The Rodney King Incident - Essay Example

full “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (by Anna D. Smith) 30 January Introduction The Rodney King incident was a watershed event in contemporary American history, it brought to the fore or to the surface the long-simmering tensions and grievances of blacks in Los Angeles, and perhaps everywhere else in the country where blacks felt the discrimination. Many academic papers had been written about this incident, from a political, cultural, and also from a social and sociological perspective. The violence that erupted was sudden as it was also expected by a lot of people in case the verdict turns out to be different from what they thought it should to be. In a sense, it caught everybody by surprise due to the sheer savagery in the riots and the looting, civilization was thrown out the window, and the long-established order descended into utter chaos similar to a war zone, as how witnesses described it. The incredible and inspiring work of Anna Deavere Smith in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” is a courageous work of performance art designed to facilitate the healing process of a city deeply divided along racial lines and intense civil unrest. Her work attempts to explain in hindsight why the riots took place at all and how it could be avoided in the future by a closer examination of the attitudes of the people she had interviewed during the aftermath of the riot. The insights gained from the interviews she conducted can help in the healing process. This paper discusses one character out of the 175 interviews conducted; the idea is to examine more closely the values and attitudes of a specific person to give flesh to the ideas and viewpoints of the people who were involved in the riots, either as participants, as onlookers, or as witnesses to a crime. People in general do not like to hate other people. Discussion The one character chosen for this paper is Mr. Rudy Salas, Sr. who is a painter and sculptor of Mexican descent. His character is chosen for analysis as the issues he raised were quite relevant in view of the riots after the first Rodney King verdict as well as on the larger issue of racism in the United States of America. In particular, he recounted how his own father had hated the gringos (Americans from the north) who invaded Mexico and went after rebel Francisco “Pancho” Villa in Chihuahua; the American expedition in 1916 was led by Maj. General John J. Pershing under orders of President Woodrow Wilson because Pancho Villa had been attacking the United States from Mexico by crossing into American territory. This hatred of gringos by his father was somehow transferred and further reinforced in Rudy Salas Sr., when he himself suffered overt discrimination at the hands of gringos while he was still studying in the elementary grades. He was constantly reminded and made to feel inferior just because he is a Mexican, a clear case of racial discrimination which does not escape the attention even of an innocent child. Their white (non-Hispanic foreigners) teachers were seen as enemies, thereby delineating possible conflicts along racial lines. Mr. Salas had seen the situation and chafed against this treatment of Mexicans, although at that time, he did not fully understand the reasons why there is a racial division among students and tutors. His character is likewise very interesting and deserves further study because of the statements he made about racism and hatred. He experienced police brutality first hand when he was badly beaten by the police for resisting arrest. He was thrown into a room, the door got locked, and officers took turns beating him severely, such that he lost his hearing on both ears after his eardrums were ruptured from the blows and kicks he got. But what is interesting and odd about Mr. Salas, Sr. is that by his own admission, he did not like the feeling of hatred that he feels towards white police officers, despite what happened to him years earlier. Based on his statements and views about the whole thing concerning the riots, it is a bit safe to infer that Mr. Salas, Sr. is basically a good person because he found it abhorrent to be having this feeling of hatred towards white police officers. He did not like this feeling and even compared it to a form of insanity, because clearly it does not make sense at all. Hatred in his case was not focused on any particular or specific person but on a whole race of whites. He knew it is not healthy on his part to maintain this hatred but the feeling was a diffused one, meaning his hatred is not that intense at all and can be considered as resentment only. Mr. Salas, Sr. can be forgiven if he has this feeling of hatred because it is a common reaction to people who suffered at the hands of another race. However, his hatred for all of the white police officers is a manifestation of his own biases and prejudices. He prejudged white police officers as bad; he is guilty of generalization and stereotyping (Reinhardt 5). Los Angelis is a city that exists on a delicate racial and ethnic balance (Charles 7) and people are wary of each other, the reason why the city is clustered along homogeneous neighborhoods. This conflicted feelings of hatred and a sense of racism as a form of “insanity” is quite characteristic of people who are generally good and having this feeling of hatred is somewhat alien to their kind nature as human beings. In other words, there is a conflict and riot within him as he weighed the moral consequences of his feelings because he still recalls all the brutal beatings he got; while memory is fluid, its sting can still linger on (Coleman 10). Mr. Salas, Sr. can be said to be guilty of a subconscious form of racial discrimination, which is probably the reason why he is uncomfortable with his feeling of hatred for the whites in his neighborhood, in particular the white police officers as he sees them as threats to his own existence, taking into account his painful experience with police officers years ago. But in a sense, he is guilty of what he accuses other people of doing, he himself is a racist. He hated people for no other obvious reasons except for their white skin. For all he knows, the next white police officer he will meet is totally blameless of his imagined or ill-conceived accusations of gringo hatred towards Mexicans. This white police officer could even be sympathetic to Mexican immigrants in America and Mr. Salas, Sr. by his actuations might end up antagonizing a sympathetic officer instead of gaining his help and support. It can be said that Mr. Salas, Sr. has transplanted his own feelings of hatred and attitude on race to Los Angeles and he viewed the rioting as a manifestation or validation of his feelings. This sense of dread must have frightened him as he saw the hatred turned into violence. The mixed of feelings of Mr. Salas, Jr. is emblematic of the larger population of Los Angeles then and now; people are ambivalent towards the issue of race relations and this is the same feeling that Mr. Salas, Jr. had everywhere he goes. People want change but in the process, they sometimes resort to violence or anger, and destroy what they want to build. In the end, people who resort to violence and anger achieve the opposite (Tervalon 12). It is a comfort to know that Mr. Salas, Jr. is not a racial bigot despite his traumatic experience. Conclusion People are basically the same everywhere, in the sense they have the same emotions, feelings, anxieties, worries, aspirations, and dreams. What happened in Los Angeles in 1992 was an aberration of sorts in terms of achieving social change after years of discrimination. In retrospect, the events surrounding this unusual moment in American history that shocked and unnerved the entire nation and the international community was a case of analyzing varying degrees of responsibility that people bear for the riots. The audiences of Smith are asked to be empathetic and analytic (Smith 15) and try to let the monologues circulate in their heads for them to contemplate and perhaps force these out into the open, much like that of Mr. Salas, Jr. Works Cited Charles, Camille Zubrinsky. Won’t you be my Neighbor? New York, NY, USA: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. Print. Coleman, Wanda. The Riot inside Me: More Trials and Tremors. Boston, MA, USA: David R. Godine Publishers, 2005. Print. Reinhardt, Mark. “Stuff White People Know (or: What We Talk About when We Talk About Trayvon)”. Theory & Event 15.3 (2012): 1-25. Print. Smith, Anna Deavere. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York, NY, USA: Doubleday, 2004. Print. Tervalon, Jervey. Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992. Ann Arbor, MI, USA: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Print. (additional question): If I am directing the stage play in a theater or in a movie film, I would position Mr. Salas, Jr. as lying on the ground, perhaps with face and ears bleeding from all the blows he took from the four white police officers who took him in inside the stockade room. Maybe it is also more appropriate to place the setting inside a jail cell, with the actor curling up in a fetal position to protect himself from additional blows. This will have a more dramatic impact on the audience to emphasize the extent of police brutality inflicted on innocent people whom the police capture at their fancy or whimsy. I will ask the actor to deliver his lines as if in great pain and by speaking very slowly. The actor is to be shown in his street clothes but there will be blood on his shirt and pants for the audience to see why he hated white police officers. Read More