Remembering Rodney King

Background and Conceptual Framework

The video of Rodney King’s 1991 beating was, Fiske argued, “a discursive instance in which racial and economic antagonism was both expressed through bodily violence and pushed into hypervisibility.” ¹⁰ As Fiske wrote, “The video[s] were not just video witnesses, technological extensions of the eyewitness, but became video accusers, video defendants, and video verdicts.” ¹¹ Holliday’s video of Rodney King’s beating, alongside its various re-technologized versions, raised the question of what it meant to bear witness, an issue, according to Peters, which rests at the core of communication studies. ¹² For journalism, this question was particularly acute, as the stance of eyewitness is one of the positions from which journalism legitimates its professional authority. ¹³

The question of what it meant to bear witness to the Rodney King beating was further complicated by the Reginald Denny beating, which occurred hours after the 1992 verdict acquitting the officers accused of beating King. The Denny beating was also videotaped. Taken together, as Swenson argued, news media presented the beatings suffered by King and Denny in a manner that “restore[d] racial inequality as social order.” ¹⁴ According to Swenson, “That the video of black youths assaulting [white] Reginald Denny was chosen to represent the riots reflects the inferential racism intrinsic to media representations.” ¹⁵ While journalism fulfilled its larger social function in preserving order, it had also reified hegemonic whiteness, calling the viewer to identify with the white victim, Denny. ¹⁶ The image of the Rodney King beating, as Spratt argued, “provided the central element of a mediated morality play”—a story pitting good against evil. Yet, like the meaning of the images emerging from the South during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s featuring clashes between predominantly black civil rights protesters and white police, the meaning of the videotaped beating of Rodney King proved unstable, subject to interpretive revision. ¹⁷ While Spratt contends that photographs of police dogs attacking protesters taken in 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, “have come to represent and explain . . . the valiant struggle for civil rights by a people who were suppressed, segregated, and abused by the dominate [sic] White power structure,” ¹⁸ the path to securing that narrative was not inevitable. Rather, journalists played a pivotal role in shaping American mythology. ¹⁹ Journalists’ stories surrounding Rodney King’s beating functioned similarly, relying on cultural narratives of victims and heroes, injustice and forgiveness.

The death of Rodney King little more than twenty years after his infamous beating offered an opportunity to reflect not only upon the life of a man whose identity was publicly defined by the March 3, 1991, beating, but also, once again, upon journalism’s role within society. Rodney King’s death was a story that necessitated reflection upon a traumatic past of racial violence—a past that implicated journalism. When confronted with tragedies or crises, incidents that tend to challenge their authority, journalists attempt to reinforce the lines of their community. ²⁰ This can take a number of forms. As Berkowitz and Gutsche argued, “Boundary work that strengthens journalism’s cultural authority has included attempts by journalists to reinforce the ties of their own community, to reset the original standards of the field, and to rebuild public confidence for journalism’s social role.” ²¹ Such strategies often invoke the past, locating events within historical contexts or providing historical analogies. ²² In considering news coverage in the wake of Rodney King’s death, this essay focuses upon a specific form of storytelling that “reassures by telling tales that explain baffling or frightening phenomena and provide acceptable answers”: ²³ myth.

A particular subset of news stories, myths, however, are more than simply familiar cultural stories helping the public access and process trauma. For journalists, as Berkowitz wrote, “applying myth becomes a believable way of adding narrative coherence while also helping to get the job done on time and in an acceptable form.” ²⁴ In addition to their practical function in facilitating journalists’ work, myths provide primers on citizenship and insight into the structures upon which they rely, because myths, according to Bird and Dardenne, can exist “only if they are communicated.” ²⁵ It is in the telling and retelling of stories that myths acquire their significance, allowing the values and beliefs central to society to persist. ²⁶

Of the seven so-called “master myths” that Lule identifies, two in particular are the focus in this essay: the victim and the hero. Myths of victims, according to Lule, “attempt to reconcile people to the vagaries of human existence—to cruel fate, to bizarre happenstance, to death itself.” ²⁷ Such myths “[o]ffer reconciliation,” elevat[ing] and transform[ing] death into sacrifice.” ²⁸ The story of the hero, as Lule argued, “help[s] define—greatness.” ²⁹ The death of Rodney King, however, not only engaged journalism’s role in shaping mythical narrative and its turn to the past. Given Rodney King’s particular place within civil rights history and the history of police brutality in the United States, journalists were also confronted with a story that necessitated a discussion of race.

