African American Riots Research Paper

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The United States has long been a divided nation. These divides have resulted in multiple riots. A city which has become notorious for its rioting is Los Angeles, California. In 1992, After being suspected of driving under the influence and pulled over, Rodney King, an African-American motorist, was brutally beaten on camera by several, mainly White, police officers. The beating lasted several minutes before King was arrested. The police officers’ excessive force shocked the nation. This started a national debate between those who felt the police had taken their use of force too far. The supporters of the police officers in question felt that the officers were merely doing what was necessary to apprehend a criminal.. Some people found their …show more content…
I thought that it was an uprising of African-American people in Los Angeles against the racist actions of the police. I thought that there were widespread beatings of White people in retaliation. I rarely heard about any other racial groups being involved in the riots. I listened to songs from the perspective of the rioters as a young teenager. They also usually spoke about it in these sorts of terms. The media portrayed these riots in a certain way. The way they were portrayed caused some people to blame the issues on African-Americans. I argue that the riots were about more issues than just African-American and White racial tension. There were preexisting racial divisions between other groups such as Koreans and African-Americans. The disenfranchisement of the African-American community put them in a desperate situation. Some police officers acted in a way that was, and continues to be racist. It is also important to understand how misunderstood these riots were. Not even half of the people arrested during the riots were African-American. While the beating of an African-American motorist did serve as the catalyst for these riots, looking only at that singular event, and neglecting to look at the other factors is a disservice to this complex …show more content…
First, they were dehumanized and denied their freedom. Whites often felt they were doing them a favor by enslaving them. Their cultures and religions were erased. Supposedly, the forced conversion to Christianity, or the Hamitic racial hypothesis justified the heinous actions that the Whites committed against the African-Americans. The White slave owners twisted the words of the Bible to support their racism and brutality. This became the new normal until the end of the Civil War. However, just because slavery ended on paper, did not make African-Americans equal. Many Whites resented them. After hundreds of years of working in somebody else’s fields, the African-American community had almost nothing. Some of the former slaves had to keep working as sharecroppers for their former masters. Others moved to cities or out of the South. Wherever they went, they faced racist attitudes and violence. They had trouble finding people to look past their skin color and hire them. When they were hired, it was often for much lower wages than their White
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