Rodney King is a household name more than 20 years after he was beaten specifically because of the riots that ensued. Those riots led to a major national revelation about police violence, corruption, and racial oppression in LA and around the country. It was so significant that we still talk about it today. Was the problem solved? Obviously not. But a conversation was started - and that’s more progress than the thousands of candle-light vigils and speeches ever since have made.
But like I said, the LA Riots were more than 20 years ago, let’s talk about Ferguson. Nobody was talking about Ferguson until the protests “turned violent”. It would’ve been crazy to imagine Obama making statements about police violence, Eric Holder taking a national tour to dialogue about police-community relations. The idea of police body cameras would’ve remained a quirky experiment in a few towns.
I can tell you this with certainty, because there are many other cases much like Mike Brown’s murder that have happened in just the past few years, and there have been many orderly, peaceful protests in response. None of them were covered on CNN. None of them prompted any of the stuff I listed above. They were brushed aside because it was possible to brush them aside, because they posed no threat. They demanded no attention.
Calling for strictly peaceful protest is effectively asking us to make the issue ignorable. We will not be ignored any longer.