The “question of race,” which Butler argued followed the 1992 trial of the officers accused in the beating of Rodney King, lays bare a field that is “not neutral.” Such a field, Butler argued, “is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful.” ³⁰ The hegemonic force of racially charged myths was evidenced in Lule’s examination of news coverage of the death of Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party. Coverage of the controversial Newton downplayed the Black Panther’s historical significance by situating him as a threat to the social order. Newton’s life was narrativized as a cliché, according to Lule, and Newton was cast as a mythological scapegoat, one whose dissent was delegitimized. ³¹

In June 2012, however, none of the stories covering the death of Rodney King suggested that King was a dissenter. Nor was King framed as posing a threat to the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department)—the script that dominated the courtroom in 1992. Rather, journalists cast Rodney King as an unwitting victim of police violence. King was a victim of “bad luck” who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time—a victim of history. In adhering to this script, journalists advanced other racialized and racist scripts—specifically scripts of the incompetent and incapacitated black man, which Jackson argued, are cataloged among historic projections of black masculinity that work to limit the discursive field of vision. ³² According to Schudson, myths “do not tell a culture’s simple truths so much as they explore its central dilemmas.” ³³ The stories surrounding Rodney King’s life and journalism’s role in it placed into sharp relief the unresolved and largely unspoken racial dimensions of these mythical narratives.

Method

To explore the mythical narratives circulating around Rodney King’s life, focusing upon their racial dimensions in recent U.S. history, a textual analysis was conducted of news coverage during the two weeks following the announcement of Rodney King’s death. This textual analysis was guided by three research questions: First, how was race articulated (if at all) in the myths surrounding King’s life? Second, how did journalists’ use of myth work to locate journalism within historical record? Third, what does the circulation of these myths suggest about journalism’s role in shaping public discourse surrounding race and racism in the United States?

Evidence was drawn from a Lexis-Nexis search of U.S. newspaper and wire reports based upon the search terms Rodney King. Sources were collected between June 17, 2012, the day King’s death was announced, and July 1, 2012, by which time King’s funeral had taken place. The search for “Rodney King” yielded 194 sources over the two-week period, which were narrowed to 73 of the most relevant for closer, in-depth analysis. After collecting these materials, the sources were searched for prominent themes and patterns in coverage.

Analyzing these textual sources over the course of the two weeks following King’s death drew out the discursive themes dominating news coverage. Particular attention was paid to the ways in which journalists attempted to cast King’s life and legacy through the framing of his victimization and journalism’s heroic role in presenting King’s beating to the public. Journalists’ modes of articulating these mythic narratives are discussed, by first examining the construction of King as an “accidental” and “hapless” victim and then journalists’ construction of citizen journalist Holliday and, by extension, journalism as heroic.

Rodney King: The “Accidental” Victim

Rodney King’s was a life book-ended by his so-called “accidents.” The features of King’s life, as reported by journalists, however, were tethered to the first “accident” to befall Rodney King—the March 3, 1991, beating, which came after King led Los Angeles police on a high-speed chase through the city. While stories announcing King’s death identified him by the 1991 beating, they tended to conclude by recounting King’s troubled life in the wake of the riots. Journalists noted King’s multiple arrests, mostly for misdemeanors connected to substance abuse, and his status as a reality TV star, appearing in the aforementioned programs Celebrity Rehab and Sober House. In 2012, the then-celebrity King published his memoir. Just prior to his death, Rodney King conducted a number of media interviews reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of the Los Angeles riots and publicizing his newly released memoir, preaching forgiveness.

