veiled4allah: discussion of Rodney King

Al-Munaqabah said:

Total comments: 996

After watching the documentary, seeing the full video, and hearing the views of those involved, on all sides, here are some thoughts:

What happened in the incident is that King resisted arrest. Four officers attempted to subdue him to cuff him but he managed to throw them off. They then used a Taser (electroshock) on him, several times, but he was not incapacitated by it. They managed to get him to the ground, but he jumped up. It's not clear if he was trying to charge one of the officers or just running for his life. The officer hit him with a metal baton and King fell to the ground. At this point, I think they should have made an effort to cuff him, but apparently they felt that they needed to "subdue" him further before getting close enough to cuff him. That's when they started beating him with the batons. There was a point later on where King had stopped even trying to defend himself and one of the officers stomped on him (he claimed in testimony that he was trying to hold King in place and felt that if he got down on the ground to do so, the other officers would hit him with their batons). Then the other officers started beating him again. Even if the initial beating could be justified (which I don't think it can be), I don't see how this part could be.

PG makes some good points. I think there is a basic attitude problem at the root of this and it's the same attitude behind the war on drugs, the war on terrorism and perhaps other things as well. It's the attitude that treats criminals as "the enemy", that approaches them with the aim and desire to control them by locking them down and locking them away. Also, there's a growing attitude that people who have broken the law or whom we suspect of breaking the law do not deserve the same rights as anybody else, due process does not have to be followed in the same way.

My opinions on this issue have changed drastically in the last year and a half. Things have happened in this country that I never thought would happen, but when I look back I see the precursors of it and wonder if I was blind before.

LauraJ said:

Total comments: 17

Al-M, meant to ask if the class discussed the importance of the Latasha Harlins case, and what part that played in at least the rioting aspects of the Rodney King case. To me, they are forever contextualized together (I was at school at Santa Barbara when these events happened. As cliche as it sounds, my 2 best friends at the time were Korean, so it was heavy.) Most of the lit on the web I've seen about the Harlins case place it in this context as well.

Al-Munaqabah said:

Total comments: 996

For those who aren't familiar with this issue, Latasha Harlins was a 15-year old African-American who was killed by a Korean-American shop-owner in L.A. a couple weeks after the Rodney King incident. Here's a description from an L.A. Times retrospective:

Latasha, 15, was shot to death shortly after the King beating. There was a videotape in that case too. It showed the black teenager and the Korean grocer arguing over a $1.79 bottle of juice. Latasha threw a punch, Du threw a chair, Latasha put the bottle down and turned to leave. Then, Du pulled a gun from under the counter and shot the girl in the back of the head. Du claimed Latasha was trying to steal the juice, but the videotape showed her approaching the counter with the bottle in her backpack and $2 in her hand.

A jury found Du guilty of manslaughter. But a white judge, who could have sentenced Du to as much as 16 years in prison, placed her on probation instead. Her penalty? Four hundred hours of community service, the same sentence football legend Jim Brown would receive years later for smashing the window of his wife's car. The Harlins case hurt. But there was no riot, only rallies and marches and prayer vigils and private tears shed by mothers like me, who wondered why a black child's life was worth so little.

LauraJ, we didn't have time to discuss this aspect in class (we have so much material to cover that we don't have time to discuss any particular issue in much depth) but it was discussed in the video and mentioned in a number of the articles I found on the web.

One of the questions we did discuss in class was whether the King incident was racially-motivated. I don't know enough to say for sure about the officers' conduct. They might have done that to a poor white man in the same circumstances. But I'm pretty sure that the trial of the officers would have gone differently if there had been African-Americans on the jury or if the victim had been white.

It wasn't the King tape that started the riots, it was the jury's acquittal of the police officers. The verdict suggests that white people can get away with treating blacks like that and/or that the system doesn't value black lives or black people the same as it does white people.

The Harlins verdict shows the same thing. Either the riots might not have occurred if the Harlins incident had never happened, or the riots were much worse than they would have been without the Harlins incident.

I was a senior in high school here in the Seattle area in the spring of 1991 when the King incident happened. I don't recall ever hearing of Latasha Harlins. I don't remember anymore how much of what I remember of Rodney King was from the initial incident and how much was because of the riots. By the time those occurred (Spring 1992) I was at college in Baltimore. I remember being much more isolated from the news while I was at college; it's a closed world of its own. In any case, I knew very little of what was going on except what I heard in the media.

As an aside, race relations in Baltimore were very different from what I grew up with in a Seattle suburb. But that's another topic in itself.

Zack Ajmal said:

Total comments: 112

I remember the Rodney King incident as my introduction to race problems in the US. I had read about slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle, but that was all before I was born.

I was in college in Pakistan at the time and we had recently started getting CNN during the day on one of the local TV channels.

LauraJ said:

Total comments: 17

Originally posted by Al-Munaqabah -

I was a senior in high school here in the Seattle area in the spring of 1991 when the King incident happened. I don't recall ever hearing of Latasha Harlins. I don't remember anymore how much of what I remember of Rodney King was from the initial incident and how much was because of the riots. By the time those occurred (Spring 1992) I was at college in Baltimore. I remember being much more isolated from the news while I was at college; it's a closed world of its own. In any case, I knew very little of what was going on except what I heard in the media.

As an aside, race relations in Baltimore were very different from what I grew up with in a Seattle suburb. But that's another topic in itself.

I can say from experience that Latasha Harlins is but one context for the situation in the LA area, early-90s. I grew up in the suburbs of LA which, by the late 80s were Klan- and skinhead-infested. In Fontana, where I finished "growing up" it wasn't simply the residents, but the school board, the firemen, the police...there were white vans with painted-on Klan/iron cross that "patrolled" neighborhoods, with the slogan, "Support Your Local Police" printed on the side; rampant KKK graffiti that targeted Blacks and Jews in the neighborhood - it was that blatant. Those people were seriously out of control.

This is not the picture that one gets from the media reports, which chronicle the riots as more or less appearing out of nowhere, oh those violent Black people, why do they hate us, etc.etc. Not only did the history of the contemporary racial conditions date back at least 15 years, but it included more than Blacks vs. whites or Koreans vs. Blacks.

A lot of it also had to do with immigration, mainly Mexican (and of course Korean), but also displaced Central Americans as well, starting in the mid 80s thanks to the illegal US interventions in that region (think: Contras). There were hostilities between Blacks and "Mexicans", but there were more sympathies, I believe. We moved to Fontana when I was in Jr. high - most kids there were either white workling class "stoners". or middle-class "surfers", as they liked to call themselves and many of whom would express Klan sympathies to one's face -- there were a few Black kids, and everybody else was "Mexican". Since I rode the bus with mostly Latino kids, some of the tough-acting "gang girls" took me under their wing and I had protection that most non-"Mexican" kids didn't. The whole thing was totally surreal.

The ethnic and class stratification among SoCA Latinos that ha happened by the early 90s was laid bare with the RK riots as well, in the form of some Mexican-Americans (dis?)placing the blame for Latino parts in the riots on Salvadoreans and other recent (at the time) Latino immigrants. Latino-police relations in LA area are in fact unfortunately still defined going back the so-called zoot-suit riots of 1943 (and prior). The cops there have historically treated both Black, and Latino communities as aggressors and presumed criminals.

In short, it was, and remains, a frigging mess.

DrDriveBy said:

Total comments: 5

Laura, your comments were very informative, thanks a lot. Sometimes we tend to forget local problems.

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