Beautiful Dreamer

It must have been the surroundings--the whiff of Darjeeling tea, the white linen decor of the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel lobby in downtown Washington, D.C., or the harpist plucking “A Whole New World,” the theme song from a Disney film about a genie who grants wishes.

Because just then, Angela Eunjin Oh, sounding nearly like a Miss America contestant, uttered a phrase that hopefuls have fumbled with for decades. She looked an interviewer in the eye and, with just enough plausibility to keep him from snorting coffee out of his nose, announced: “I would love to help create world peace.”

Oh was talking about the hot-button issue of race in America, President Clinton’s much-debated dream of addressing our conflicts with a national dialogue and the findings, due this summer, of a seven-member President’s Advisory Board on Race, on which Oh, a Los Angeles defense lawyer, is an increasingly visible player.

But . . . seriously . . . world peace?

She laughed in spite of herself, bobbing her head slightly, as if a conservative lurking at the next table might suddenly pounce. But the concept was irresistible and she drifted back to it: Imagine leadership, presidential no less, investing resources and political capital in what Oh called the Ministry of Unity. It could gather and disseminate sociological research, statistical analysis--the truth about America’s racial divide, how it exists, how attitudes could be changed. Shining examples of community diversity could be studied and “held up to the light of day.” America might finally begin curing itself and then, through the magic of telecommunication, spread the word to a world sick and bloody with its own racial or ethnic schisms, eager for an antidote.

Caught in the pull of her own reverie, Oh let it slip again: “This is why, I’m not kidding, I want to create world peace.”

Angela Oh is an accident of nature: A Don Quixote in a button-down world, a true believer in an age of cynicism. Thirteen years ago, when junk bonds were holy and civil disobedience existed only in PBS documentaries, Oh was led away in handcuffs from an anti-apartheid protest at UC Davis. She and other law school students had seized and held offices outside the chancellor’s suite, demanding divestiture of the school’s holdings in companies with South African ties.

But this wasn’t Selma. The era’s mantra was political correctness, not separatism. Collective white guilt was the order of the day. Universities nationwide, including the UC system, sympathized, eventually opting for divestiture. Apartheid withered and died. Oh’s comrades matriculated into a world where the Cold War would end and a historic period of economic growth would begin.

Today, at 42, Oh is an accomplished litigator, serving on councils and advisory panels for corporations such as Merrill Lynch and Southern California Edison. But she still carries the banner of human rights, as a Los Angeles Human Relations commissioner, as an organizer of more projects, associations and alliances than even she can remember. Oh sees the world in stark contrast between those who are simply uninformed and the dispossessed, whose seething she calls “righteous.” She may be America’s last idealist, struggling to hold her vision even as the Washington Beltway culture all but writes off the president’s race initiative at its halfway mark.

People say Oh is passionate, fearless and tough in the clinches; yet she loves verbal combat and doesn’t mind being told she is wrong. She has an uncanny ability to deliver unrehearsed rhetoric in flawless diction and phrasing; yet she is haunted by a fear of recklessness. Friends say she has never sought the spotlight; it has found her time and again.

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When Racial tensions exploded in Los Angeles six years ago, Angela Oh came onto the public scene almost by accident. Producers of ABC’s “Nightline” were scrambling for an opposing view from a Korean American community being bashed as a racially insensitive armed camp, even as 2,000 of its businesses were gutted by angry mobs.

A call was placed to the Korean-American Bar Assn. and Oh, then president-elect, arrived at the studios with President John Lim and Jerry Yu, head of the Korean American Coalition. All three could not appear, they were told, so in a quick huddle it was decided that Oh, with her experience as a courtroom litigator, would do the honors.

Her reputation as a legal strategist and cool-headed jury persuader had preceded her. As a partner in the Los Angeles firm of Beck, De Corso, Daly, Barrera & Oh, she was handling celebrated criminal cases. Within months of the riots, she would represent a defendant in the murder of Foothill High School honors student Stuart Tay, who was beaten to death with baseball bats and a sledgehammer by other students. Oh’s teenage client would be the only one of five to avoid prison, exchanging his cooperating testimony for a stint in the state youth authority.