Recalling the 1991 beating, journalists emphasized the physical violence King endured. In these stories, King was a brutalized object, acted upon by Los Angeles police. He was not only a battered victim, but also someone who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. This emphasis, upon the beating as mere “accident,” situated King as a victim of circumstance in March 1991. In the words of Alfred Doblin, King was “a product of bad genes, bad judgment, bad policing and bad luck.” ³⁴ Bill Coffin’s reflections followed a similar line of thought,

Some people are born to greatness. Other people have the conditions for greatness thrust upon them. And some people get caught in the crossfire between the two and find themselves in over their head. Such was the sad case of Rodney King, a man who might have lived a relatively mundane life were it not for the extraordinary events that made him a household name, an icon for modern American race relations and his own worst enemy. ³⁵

The Los Angeles Times reflected upon King’s death and the lives of the key players in King’s beating, “Gates, Bradley, and Christopher made this city’s history; it merely happened to King.” ³⁶

Not only was King “unlucky” in the most literal sense, but he was also a tragic, pitiable figure to whom history “happened.” Rodney King was an icon whose iconicity and symbolism were unintentional, confronted with infamy he neither wanted nor was prepared to handle—catapulted unwillingly into history. He was, as one journalist wrote, “a private and wary individual who was reluctantly dragged into the world’s biggest spotlight.” ³⁷ Rodney King was not unlike other icons of the civil rights movement, such as Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy killed by two white men in Money, Mississippi, in 1955, whose story found itself repeated in journalistic meditations on Rodney King’s life. History, journalists asserted, happened to both Rodney King and Emmett Till, much like it “happened” to Rosa Parks. According to Leonard Pitts Jr., “history” “chose [emphasis added] quiet, dignified Rosa Parks as the emblem of the fight against segregation.” ³⁸ History, Pitts claimed, “chose [emphasis added] handsome, prankish Emmett Till as the face of racial violence.” ³⁹

What went largely unacknowledged by journalists discussing these historic African American men and women was that not only was Rosa Parks a very deliberate icon, an activist who carefully strategized her place within the civil rights movement, but also, Rodney King’s beating was not simply the product of “bad luck.” By framing King’s experiences as a consequence of luck, or lack thereof, journalists largely elided the issue of race that lay at the root of King’s experiences. Although journalists referred to King as a “symbol of civil rights,” implying significance to racial discourse in the United States, by dubbing King’s beating a product of misfortune rather than racism, the beating was brutality that could have been avoided if the circumstances had been different. Those circumstances, however, did not include institutional racism. In mythologizing King as the consummate victim, who led a “sad” and “difficult” life, ⁴⁰ there was something almost inevitable about Rodney King’s experiences. He was, according to the myth, a sort of pathetic figure who, by coincidence, kept falling into bad situations. By extension, even Rodney King’s struggles with substance abuse could largely be written off as another piece in an otherwise troubled life, beset by tragedy.

Rodney King: The “Hapless” Victim

Although coding Rodney King as an accidental victim inverted the script of King as violent threat that had gained traction during the 1992 trial, journalists advanced concurrently circulating scripts coding black masculinity. Journalists’ repeated reference to the “difficult” life Rodney King led in the wake of the 1991 beating—his inability to maintain a job or his strained relationships with his family—reinforced scripts of incompetence and ignorance. ⁴¹ These scripts worked in tandem to fortify the myth of Rodney King as “hapless” victim, serving to reinforce it in two ways. First, journalists reflected upon King’s infamous question, “Can we all get along?” as a moment of simplistic brilliance, spoken from the mouth of a man who did not fully understand the weight of his words. Second, journalists reflected, somewhat incredulously, upon King’s ability to forgive those who beat him. Journalists asserted King not only as unthreatening, but also as an unwitting victim who provided fodder for elaborated narratives of national progress with respect to racism in the United States.

(Citizen) Journalism: The Hero

If Rodney King’s forgiveness was an indicator of the nation’s racial reconciliation—its forgiveness for past racism—the opportunity to reflect upon Rodney King’s life, too, offered journalists a moment to reflect upon journalism’s role in U.S. civil rights history. The 1991 Rodney King beating was, as Tom Marquandt of the Capital wrote, “a key moment in citizen journalism.” ⁵⁶ Marquandt sought to remind readers that the name of Rodney King would be little more than a footnote in U.S. history had it not been for George Holliday’s amateur video. Without the bystander Holliday’s video, Marquandt reminds, “there never would have been a case against police officers—or so much fury about their acquittal.” ⁵⁷ Alicia Stewart of CNN.com posited that part of the power of the video of the King beating stemmed from the fact that it came from an “unexpected source: a citizen journalist.” ⁵⁸ Jesse Washington of the Associated Press reiterated, “If a man had not stepped outside of his home and videotaped the beating, King would have been lost to history.” ⁵⁹ Journalism was that which made history. King was simply there—again in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although King’s beating was described by journalists as the product of “bad timing,” as discussed earlier in this paper, little was made of Holliday’s so-called “good timing.” Discussion of Holliday’s place within history seemed to suggest that Holliday’s role, the white bystander poised to show the beating to the world, was a given.

