Rodney, King of Cucks or, How Weak Men Make Hard Times
How one sentence uttered in 1992 Set Cities on Fire Decades Later
Those of you who are Generation X or older will clearly remember the case of Rodney King, a California man who was severely beaten by police in a video that became world famous. Millennials will have some memory of the riots that ensued, but most were too young at the time to be paying attention to the details of the case.
On March 3, 1991, Rodney Glen King was beaten brutally by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) during his arrest after a high speed chase for driving while intoxicated on the I-210.
An uninvolved local resident, George Holliday, saw the incident unfolding and filmed the scene from his nearby balcony and sent the footage, which showed the unarmed King on the ground being beaten after initially evading arrest, to local news station KTLA. The publishing of the video caused a public outcry.
At a subsequent press conference, LAPD chief Daryl Gates (who had been chief there since 1978) announced that the four officers involved would be disciplined for use of excessive force and that three of them would face criminal charges. The LAPD initially charged Rodney King with "felony evading", but later dropped the charge.
Four officers were eventually tried on charges of use of excessive force. Of these, three were acquitted; the jury failed to reach a verdict on one charge for the fourth. What do you think happened next?
Within hours of the acquittals, the infamous 1992 “LA Riots” started, sparked by outrage among racial minorities over the trial's verdict and related, longstanding social issues, overlaid with tensions between the African American and Korean American communities. Keep in mind, it only took a few hours because these were the days before social media. Gathering people for a riot can occur in mere minutes nowadays.
If you're unfamiliar with the slang term/ meme “Rooftop Koreans”, sometimes shortened to “Roof Koreans”, it refers to the Korean American business owners and residents during the 1992 Los Angeles riots who armed themselves and took to the rooftops of local businesses to defend themselves. Nowadays you are likely to see references to the Rooftop Koreans anytime there is self-defense by locals, especially business owners, during urban unrest.
Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley said, "The jury's verdict will not blind us to what we saw on that videotape. The men who beat Rodney King do not deserve to wear the uniform of the LAPD."
President George H. W. Bush said, "Viewed from outside the trial, it was hard to understand how the verdict could possibly square with the video. Those civil rights leaders with whom I met were stunned. And so was I, and so was Barbara, and so were my kids."
Everyone was giving license to complete shock and outrage at the LAPD: from the mayor all the way up to the old, conservative and stereotypically white President of the United States.
In 1992, suggesting that the King verdict was anything other than a complete outrage, even calling it “understandable” was equivalent to waving a Nazi flag or wearing a KKK hood on the street in multiracial neighborhood. You simply did not DO that in public, even if you felt that way privately, and this applied to anyone -black, white or any other race.
This was the first time all the rumors and narratives about “racist cops” in the post-civil rights movement era engaging in “police brutality” were made glaring for all to see, not just murky claims by criminals and activists. This didn't just happen in movies about the 1950s or in the deep south. It happened right there in progressive liberal southern California, in 1992.
On April 29th was the infamous the attack by the “LA Four” on unarmed truck driver named Reginald Denny, who was targeted because he was white, in which they dragged him from his truck and beat him severely, fracturing his skull. Four other local black people came to his rescue.
The rioting lasted six painful days and killed 63 people, with 2,383 more injured. The riots ended only after the California Army National Guard, the Army, and the Marine Corps provided reinforcements to re-establish control. Rodney King held a press conference to advocate for a peaceful end to the conflict.
Rodney King’s LA Riots press conference was a moment in history.
In this moment, King uttered the phrase which echoed through history:
“Can't we all get along?”
Many Americans, especially black and poor people, cringed at this moment. The people who were rioting in LA did not want to see the icon of their anger asking them to just “get along” with brutal police and a system that they felt oppressed them, and him too, daily.
They were out there fighting for justice for HIM (and also over the local killing of Latasha Harlins by a shop owner 13 days later), and he had the nerve to call for what amounts to the equivalent of a ceasefire after a severe terror attack?!
The public heard King’s inquiry, and the answer was a collective resounding “NO.” The rioting went on at full blast for at least two more days.
