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Well... yeah. They were pissed and lost their cool. It's their job not to do that.
The Rodney King incident didn't occur in a vacuum. The police and the black community don't have a good relationship in most places.Making that distinction, early on, could have save a more than few lives, left Reginald Denny with his entire brain, and prevented the destruction of a large swathe of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, Blacks weren't interested in the truth...they had an opportunity to exploit.
Perhaps we could have a constructive discussion about whether the police are just doing their job, or whether there is widespread abuse of power.
Were they frustrated, angry, with a lot of adrenaline flowing? Yes. Does that make it OK to continue beating a suspect after he has been subdued? No.It was wrong to beat Rodney King although, it can be argued that since the public rarely saw the entire recording, we really don't know how much of his plight was provoked by him...do we? I mean, why wasn't the passenger similarly treated?
Black folks see racial issues where white folks don't because they have to deal with race frequently in their daily lives. They don't have a choice about that. It's sort of like if you lived in China, you would have to deal with your not being Chinese on a day-to-day basis. You would be at a disadvantage if you had to live there.
Being that most black folks were born here, that is incredibly frustrating for them. Take away all the active racism, and you still have a country built by white people for white people where things are done in white ways, and if you're not white, you have no choice but to adjust, and if you can't adjust, you'll never get ahead. So it still feels racist.
His acquittal had everything to do with his being black, however. His lawyers did a great job of making his "getting away with it" feel like some kind of racial victory to get back at all those white folks who "got away with it" over the years... not that any black people got anything tangible from what basically was another rich dude buying his way out of trouble.Oh, and O.J. Simpson was guilty and his arrest had nothing to do with being black either.
Discuss...