The death of Rodney King thus was a reminder of not only King’s place within history—civil rights history, urban history, and media history—but also journalism’s place within historical record. As Lynn Elber of the Associated Press reminded,

It had long been the job of TV news cameras to document history and inform members of the public, who could serve as eyewitnesses but not reporters and certainly not camera operators. The most noteworthy exception: Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas businessman who recorded the critical seconds of President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination on 8 MM film. ⁶⁰

Los Angeles Civil Rights Association president Eddie Jones claimed, during an event held to memorialize Rodney King, “The good part is there was somebody there with audio and video and technology. That has made the difference in the way things are being run today in law enforcement.” ⁶¹ Much like the Zapruder film presents the final moments of President Kennedy’s life, the Holliday video of Rodney King’s beating offers the only documentation of the violence. Both instances, however, were immortalized not by professional journalists, but by members of the public. Both Zapruder and Holliday are critical reminders of citizen journalism’s centrality to history and historical record.

By championing Holliday’s video and Holliday as a hero, a sentiment repeated by the Reverend Jesse Jackson in public statements in the wake of King’s death, it was the tape of Rodney King’s beating that made “[t]he problem of excessive force in American policing real,” ⁶² as if to suggest that the mediated videotape produced a verifiable truth that previously was dubious. Reference to Rodney King, some twenty-plus years following the beating, conjures the powerful memory of Holliday’s video. The visual has been seared into American memory, as Emily Langer of the Washington Post wrote. ⁶³ In underscoring the power of the video, agency was transferred to the medium, which allowed the public to bear witness to the action taken against King. Rodney King was once again stripped of his place as an historical agent. George Holliday was not the only hero. Journalism, more broadly defined, had performed heroically, as journalists reminded.

Just as the video stands as testament to the power and necessity of (citizen) journalism, so too did journalistic coverage of King’s death elicit broader journalistic reflection upon journalists’ authority as eyewitnesses to the 1992 verdict acquitting the officers charged with beating King and the riots that followed. Tammerlin Drummond of the Bay Area News Group reflected upon the days of rioting in the wake of the 1992 verdict and, specifically, the dissension in the newsroom. Drummond, however, wrote,

Yet in the midst of this horrible time, there were acts of extraordinary kindness and courage. An African-American colleague at the Times risked his life to rescue a Vietnamese woman who had been attacked by a mob. The riots brought out the worst in many, but others rose to the occasion. ⁶⁴

Although the Los Angeles riots are remembered as among the deadliest riots in American history, they were a time that also signaled that good still existed, particularly among journalists. Reflection upon Rodney King’s life offered not simply an opportunity to consider citizen journalism’s significance; it offered an opportunity to reconsider journalism’s institutional role more broadly within the citizenry.

Conclusion

While journalists’ mythologizing of Rodney King as an unwitting and accidental victim rather than aggressor reversed the narrative that had gained traction during the 1992 trial, their coding of King as “hapless” served to reinforce other dominant scripts racially schematizing the black male life: scripts of incapacitation and incompetence. Although King’s significance within recent U.S. history is indisputable, the profundity of his words, like his suffering, were cast by journalists as inadvertent, unintentional. Yet, the “accidents” that defined King’s life were not without purpose, or so journalists claimed. Rather, King’s life was told as a triumphant narrative for understanding race relations in the United States. In journalists’ telling, King suffered brutality unimaginable so that (white) audiences across the United States could see what African Americans had claimed was institutionalized for centuries: racism. As Bill Coffin wrote,

And while the violence of his own beating and the larger violence of the riots that followed shocked King and the nation, one might say that in the end, the nation emerged from it stronger, healthier, and better able to face the future. ⁶⁵

The lesson had been learned, or so journalists posited.

