A riot of colour

JOHN BATTLE MP
IT WASN'T just the video-tape of Rodney King, beaten to the ground by policemen who clubbed and kicked him for 81 seconds, that did the damage.
The video tape was played over 30 times throughout the three month trial on a large screen in the court room broadcast nation wide.
The film of King's beating on the night of March 3 1991 was slowed down and examined frame by frame. There were discussions of how many of the blows actually connected. The officers accused testified that Rodney King violently resisted arrest yet there is no visible evidence on the videotape.
They then testified that they believed Rodney King to be under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug PCP as "he seemed impervious to pain". Rodney King was blood tested no trace of PCP was found.
To beat someone repeatedly to test their sensitivity to pain, and to determine whether they are using pain-numbing drugs is more than reminiscent of the classic witch-hunt.
The practice of submerging women accused of being witches was the ultimate double jeopardy. Survival is obvious proof that you are a witch therefore you must be burnt to death. If you drown then it is accepted that you were not, after all a witch. Testing Rodney King for using PCP fits into that classic attitude of blaming the victim for their fate.
There's been a marked difference in response particularly in reporting the Los Angeles riots, in America and here in Britain. American commentators and journalists at least accept that there could be some linkage between the social and economic position of black people in society and the outbreak of violent rioting in other words that social and economic causal factors should be taken into account.
The black Mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley commenting on the jury verdict said: "Today the system failed us" and then went on to call for non-violent protest "we must express our profound outrage and anger, but we must do so in ways that bring honour to ourselves and our communities".
Even President Bush publicly acknowledges that the issues of endemic racism, urban decay, inner city poverty and unemployment are back on the agenda.
But while President Bush was holding "listening sessions" at the White House with black leaders, the British commentators were beginning to shift tack from "it's typical America and it won't happen here" to a more aggressive approach.
Highlighting the "black crime problem", but failing to check the statistical facts that if more blacks are picked up
than whites then proportionately they become the cause of identified crime; challenging the race relations industry as "liberalism" Charles Murray proposed in a major feature In The Sunday Times that blacks behave in ways that scared and angered whites.
"Some of these ways of acting affected whites only second-hand; creating a festering irritation that made whites less sympathetic towards blacks the rise in illegitimacy, black youths dropping out of work, inner city fads and customs, and sexual norms that many adult whites found distasteful, immoral or both".
References to the dependency culture breaking the "self-perpetuating cycle of despair and deprivation" remind us that America's whites "no longer feel responsible for the plight of blacks".
Praising welfare reforms that restructure benefits "so that teenage mothers are not encouraged to remain unmarried and have more children" is the old story of social engineering with a vengeance "if they breed too many starve them out." Again the agenda shifts from tackling poverty to population control.
As talk of "allowing too many immigrants into Britain", "blacks taking over our inner cities," "the Moslem problem" in Halifax conies over the Radio not only is the harsh Asylum Bill sublimally primed, the reality of our divided cities is swept aside.
Martin Luther King said: "A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard." Writing off black people as dangerous and worthless is another piece of "victimage". But blaming the victims hardly builds future human communities.