I was a senior in high school when a jury acquitted the policemen who had been videotaped beating Rodney King nearly to death and Los Angeles descended into five days of riots, arson, beatings, firefights, and murder.
It is no longer possible for me to piece together what I knew or thought about the King incident before the riots. (From the vantage point of 2020, it is hard to remember how much less we knew about anything at the time, and how there was not yet this firehose of opinions about everything that is blasting at us every second of every day now.)
On one hand, I was a white teenager living on the opposite side of the country whose day-to-day milieu oozed wealth and privilege; on the other hand, the private Quaker high school I was attending was good about at least surfacing and discussing such matters. In other words, although I was probably not completely blindsided by the riots, at the same time I would not have possessed an especially robust framework for contextualizing them and what precipitated them. I think I probably viewed it all as a sort of standalone set of awful events that—although evocative of of certain incidents from the past—now stood somewhat outside of time, an anomalous blip in the storyline of a universe that was otherwise steadily, albeit slowly, bending toward justice, to paraphrase another King.
But I really can't say what may or may not have been on my mind as the riots began. The only thing I remember for sure is how profoundly disoriented and afraid I began to feel as I learned about some of the more awful things that happened during those five terrible days in LA. I was especially affected by the footage of the attack on the truck driver Reginald Denny, who was kicked and knocked to the ground and then beaten with a claw hammer and a brick and other items as he lay more or less unconscious in the middle of the street at Florence and Normandie in South Central. I had never seen anything like this, and what I experienced as the brutal injustice and unfairness of this attack was overwhelming to me. I remember blurting to my parents that, although I'd at first been sympathetic to people who were disappointed by the verdict, now I "supported the officers," or words to that effect.
No, it made no sense. Perhaps what I was trying to say, in this amazingly incoherent way, was that I *supported law and order*, or, really, that I supported *feeling safe again*. I was dismayed at the apparently lightning-fast collapse of what had previously felt like the ironclad rules of society, and—from the sight of Denny being attacked merely because he was white, as at least seemed to be a fair assumption—the sudden realization that this was something that could happen to *me*, that I could be killed in the street simply because of what I looked like. I was being forced to consider, not for the first time but especially urgently, that the world really might not operate as advertised. Disoriented, angry, and afraid, I wanted to feel safe again and I suppose I was furious at anyone who might keep me from being able to.
Then the riots ended, and—it might be said—life returned to normal.
For me, of course, "normal" meant a world that seemed to operate *mostly* fairly and at least seemed designed to keep me safe, a world in which I could once again depend on what turned out to have been the only briefly interrupted and now once again more-or-less ironclad rules of society.
For many others, "normal" meant—had always and has always meant—something quite different. It has meant learning to live, on a daily basis, with something like that anxiety and disorientation I found so achingly uncomfortable for just a handful of days in April of 1992. It has meant living with the suspicion that the structures and people that are presented as protectors and forces for good cannot necessarily be depended on, in the end, to extend that protection to all.
I am saddened, of course, by the scenes I am seeing in Minneapolis and so many other American cities right now, including—once again—Los Angeles. But for anyone who is finding it easier to excuse Officer Chauvin than to understand at least the motivations of the crowds of Americans who, for the most part, have felt called out into the streets simply because they want to be able to believe that they and their children are included among the people that police are sworn to serve and protect—well, I would suggest considering how it might feel to pass every day of your life believing just the opposite.
