What's Changed in the 30 Years Since Rodney King?

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/unsettled-territory/626b3fda19cbaa0020240bae/rodney-king-la-riots-anniversary/

Thirty years ago this week, the police officers who were on trial for beating Rodney King were exonerated, and Los Angeles went into revolt. The outrage seems so pure in retrospect, and the sense of betrayal so naive. It was a horrible beating. Yet today one is tempted to say, But he lived!

It was the beginning of our current era, in which video footage serves as evidence for state violence against Black people. This era might promise validation of claims of racial injustice, but it also threatens to simply codify this injustice as an acceptable American fact. Consequences are rare and collective grief is ordinary.

Rodney King pleaded, “Can’t we all just get along?” The answer, in short, has been no. These days the footage extends far beyond group beatings to killings: gunshots into a car, into a back, into a child, and flesh-to-flesh suffocation. The exoneration of police officers remains the rule rather than the exception. What kind of people would quietly accept this from a government that is obligated to protect them?

I was a college student 30 years ago on the night the verdict was read. A small group of friends and I called a campus rally, which we held on a plaza once distinguished for anti–Vietnam War and anti-apartheid protests. I have no memory of doing so, but apparently I led an expletive-filled chant directed at the president of the university. What I do remember is that I made a connection that night. At our freshman orientation, the dean had made a speech defending the West and its canon against the encroachment of multiculturalism. I connected that disturbing moment to the tendency of our fellow students to slam campus gates in Black students’ faces, assuming we were locals from the largely poor Black community in New Haven. I connected this juxtaposition between the rich university and the neglected Black city to King’s experience being cowed with clubs by a group of swaggering officers.

*snip*

[usonian]

1. Since 1968?

Here's my response .... If you can't change "hearts and minds", change the laws, change the climate. In a lot of business books, it is said that a CEO doesn't so much set the culture, but sets the limits of accepted behavior. Take charge.

The best, the ONLY cure to WhiteChristianNationalism, race baiting, mysogyny, etc. is WINNING
https://democraticunderground.com/100216524810

snippet:
This is from the epilogue of "Stamped From the Beginning", by Ibram X Kendi.
Emphasis mine:

Protesting against racist power and succeeding can never be mistaken for seizing power. Any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to antiracist policies seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, nations—the world. It makes no sense to sit back and put the future in the hands of people committed to racist policies, or people who regularly sail with the wind of self-interest, toward racism today, toward antiracism tomorrow. An antiracist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people holds those antiracist leaders and policies accountable.

[Polybius]

2. Better cameras

That's pretty much it.