PRESENTATION: LA Riots

Video taken from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROn_9302UHg


The LA Riots were a response to the verdicts rendered in a 1991 case involving Rodney King (an African-American male), the victim of a brutal beating at the hands of the LAPD. On April 29, 1992, the courts cleared three of the four LAPD officers of all charges and charged one with excessive force.

In response to this ruling, citizens rioted for days. Over four thousand were injured and fifty were killed. The city suffered one billion in property damage.

Many were outraged due to the obvious racial implications of the situation and, in addition, the fact that King suffered repeated beatings for simply leading police in a car chase after they attempted to stop him for speeding violations. To many in the African-American community, the tape of King was just proof of what people had been yelling for years--that racism and sexism was rampant in the LAPD. The riots also revealed deep racial tensions between all of the ethnic and racial groups in LA, including Black-Korean tensions in areas where Korean businesses seemed to be doing quite well.

The King case and the LA riots are a testament to the fact that often times, racial tensions lay far beneath the ground in our communities because people turn a blind eye until they are forced to watch. Often times systemic racism (such as the way it manifests in the police force) is hard to prove and the video tape of King literally shoved it in people's faces. Do we have to have an event like this to believe that racism still exists? How can we probe and experiment with racial and gender relationships in a way that will reveal our unconscious (and often times naive and ignorant) prejudices even when they are not at the extreme level of a brutal beating?


http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/la_riot.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/04/28/la.riot.anniversary/index.html
http://www.asiasource.org/news/at_mp_02.cfm?newsid=79441