But on May 6, 1992, while Los Angeles was still smoldering, her clients were the city’s 200,000 Korean Americans. While the riots were triggered by verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial, the street rage was stoked months earlier when a white judge granted a Korean American merchant probation for shooting to death Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old African American girl, in a dispute over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice.

On “Nightline,” in short, punchy rhetoric, Oh fought back:

--Confronting the charge that Korean American merchants were interlopers in South-Central who gouged customers: “We choose to be there? No. It is out of economic necessity that we are there. It so happens that the overhead is affordable in those areas,” she said, turning the spotlight on grocery chains that historically had shunned the area: “God forbid that you would see a Gelson’s in South-Central.”

--Skewering then-President George Bush and his emergency arrival in the city (covered live on “Nightline” seconds before in a cutaway segment): “I think it’s very good that he’s here in Los Angeles, for him to be able to survey the damage that his policies and his leadership have yielded. This is the harvest.”

--Reacting to the growing anti-immigrant sentiment: “We are seeing around the globe that the American dream may be the real myth.”

“Nightline” anchor Ted Koppel praised her eloquence, and overnight Oh became a player on Los Angeles’ culturally diverse stage. She was chosen staff lawyer for a state Assembly committee investigating the riots. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) applauded her in Ms. magazine. Talk-show hosts drafted her for on-air debates.

“For a period of time, she was known as the Korean Woman,” muses attorney Michael Yamamoto, a close friend. “Like there was only one.”

Ironically, reviews of Oh within the Korean American enclave were mixed. While community activists raved about her, conservative first-generation immigrants were offended by her Bush remarks and felt her lack of fluency in the native tongue (she does well enough to debrief Korean American clients) showed she was not “Korean enough.”

When Clinton tapped her last June for his race panel--the only Asian American among seven members--his plan was to unify America with a series of town meetings and a report. Detractors found it a hoot, more fluff from the president who feels your pain.

Since then, public perception has gone from bad to worse. After a slow start, progress seemed rudderless. At the first public face-to-face meeting with Clinton in September, there were awkward lapses--as if no one knew what to say. In November, board chairman John Hope Franklin, an 82-year-old respected historian, drew fire when the panel discussed affirmative action without inviting dissenters such as Ward Connerly, the driving force behind California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. Critics began characterizing the race initiative as not dialogue, but monologue. By December, there were press reports of internal clashes between White House aides and advisory panel staff over the initiative’s direction, or lack thereof.

For Los Angeles, the wheel-spinning was deja vu. After all, this reliance on “dialogue” by a multicultural committee was an achingly familiar concept. After the city was rent by violence in April, 1992--leaving 53 dead, 2,400 injured and $1 billion in property damage--Los Angeles was awash in investigatory panels, commissions and a seemingly endless discussion of race and coming together.

But apart from efforts aimed at rebuilding or police reform, nearly every group devoted to healing racial schisms flared briefly, only to sputter and die. Officials and activists interviewed for this story--with the emphatic exception of Mayor Richard Riordan--said the riots could very well happen again. Those promoting racial harmony in the city never got beyond the talk--which is precisely what detractors say is happening with Clinton’s initiative.

“There is a potential for it to go absolutely nowhere,” says Joe Hicks, a race relations activist and executive director of the L.A. City Human Relations Commission. For it to produce a blueprint for changing attitudes, Hicks says, the president and his panel must move beyond the “warm-and-fuzzy approach.”

Riordan also acknowledges the potential for futility. “Anything that gives awareness is excellent,” he says. “But I think that you have to have these panels think in terms of implementation. So many of them have sort of drifted away after coming up with a brilliant report.”

Case in point: the state Assembly committee created to investigate the riots, for which Oh was special counsel. After months of taking testimony on a range of issues, including human relations, the Assembly Special Committee on the Los Angeles Riots produced a video and a 53-page report--both virtually ignored. State clerks recently were unable even to find a copy of the final report. “Aside from two people in my family,” jokes the former chairman, then-Assemblyman Curtis R. Tucker Jr. (D-Inglewood), “I don’t think many other people read it.”

