Yes, ‘Those People’ Do Get It : For many in the African-American community, history and context will always link the King and Denny trials.

Remember the story about the woman who caught her husband in flagrante delicto and accused him of adultery? “Who are you going to believe?” he shot back. “Me--or your lying eyes?”

I think of that story a lot these days as I listen to legal analysts, journalists and pundits ponder Los Angeles’ current crisis in the trials of the LAPD 4 and the L.A. 4+. The first four guys are accused of violating the civil rights of Rodney King. They’re white, wore blue uniforms and, according to the videotape, pretty much creamed the black speeding motorist that night, once he pulled over and emerged from the car.

The second group of guys are accused of violating the human rights of Reginald Denny. They’re black, wore baggy trousers and athletic shoes and, according to the videotape, pretty much bludgeoned the white trucker who drove through their neighborhood the afternoon the King verdicts were announced, once they pulled him from the cab of his vehicle.

People everywhere have strong feelings about both cases. In parts of the African-American community, anxious eyes are watching the outcomes in tandem, because for many, the two are inextricably linked.

I find it fascinating that, for the most part, journalists and judicial analysts (who are mostly white, mostly well-educated and well-paid) profess no comprehension as to why this is so. They act as if, by insisting that the two trials are related, African-American Angelenos are behaving like recalcitrant children. In essence, the opinion-makers are asking: Don’t Those People Get It?

Actually, Those People (and I am one of them) get a lot more than you’d imagine. Like the fact that it is hard to take an antiseptic look at the King-Denny cases when real life in many neighborhoods south of the Santa Monica Freeway and east of La Brea keeps intervening. Like the wife in the story, we know what we’ve seen with our own eyes. Friends, relatives and neighbors (usually black, usually male) are frequently stopped and harassed for no discernible reason except, of course, the obvious--their race and sex. So what happened to King was, in many ways, no fluke.

We get that there might well be trouble if the Los Angeles officers walk away free and Denny’s assailants walk into jail cells. Many, many people I’ve interviewed say they have no problem with Denny’s alleged assailants being punished as long as that punishment is perceived to be proportionate to the crime. To a person, no one expressed any interest in the recurrence of last spring’s devastation.

What people do get, though, is a sad truth: If you’re on the margins of society, sometimes a legitimate grievance goes unheard until it inconveniences those who are better off. (“The only thing white people understand,” one older man told me bitterly as we poked through still-smoking rubble on his block, “is money and property.”) Maybe it’s just an interesting coincidence, but when a significant quadrant of the city was torched, the power elite paid attention at last.

Daryl Gates finally read the handwriting on the charred wall and decided it was time (way past time) to go. Major banks, which had been quietly redlining both businesses and homes in minority neighborhoods suddenly decided maybe they’d been a bit too stringent. The media, which had blithely slugged great swaths of black and brown Los Angeles as “South-Central” started spending a little more time here and filing stories that made the residents a little more human to the rest of the city and its suburbs.

But as the anniversary of the costliest urban uprising in U.S. history approaches, so does the decision in the second King trial. The thought of that is enough to make people nervous, and the jitters make people behave in awfully silly ways. Like declaring that Those People are just being unreasonable and are advocating mob justice in pressing for the conviction of the LAPD 4. “It’s ridiculous!” fumed a conservative columnist in Washington when we discussed the point on CNN recently. “The law doesn’t work that way.”

Actually, any African-American with a memory will tell you that for us, for too long, the law didn’t work, period. Like Ernestine Lange, a 58-year-old grandmother of three, we remember when whites were never convicted of murder or assault if the victim was black, when separate and very unequal was the law. “They ought to do the right thing,” Lange said. “Either give ‘em all time or let everybody go.”

What about the argument that the trials are completely separate, I asked.

“Look here,” she pointed at me. “If those cops hadn’t done what they did, there wouldn’t have been a riot, and Reginald Denny wouldn’t have been hurt.”

It’s a point that even us journalists should be able to get.