The situation was not resolved until the California National Guard, United States military, and several federal law enforcement agencies deployed more than 10,000 of their armed first responders to assist in ending the majority of the chaos & violence. Even after this, sporadic violence continued for several days.
With most of the violence under control, 30,000 people attended an 11 a.m. peace rally in Koreatown on May 2nd to support local merchants and racial healing, but it was necessary to keep elements of National Guard active there for up to 27 days later.
The fact that Rodney King's press conference speech did little to quell the rioting is very telling.
The police, government and media had hoped that putting Rodney King's sad sack face on the screen would all of a sudden make everyone in the riot decide that non-violence was the answer.
However, it backfired. He did not appear as a man who had just been done wrong but took it on the chin like a champ and was now trying to be peacemaker, as they had hoped. He appeared as a pitiful, broken man whose acquiescence in the face of degradation was despicable to the proud. His sappy “Can't we all get along?” whimpering may have even intensified some of the violence.
For a black man to be beaten that badly by white cops for all the world to see and then try to play Mother Teresa was sickening to many. It was like Elie Weisel’s unflattering depiction of his father during the Holocaust in “Night” as “more involved with the welfare of others than his own family”.
“Get along?” How? And more importantly, Why? The fact that he was obviously set up to make a “peacemaker” speech by the system to try and stop the rioting was bad enough, but the fact that he left no room for any type of militancy or even basic recompense for injustice was enraging.
Also, it was a turning point for the government, where they saw that they could not control Urban unrest among the populace who no longer trusted the government or police. Trotting out a Black face to try and hush black resistance wasn't fooling anyone anymore.
This set America off on the “Don't Make the Black Kids Angry**” spiral that we saw spin out of control during the George Floyd riots.
(**See: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25058167)
After all of the death and violence during the LA riots, policing in America changed. Not wanting to look anything remotely like the police who beat Rodney King, out of fear of riots, new training was implemented across the nation in almost every city’s Police Department.
Cutting back on police brutality is definitely a good thing, however, the new sensitivity training and stricter punishments for brutality also came with a heightened sense of fear of litigation from the cities themselves.
Fast forward to 1999, at the Battle in Seattle, we see the Seattle mayor for the first time give up an entire downtown of a major US city to rioters, closing streets and telling local citizens to avoid the area, just to avoid potential violence and lawsuits from citizens who get might hurt.
Communist groups like The Revolutionary Communist Party and antifa saw this opportunity and decided to take full advantage.
They realized that if they just got enough crazy people out, that the government would cuck and let them run amok on the streets, and that's exactly what we can see happening at almost every major left-leaning protest.
Soon, “Stand Down” was the order of the day. From the Trump rally Riot at UIC in Chicago to Pro-Hamas “flood” protests, police are exhibiting a never before seen level of liberalism when it comes to threatening behavior, vandalism, blocking traffic and more.
However, when it comes to right wing protest they seem to have no issue remaining heavy-handed. This is simply because experience tells them that the right wing people will not actually go to a full scale riot, because they have families at home and jobs and other things to make them think twice about going to jail for any significant amount of time.
I wonder what would have happened if Rodney King had come out on Mayday (historical Anarcho-Communist protest holiday) and instead of pissing off everyone with a sopping wet diaper of a speech, actually said something honorable?
Imagine if he'd come on TV and said something like:
“I KNOW why you're angry! I'm damn angry too! I'm ANGRY AS HELL!!
But instead of tearing up the neighborhoods where we have to live, and where zero police live, we need to take back the power from the corrupt police!
Run for office!
Join the police force and clean it up!
Become lawyers and help people who are being treated unjustly!
Stop aborting our children for the rich white woman's “plan”!
Stop doing drugs! I've got off drugs and so can you!
Let's take this city back for the PEOPLE! Take this country back for the PEOPLE! WHITE POWER TO WHITE PEOPLE! BLACK POWER TO BLACK PEOPLE! POWER TO THE PEOPLE!”
……..