Or consider the Black-Korean Alliance, formed by the Human Relations Commission in the mid-1980s to foster “dialogue among community leaders.” After the riots, the alliance struggled to bring opposing factions together, only to collapse amid inter-ethnic tensions.

Rebuild LA, a private riot recovery agency later dubbed RLA, assigned one of its 12 task forces to salve the city’s racial divide. But after 2 1/2 years of passionate and, sometimes, volatile talk-fests with groups of 50 to 100 people across the city, the Racial Harmony Task Force fell far short of its goals. It was all but ignored in RLA’s final report.

“The problem put in front of them was the toughest problem we’ve got,” says Barry Sanders, a Los Angeles attorney and former RLA co-chair. “And I can’t say that we came up with anything new or a direction particularly new or different.”

Antonia Hernandez, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was a task force chairwoman. She remembers two achievements: strengthening ties among community activists and pushing for the development of a new public television program, “The Puzzle Place,” aimed at teaching children tolerance.

“Our frustration is that you can manage, if you stick through it long enough, to make it work with a small core group of people. But how do you expand it?” Hernandez says.

“A lot of people who are the usual suspects get selected to go on these kinds of groups,” says Linda Griego, former RLA president. “So in some ways, you’re sort of preaching to the converted.”

And the unconverted across America are legion, if evidence presented to Clinton’s advisory board is to be believed. The panel listened in September as experts cited research and surveys asserting that while Jim Crow is dead, a subtler form of racism lives on, largely based in a stubborn persistence by people to categorize one another.

“Because these are rooted in normal processes, this subtle bias is often expressed unintentionally and often exists unconsciously,” testified Jack Dovidio, professor of psychology at Colgate University. “People do not acknowledge or do not say that blacks or other people of color are worse than whites. They’re very guarded about that. But what comes up over and over again is that whites are better.”

Panel members listened intently and Oh said afterward: “When people ask me, ‘Is this a matter of changing hearts, as well as minds?’ I’m more and more convinced that it is. And that’s what’s hard.”

Toward that end, she has tapped her community activist network in recent weeks and raised $45,000 to produce--with the help of National Public Radio broadcaster Warren Olney and others--a film documentary on the complexity of race relations in Los Angeles, and what did and did not work in the area of race-healing after the L.A. riots. “I’m hoping to be able to get this to the White House in advance of our Feb. [10 and 11] meeting,” she says. “This next six months is going to be extraordinary in terms of the energy that’s going to come off the president’s initiative on race.”

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Angela Oh was born and raised in Los Angeles, the eldest of four children to Korean immigrants Sam Yul and Young Sook Oh--Americanized to Samuel and Elizabeth Oh. Angela’s early years, with both parents working or attending school, were spent with a doting grandmother, a maker and seller of silk neckties, whose unconditional love bestowed a strong sense of self-esteem. Angela grew up a bright little girl, with a sense of purpose. She was a Girl Scout. During moments of absent-mindedness, rather than doodle on a pad of paper, she would untangle knots in string or necklaces, making everything right.

She remembers few racial episodes. There were innocent queries by young classmates at San Fernando Elementary School--was she Chinese? Japanese?--or curious inspections of the Korean lunches packed into her little metal bento box. One vacation, she remembers three men harassing her father with “Chinaman” slurs. Samuel Oh simply drove away with his family in silence.

Her father worked as a medical technologist; her mother is still a schoolteacher. Both planned carefully for their children. Angela was to be a dentist. (One sister became a doctor, another a pharmacist, as ordained.) From Granada Hills High, Angela attended UCLA. But she hated biology and grew impatient with her “chosen” vocation. She began questioning authority and obsessing about issues of equality and justice.

“My father once asked me, ‘Are you a Communist?’ ” she says.

After graduating and continuing in a UCLA master’s program in public health--during which she led community forums on toxic hazards--Oh committed the sin of falling in love with a white man, Jack Koulbanis.

