1992 was a period of fierce racial anxiety. Police brutality against minorities had been a real thing for a long time, but it was finally exposed on a larger scale. The filming of Rodney King's brutal beating would effectively, as Martin Luther King would say, "dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored". But the violence didn't stop during the riots, it was magnified by the thick racial, social, political, economic, and classist tensions.
But the same issues still exist. There's still a great sense of distrust toward the police department within the black community. We've heard the news: Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Gardner. And similar to the LA riots, people react. They take to the streets in protest: we have the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, and the support of thousands of americans across the country in voicing their outrage. Police brutality against minorities is still as alive today as it was in 1992 LA. There's a bit of a twist though, an unspoken story behind the highly publicized aggressions against young black males. Black women suffer from police brutality too, but people aren't as aware of this fact. In an Alabama Waffle House, two white police officers forcefully wrestled a black woman to the floor after she tried to release herself from his unnecessary grip. At a pool party in McKinley Texas, a police officer forced a fifteen year old black girl (in a swimsuit nonetheless) to the ground and drew his gun toward a group of black youth. People don't know about these occurrences against black women in the same way. We are also stopped by police, we too are incarcerated at higher rates. And just like black men, it doesn't stop at police violence. In the third Washington Post article, Andrea Ritchie mentions black women giving birth being 10 times more likely to "have their blood drawn, their umbilical cord blood drawn, and tested for drugs", sometimes without their prior consent (3). The article also discusses black and brown women being profiled as prostitutes (3). We're looking at our current situation with the wrong lenses, just like we did in 1992, when the response to rioting was removal of welfare and increased privatization. But once again we as a population overlook some important aspects of the narrative, just like bush and reagan did in confronting disgruntled american citizens. Not every side of this racial problem is being exposed. We continue to oversimplify racism against minorities as a black, white, and male problem.
-Farida Salifou
1. Waffle House: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/04/23/police-wrestled-a-black-woman-to-the-ground-exposing-her-breasts-in-restaurant-video-shows/?utm_term=.9307ac03934c&noredirect=on
2. LA Riot Journalist: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/04/28/burn-baby-burn-what-i-saw-as-a-black-journalist-covering-the-l-a-riots-25-years-ago/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.892f1f7b85f4
3. Violence Against Women of color: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/03/27/police-violence-affects-women-of-color-just-as-much-as-men-why-dont-we-hear-about-it/?utm_term=.b0bccd4ea2b4
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