Racism Rising in the Golden State

CHINO HILLS, Calif. -- Despite all their big talk of honor, pride and the Aryan warrior's code, neo-Nazi Skinheads don't like a fair fight. Cowards by nature, they prefer to travel in packs and gang up on hate crime victims. The trio of Nazi skins laying in wait near a playground in a park here the morning of May 1 proved no different.

Around 11 a.m. that Sunday, a 21-year-old black man from the nearby city of Diamond Bar arrived at the park with a group of foster children from a group home where the man volunteered as an activities coordinator. He'd brought the kids to play basketball. As the players divided into teams, according to witnesses and police reports, the Skinheads swaggered over. They called the foster home worker a "nigger." They told him he'd made a big mistake by showing up in their park that morning with a bunch of mongrel brats.

The subject of their taunts and threats hastily tried to gather his charges to leave, but the Skinheads surrounded him and then attacked. They thought the odds were three to one. But they were wrong. Several of the kids jumped into the fray. Seconds later, two more adult employees of the group home arrived in a separate vehicle and heard the intended victim yelling for help. They also joined the combat. The Skinheads suddenly found themselves badly outnumbered in a fight they'd started.

One of them ran for their car, jumped in, gunned the engine, and promptly crashed into a park bench, then a metal exercise station, then a concrete barrier, and then, at last, a tree. Unfortunately, the damage did not disable the vehicle, and the Nazi at the wheel was able to throw it in reverse then roar across a field and toward the cluster of kids and adults from the group home, who by then had beaten one of the remaining Skinheads to the ground and were physically restraining the other while they waited for the police to arrive (several bystanders had called 911 on mobile phones).

The first officers on the scene found the enraged driver of the battered car wheeling erratically around the park, chasing the kids and group home workers in a deadly game of tag. They immediately blocked his vehicle with their own and arrested him for attempted murder. The other two Skinheads were taken into custody on charges of aggravated assault (one of them escaped from a local hospital that night after being treated for his injuries). A spokesman for the Chino Hills Sheriff's Department described the 20-year-old Skinhead driver as "a known white supremacist" who had previously been arrested for several racially motivated attacks in San Bernardino County. "He places himself in places where minorities will be and makes slurs," the spokesman said. Police found neo-Nazi pamphlets, stickers, and patches inside his car.

The attack in Chino Hills, a suburban city with about 70,000 residents, was no isolated incident. It occurred in the heart of the Inland Empire, a booming region of Southern California where tract homes are cheap, the air is filthy, and white power violence is on the rise.

The new minority

Made up of an area stretching from western Riverside County to the southwest corner of San Bernardino County, the Inland Empire used to be a sparsely populated, rural area of ranches, vineyards and farms, where whites were the clear and dominant majority.

All that has changed.

Driven from Los Angeles and San Diego by soaring housing prices, middle- and working-class black, Hispanic and Asian families have migrated to the Inland Empire in massive numbers, drawn by a surplus of comparatively affordable, big homes in sprawling, suburban-style developments. The rolling, high-desert terrain of the Inland Empire is now studded with more than 50 small to mid-sized cities containing a combined population of roughly 3 million. This continuing exodus inland from Southern California's expensive coastal cities has fueled large-scale residential, commercial and industrial development in the region. Horse pastures and orange groves have been paved over for strip malls and chain restaurants. Simultaneously, the Inland Empire has experienced rapid demographic shifts as more and more minorities move into a region that has long been a hotbed of white supremacist activity. Between 1990 and 2000, the Inland Empire's white population increased only 7%, while the number of blacks grew 61%, Asians 62% and Latinos 82%.