“He was not allowed to sit in the car outside my parents’ house. I had to ask him to leave,” she remembers. The romance left her estranged from her parents for several years. “My mother did not want me to contaminate my three siblings with my bizarre choices.”

After years of on-again, off-again romance, Oh and Koulbanis married in 1995. Both have long since become close to her parents. Koulbanis commutes to Sacramento and his job in disaster assistance with the federal Small Business Administration, and they share a home in the South Bay, a few blocks from the beach. “He brings the sanity to my life,” Oh says. Their yard, with slabs of Korean barbecued beef often sizzling on the outdoor grill, is a favorite watering hole for an eclectic mix of friends.

It is during these relaxed moments when friends urge her to run for public office, and Oh has been pressured by other sources. (She said Frank Zappa once called asking where he could send a check.) For now, Oh dismisses the notion: “I’m a feminist. I’m a criminal defense lawyer. How’s that going to play?”

Moreover, she says, there’s the issue of her candor: “It’s not in me to keep my mouth shut.”

In fact, during the first session of Clinton’s panel in July, she triggered a debate about the focus of race discussions when she tried to suggest that the panel’s research encompass more than black-white racial conflict. It came out as: “I just want to make sure that we go beyond the black-white paradigm.”

This puffed up chairman Franklin, an African American who has written seminal volumes on slavery. “This country cut its eyeteeth on racism in the black-white sphere,” he hissed.

The conservative Washington Times later had a field day with Oh’s endorsement, on a talk-radio program, of cash reparations for slavery--something Clinton is on record against. “Clinton, Race Panel at Odds,” screamed the headline. And when the Washington Post ran a story on the panel’s slow start under the headline “Initiative . . . Foundering,” guess who offered a sympathetic quote about the criticism being justified?

She sometimes expresses shock, even mock horror, at how her views make news. At the board’s initial meeting in July, Oh suggested that panelists waste little time trying to prove that racial discrimination persists in America: “I don’t need the data. I think we know it’s there.”

That kind of shoot-from-the-hip observation gives running room to those eager to bash Clinton’s race initiative, like conservative black columnist Thomas Sowell, who mocked Oh’s comment in an October essay: “In other words, we (the panelists) have already made up our minds, don’t confuse us with the facts!”

There is clearly a side to Oh that sees her mission--indeed, revels in the task--of slashing through all the Washington hypocrisy and timidity to bang some heads together.

“I guess I piss people off because I’m always trying to push the envelope,” she says, “trying to figure out where the common ground is. I’m not interested in finding justice for just Koreans. I want justice for all people.”

A listener wonders where she keeps her cape. Oh is the loose-cannon cop nobody will ride with, the flak-dodging fighter pilot who keeps getting her wingman shot to pieces. If there is ever racial harmony, the Angela Ohs of the world will have little left to do but publish their memoirs.

“People who are disenfranchised have never gotten themselves in a position of being enfranchised by sitting by and sort of going with the flow,” Oh says. “We’ve always had to raise the hard issues and be told that we’re off-the-market crazy and unrealistic and idealistic and unreasonable. In a way, I’m hoping that’s why the president asked me to be involved. In terms of bringing a willingness to take some risk about saying things that have to be said in this discussion: I’m willing to do that.”

But given the harsh criticism of the panel, Oh has had misgivings a thousand times, wondering if she did the right thing by joining it. However, she remains, always the member tapping furiously on her laptop at the dais as others talk. When she scrutinizes her notes, her face disappears behind the raised lid and the audience sees only the top of her head.

For Oh, the truth is uncluttered, the answers clear--much like her fears for L.A.’s future: that the riots could happen again.

“The efforts to rebuild have not been enough,” she said, stabbing a piece of apple tart with her fork at the Renaissance Mayflower. The harpist was now playing “Cavatina,” the lyrical theme from the film “The Deer Hunter,” a story of violence, anguish and perseverance. “The rage that we’re talking about around race and class and economic development is very, very deep. And I have an abiding respect for it. Because I think it’s righteous.”