Peace, Finally, for Rodney King/No Justice, Still, for Us
by nancy a heitzeg

The man who became the self-described “poster child for police brutality” was found at the bottom of the pool he built on Sunday. Twenty years after the videotaped beating and ensuing riots that made him reluctantly famous, Rodney King was dead at 47.

Despite bearing the internal/external scars of that brutalization, King still carried forth, in his new book, The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption, the simple message he delivered in the midst of the riots, “Can’t we all get along??”

In the end, Rodney King believed he found some measure of Justice. And now, at last, Peace.

The rest of us??

Not yet.

Yes, it is true that the 56 Blows -captured, pre-youtube, on grainy graphic video – shattered the silence of color-blind White Denial. Exploded onto our TV screens, reported so somberly — finally the evidence!!! of what every black/brown/red man/woman/child knew (and knew forever) to be the Truth of every day police practice. Not just LAPD — infamous since the days of Zoot Suits — but Every Big City PD. All steeped in racial profiling and excessive force. Occupying Armies.

Surely there would be Justice Now. Surely Anyone could see.

But not an all white Simi Valley jury — blinded by racially coded appeals to ” the thin blue line”, blinded by fear of “PCP and Bionic man-powers” and the ever present danger of the “Criminal Black Man”.

Not Guilty was the Verdict — Justifiable Use of Force.

And so South Central LA Burned — abandoned finally by LAPD, who, now outnumbered, fled the intersection of Florence and Normandy to fall back and protect the borders of “whiteness”, demarcated by Brentwood and the Beverly Hills Hotel.

South Central LA Burned — set ablaze by those whose neighborhood it never was anyway. Burned , not just for Rodney, but for Latasha Harlins and so many unnamed others. Burned with the sparks of frustration and rage, from the ashes of Watts and so much, for centuries, unchanged.

More than 60 Dead — thousands arrested. Mostly Latino and Black.

Not that media would tell us. In a dress rehearsal for the level playing field false equivalency that has become the paradigm of color-blind coverage, their attention quickly turned to a singular white man, also beaten, this time by Black citizens. Saved by Blacks too, but that didn’t matter.

“See — Everyone is racist“, the argument goes. It is individual , not systemic. Better yet, just pretend that race has nothing to do with it at all.

And the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy gets another pass.

No Justice/No Peace.

In the two decades that followed, yes, we critiqued racial profiling and police brutality. Yes we demanded Justice while the prison industrial complex continued apace — to 1 in 100 now 2.5 million. Yes we demanded Justice while the school to prison pipeline created new, ever more insidious ways of insuring future profits, on the backs per usual of communities of color..

Yes we demanded Justice when Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Anthony Baez, Jason Gomez, Frank Lobato, Ismael Mena, Oscar Grant, Aiyana Stanley Jones, Rekia Boyd and Trayvon Martin fell.

And Yes we demanded Justice for Shaka Sankofa, for Stanley “Tookie” Williams, for Troy Davis too — and the State, unblinking, murdered them nonetheless.

We were always disappointed. Always denied. And always will be.

Derrick Bell was right – the law has not saved us, and is in fact, designed to defeat us.

We cannot expect Justice from an unjust system — one designed, in fact, solely for disparity. We cannot expect the same system that does structural violence to our communities to mete out the same to our transgressors.

“The Master’s Tools will never Dismantle the Master’s House”

In the words of Kay Whitlock, We Need to Dream a Bolder Dream:

How, then, do we begin to move toward ways of framing issues and making strategic choices that are not merely about punishing violence, but dismantling it in the community and within public and private institutions, replacing it over time with more healing, transformative visions of justice? How do we begin to envision justice as various forms of compassionate regard for the wholeness of both individuals and entire communities?

We begin by drawing on the experiences of others for inspiration. Nobody has the all of the “right” answers; we will have to create them, painstakingly, over time. Fortunately, there already are a growing number of groups working with imaginative persistence to reduce and organize resistance to multiple forms of racist, misogynist, and anti-queer violence while also exploring hopeful new ways of conceptualizing justice….

There will always be those who say it is impossible to imagine safety and justice without reliance on increased policing, harsher punishment, and more prisons. But these groups and others serve as beacons, giving us promising glimpses of the possibilities inherent in that bolder dream. Their vision, courage, and innovative determination deserve our long overdue and urgent attention.

Dream with Us then.

Dream of Justice/of Peace.

Originally published for Criminal InJustice at Critical Mass Progress