Reflections on a LA Rebellion and the Birth of the Digital Era
Amidst the images of violence, the fires that raged in the background and all of the allusions to earlier moments of insurrection—Watts in 1965 and Newark in 1967—my most lasting memory of the LA Riots was the watching the series finale of TheCosby Show on the evening of April 30th, 1992—a full day after the city erupted. As the Huxtables celebrated the college graduation of their only son Theo from New York University, the show that had defined Black Middle Class aspiration for nearly a decade and whose popularity made a claim on a post-race society before such language even existed, was revealed as flaccid in the face of the anger and betrayal of those that The Cosby Show ostensibly represented.
This disconnect was not without significance; The Cosby Show emerged as the most popular sitcom on television during an era—marked by the two term presidency of Ronald Reagan—that witnessed an outright assault on the Black poor and working class. For far too many Americans, The Cosby Show reflected the realityof Black life and possibility. Yet The Cosby Show had little to offer with regards to explaining the rage felt and exhibited by the young Black Americans that fueled the violence in Los Angeles and other cities across the nation. America would instead turn to generation of newly minted Black PublicIntellectuals and would be forced to finally take heed of the talking drums that had been ruminating in American cities for more than a decade in the form of rap music and Hip-Hop culture.
In his book The Black Fantastic, political scientist Richard Iton argues that the decade of the 1980s represented the beginnings of the hyper-visibility of Blackness. The popularity of The Cosby Show and YO! MTV Raps, along with the emergence of singular Black icons such as the late Michael Jackson, the late Whitney Houston, Eddie Murphy and Michael Jordan, were critical components of Black hypervisibility in the era. The beating of motorist Rodney King in March of 1991, along with the televised Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Hearings in the fall of that year helped define what Black hypervisibility would look like at the dawn of the digital era.
King’s beating by LAPD officers—he was hit more than fifty times—was captured on a hand-held video device, and became a signature moment for the burgeoning digital era. As the video-taped beating became the most powerful evidence of what many Blacks and others understood as systematic (and perhaps systemic) violence by law enforcement officers against Black and otherbodies, that very same video-tape would be deconstructed in the court room a year later, leading to the acquittal of those officers on the basis that their violence was justified since King—unarmed and on the ground throughout—was incredulously resisting arrest.
The Digital era demanded a digital literacy, and a generation of Black scholars, many of them influenced by Black British theorist Stuart Hall, and Black and Brown journalists needed to re-tool in order to unpack the logic of the new media terrain. In her recent book, Uncovering Race: A Black Journalists Story of Reporting and Reinvention, journalist Amy Alexander recalls that “The LA riots…literally sparked my interest in media criticism.” Alexander like many Black journalists at the time found herself appalled by the coverage of the violence, and like the Black journalists that covered the Watts Riots in 1965, it also offered great opportunity for them.
A generation of Black journalists entered mainstream newsrooms immediately after the outbreak of violence in American cities in the late 1960s, just as the era created a spark in scholarship about Black life, the most well known being Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous and much debated The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which many cited as an explanation for the violence. Similarly figures such as Cornel West, bell hooks, the late Manning Marable, Patricia J. Williams, Michael Eric Dyson, Anna Devere Smith and many others rose to national prominence in the aftermath of the LA Riots, largely playing the role of interpreters of an expanding racial chasm in the post-Civil Rights era, that no longer pivoted on a Black-White axis.
Yet the figures who provided the most credible witness to the week-long violence that occurred in Los Angeles and the underlying tensions that led to the explosion of violence, were often marginalized in its coverage. Hip-Hop culture and rap music, for more than a decade prior to the LA Riots, provided commentary on the on-the-ground tactics of law enforcement, the inconsistent application of criminal justice in Black communities and the realties of poverty. Whether it was The Furious Five’s dissertation on such matters with “The Message” (1982), Toddy Tee’s “Batterram” (1985), which described the B-100 armored vehicle used by the LAPD to knock down the doors of suspected drug dealers, or NWA’s “Fuck the Police,” Hip-Hop offered a view into the kind of street level buy-and-bust strategies that accelerated the prison pipeline for Black males that inherently involved forms of police harassment, racial profiling and misconduct.
Many of those Black youth were clear about the linguistic slippages that gave the LAPD license to attack them. As Ice Cube told Angela Davis, “We're at a point when we can hear people like the L.A. police chief on TV saying we've got to have a war on gangs. I see a lot of black parents clap-ping and saying: Oh yes, we have to have a war on gangs. But when young men with baseball caps and T-shirts are considered gangs, what these parents are doing is clapping for a war against their children… That war against gangs is a war against our kids.” (Transition, 1992).
Ironically for many Black youth of that generation, the video tape of Rodney King’s beating, represented, perhaps, their last investment in the idea of American Democracy or at least the idea that there was justice. The violence that erupted on April 29th—too much of it unfocused, haphazard and detrimental to Black communities—was a product of a deep and compelling sense of betrayal.
The LA Riots became a ground-zero in the shift in the way that mainstream America covered race and how it framed the voices that would give witness to that reality. Hip-Hop’s political wing would not simply be demonized—Bill Clinton’s calculated political undressing of activist-turned-rapper Lisa Williamson (Sister Souljah) and the controversy surrounding Ice T’s “Cop Killa” being the most resonant examples—but the culture’s excesses were quickly transformed into the style du jour, creating a generation of Hip-Hop moguls, including Ice Cube, whose political rhetoric became increasingly measured and ultimately muted. The same could easily be said for the generation of Black Left intellectuals, who found themselves in regular rotation on The Charlie Rose Show and Talk of the Nation; few of us publicly defining ourselves as Radical Democrats—one of the favorite terms of the era—even if it is a politics that we are still deeply committed to.
The hand-held video camera that captured the beating of Rodney King, heralded the coming of a mobile culture, where the ability of citizens to capture the misconduct of law enforcement and other agents of the State is an everyday occurrence. Indeed the accessibility of such technology, in part, inspired B. Dolen’s recent collaboration “Film the Police,” which implores citizens to take hold of their own Democracy by shifting the frame to the State—a radical concept as the Obama White House considers whether to veto the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which was just passed in the House, and would give the government further means to provide surveillance of US citizens.
Rodney King may not have found justice that day that those four officers were acquitted in court; and folks of all races, who took to the streets in the aftermath of those acquittals, certainly did not find justice. In myriad ways, America is no closer to an honest understanding of how race functions in our society, than it was twenty-years ago; This despite the presence of a Black President, whose election has arguably dampened the political will to have such conversations. Yet the digital technology that was at the heart of our collective response to Rodney King’s beating, offered a view into how that technology could help shape future responses to such atrocities, whether they were captured on camera or not .
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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books, including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University.
