An analysis of how footage showing the collective beating of Rodney King by police officers was interpreted in court as Rodney King’s violence against the officers.

Notes

That it was achieved is not the consequence of ignoring the video, but, rather, of reproducing the video within a racially saturated field of visibility.

The visual representation of the black male body being beaten on the street by the policemen and their batons was taken up by that racist interpretive framework to construe King as the agent of violence, one whose agency is phantasmatically implied as the narrative precedent and antecedent to the frames that are shown.

The defense attorneys broke the video down into “stills,” freezing the frame, so that the gesture, the raised hand, is torn from its temporal place in the visual narrative. The video is not only violently decontextualized, but violently recontextualized; it is played without a simultaneous sound track which, had it existed, would have been littered with racial and sexual slurs against Rodney King.

Over against this reading is required an aggressive counterreading, one which the prosecutors failed to perform, one which might expose through a different kind of reiteration of what Fanon called “the historico-racial schema” through which the “seeing” of blackness takes place. In other words, it is necessary to read not only for the “event” of violence, but for the racist schema that orchestrates and interprets the event, which splits the violent intention off from the body who wields it and attributes it to the body who receives it.

Endangered-endangering - Schematic racism and white paranoia

Notes

See also