’s trauma being reduced to a campaign talking point.
Filmmaker So Yun Um, whose 2022 documentary “Liquor Store Dreams” explores the experiences of second-generation Korean Americans raised in liquor stores in LA and the first-generation immigrant parents who operated them, says Pratt is exploiting the community.
Um’s family until recently operated liquor stores in Hawthorne and West Athens. So she understands why some Korean Americans continue to feel anger toward Bass.
“It was insensitive of Bass to say that,” Um said.
But she added, “What’s important to us is that she acknowledged what she said and apologized.”
“As a family who has lived in Koreatown their whole lives and are part of the liquor store community who has experienced the 1992 LA uprising, we know all too well when narratives get skewed,” she said.
Pratt is fusing two separate grievances into one narrative for his campaign, Edward J.W. Park, chair of Asian and Asian American Studies at Loyola Marymount University, told The LA Local.
“From the campaign’s point of view, it is a convenient sort of confusion that Karen Bass saw the destruction of these liquor stores in South LA as an opportunity to rebuild South LA without these liquor stores,” he said.
Park was involved in rebuilding and organizing efforts in the Korean community after the unrest. He has spent decades documenting the political and social aftermath of what happened in 1992.
The second grievance, Park said, is more current — frustration among some Koreatown residents who may feel the neighborhood has been neglected by the city for years, particularly when it comes to homelessness and public safety.
“I think at the heart of it is this feeling where some residents don’t understand why it is just conventional wisdom that Koreatown is forced to live with rampant homelessness, open drug use, drug trafficking, tents, the outrageous homeless problem that we have in this city,” he said.
The South LA liquor store debate
The controversy stems from Bass’ work as a community organizer in South LA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
At the time, community organizers in predominantly Black neighborhoods across South LA were organizing against what they saw as an overconcentration of liquor stores tied to drug activity and crime.
“Liquor stores were everywhere, but they were incredibly concentrated in South LA,” Park said.
A majority of those stores were owned by Korean immigrants, who increasingly entered the liquor and convenience store industry in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the few available paths toward “an American dream” of economic mobility amid discrimination and limited job opportunities.
Bass, then the director of the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, wrote in a June 1992 Los Angeles Times op-ed that many South LA residents viewed the concentration of liquor stores as contributing to crime and deteriorating quality of life in their neighborhoods.
Hyepin Im, president and CEO of Faith and Community Empowerment, said Korean liquor store owners felt they were unfairly portrayed in the media and in Bass’ op-ed.
Im was active in community rebuilding efforts post-1992 and has worked to bridge tensions between Korean and Black Angelenos.
In the years before the unrest, several Korean shopkeepers were killed during robberies, and fears of violence were a reality of daily life for many store owners, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“The negative sentiments toward these storeowners failed to consider the reality of these storeowners providing a service while putting their lives on the line,” Im said.
Tensions between the Black and Korean community were simmering before the unrest. In 1991, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by Soon Ja Du, a Korean liquor store owner who accused her of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice.
Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter but did not serve jail time, sparking anger in the Black community.
After the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers charged in the beating of Rodney King, violence erupted across the city.
“There was almost a targeting of liquor stores that were owned by Korean Americans during the riots and a lot of people said that was related — ‘remember Latasha Harlins,'” former LA Mayor Jim Hahn told LAist in 2012.
Koreans made up less than 2% of LA’s population, but they lost roughly 2,300 businesses and sustained an estimated $350 million of the city’s $785 million in property damage during the unrest, according to scholars. Many felt abandoned after police pulled out of Koreatown during some of the worst violence and destruction.
Do Bass’ comments still resonate?
Steve Kang, the former director of external affairs at the Korean Youth and Community Center who now serves as president of the Board of Public Works and as Bass’ film liaison, helped organize a private conversation between Bass and Korean American liquor store owners during her 2022 mayoral campaign.
At the time, Kang said billionaire Rick Caruso’s campaign had gained traction among some Korean American voters, making Koreatown “sort of a centerpiece in one of the key battlegrounds for the mayoral election.”
“And because of that, I think people dug up old archives and things that the mayor said when she was an organizer,” he said.
Bass apologized for the comments during the private meeting, saying “while the concerns about the stores were not about the race or nationality of the owners, I understood how my comments could have been hurtful,” according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times.
Not everyone has accepted Bass’ apology.
In a video posted by Pratt’s campaign, Scott Suh, a former president of the Wilshire Center-Koreatown Neighborhood Council and former city planning commissioner, says Bass tried to block Korean store owners from rebuilding after the unrest. He goes on to say that anyone who supports Bass is endorsing “hate crime and racism.”
Suh did not respond to requests for comment.
Kevin Kang, a pastor at Tujunga United Methodist Church whose family operated a business in South LA during the unrest — and whose mother still does — said communities of color are too often politically co-opted.
“We know that’s out of context,” he added, referring to Pratt’s use of Bass’ comments. “I don’t think he actually cares about Koreans. We just become another tool for them to prove their point.”