Mythologized in this way, Rodney King’s life was transformed into a medium for national healing. Police departments specifically and the nation more broadly were redeemed. The Daily News of Los Angeles declared the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the riots and meditations upon the life and death of Rodney King a reminder of

how far the LAPD has come since the era of the King beating. A larger police force seems to have given officers the confidence to enforce the law without overstepping ethical bounds. And policy changes mean officers can no longer expect it to be covered up if they do step over the line. ⁶⁶

The story of King’s life was thus a story of redemption—of moving beyond the traumatic past and learning the lessons of history. Rodney King had sacrificed his life for the good of the nation. Like the stories of many victims before him, who, as Lule wrote, were “guilty only of coincidence, bad timing, and the unfortunate fate of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” ⁶⁷ Rodney King’s story was resolved.

Yet few would remember the name of Rodney King had it not been for the video of a citizen journalist who left an indelible imprint on American racial consciousness. The video had provided tangible evidence—proof—that was indisputable. Journalism provided the nation with the ability to bear witness to the brutality suffered by King. Journalism had fulfilled its most basic function. Thus, in remembering Rodney King as the consummate victim, one who was himself a construction, journalists portrayed Rodney King as a man who ceded control over his fate to those who would shape public memory of his life and legacy. In so doing, journalists shaped their own legacy within civil rights history as members of the profession who exposed police brutality for the world to witness—as heroes. Retelling the story of Rodney King’s “accidental” and “hapless” life thus allowed journalism to engage in a form of self-celebration that reiterated the significance of journalism to racial discourse in the United States.

King’s story, of course, is not the first of its kind. In narrating the life of Rodney King and invoking the names of historical figures such as Emmett Till and Rosa Parks, journalists summoned a past intimately connected to journalism. The photographs of Till’s mutilated body were published by Jet magazine in 1955 and cited as a catalyst of the modern civil rights movement. ⁶⁸ The images of Rosa Parks seated on the Montgomery bus where she refused to move to the “colored” section are, too, inscribed within popular memory as sparking the movement for civil rights in the United States. Rodney King’s story was situated in relation to these narratives—narratives in which journalism played a central role, as it did in Birmingham, Alabama, where Charles Moore’s photographs captured police dogs attacking black protesters under the eyes of Bull Connor. ⁶⁹ In these cases, the black men and women attacked were portrayed by journalists as wielding little authority. They were framed as passive, thereby relying upon sympathetic witnesses to rescue them from their plight. ⁷⁰ Journalists’ remembrances of Rodney King conformed to pre-circulating histories of the civil rights movement. However, while the story of the Rodney King beating conformed to existing civil rights histories, journalists’ retelling of Rodney King’s life served as a redemptive coda—reminding of not only King’s forgiveness for the nation’s sins of racism, but also of the purpose of Rodney King’s life, which enabled the nation to see changes that needed to be made and, according to journalists, were. Journalism’s authority was once again reaffirmed and King’s life narrativized as a national parable, albeit once again schematized through a racist lens, following Butler and Jackson. ⁷¹

The myths of King as victim and journalism as hero bear consequence for understandings of how journalistic mythologizing can reinforce racism and narratives of history that privilege whiteness. When Rodney King died in June 2012, the story of the slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin was starting to unfold, once again bringing to the fore questions of racism and the appropriation of police power. While names like Emmett Till once again made their way into popular discourse, so, too, were commentaries arguing that things had changed since the time of the Rodney King beating. Philadelphia talk radio host Dom Giordano was quoted, “For instance like a Trayvon Martin, I do see things routinely that indicate that we are getting along, that we are moving past racial tensions.” ⁷² Although changes were made in response to the video of Rodney King’s beating, there is danger in moving too far toward narratives that suggest national redemption and closure, as the recent George Zimmerman acquittal reminds. Rodney King’s life and death are testament to the unfinished, unresolved past. The controversy surrounding Trayvon Martin’s death is yet another reminder that the narrative is more complicated and troubled than journalists’ stories grant. Although myths provide journalists with scripts within which to fit stories, the limits to mythical narrative are, as the case of Rodney King and subsequent similar cases remind, profound. The myth of Rodney King’s life had been resolved, preserving the social order. Myth’s potential to change the social order, a more difficult proposition as Lule suggests, however, remains unrealized. ⁷³