Uncanny Resemblances

In 1965, the “negro part of LA” (as it was described in the news segment we watched during the screening on Monday 9/7) erupted in riots on the streets. We watched an insanely biased and overdramatised news segment that showed footage of looting and violence with theatrically dramatic music and white newscasters commenting over the footage. However, key factors to telling a whole story were missing: there were no interviews with the very people on the streets, and there wasn’t any context given to explain the events or the source of all the anger behind the riots. Instead, the rioters were seemingly brushed off as just hoodlums and thugs; they were not viewed as people who had legitimate concerns and legitimate reasons to be angry, rather as irrational villains who needed to be contained. Then we watched a clip of the LA uprising, and a very similar news segment was provided. However, there was one extremely important, eloquent, and necessary addition: Tim Chaney. Tim Chaney was a Black citizen living in Los Angeles and a participant in the Rodney King riots. Chaney provided excellent commentary on the events and pressingly explained reasons for the anger within the Black community (and their allies). Chaney’s words were poignant and revealing. He explained that the police abandoned the Black community, even though the cops were sworn to protect and serve all Americans, regardless of their race, socioeconomic background, religion, and so forth. His words stung with injustice, and they stung with recentness. Today, America’s treatment of the Black community is heartbreakingly unchanged. The two news segments are eerily similar to coverage of fed up Black communities today; for example, in juxtaposing Baltimore to the Watts riots and the LA uprisings, we see the same white commentary over black suffering without the full picture or real, Black voices; we watch the news create a boundary between the Black community and the rest of America; we watch institutionalised racism revealed and dissected, but we are yet to watch effective measures of change take full form.