Searching for Clues to the L.A. Riots

I eagerly dove into Peter H. King’s article “Searching for a Legacy” (April 21). I am very disappointed in what I found. King’s strongest analysis of the cause of the 1992 Los Angeles riots is “frustration and self-defeating anger and an instinct for anarchy.” An instinct for anarchy? Although the article refers to the Rodney King beating, it only briefly touches on the verdict in favor of the police officers who carried out the beating. King assumes that his audience knows this information, but many young adults may not or would not be able to infer it from his quote from Vera Tenenbaum: “It was after the King trial, Rodney King.”

In fairness, he quotes Cornel West, a highly respected African American intellectual who describes the urban uprising as a “display of justified social rage” that signifies “the sense of powerlessness in American society.” Later he quotes Michael Cocquia: “It wasn’t just Rodney King. There were a whole lot of brutality building up to it.” But what do these quotes mean? What is the basis for the social rage? What brutality? Because King does not bother to offer any background information on the dearth of jobs and the level of poverty in the area, what we have is a racially biased analysis of the cause of the uprising. We conclude that the cause is an “instinct for anarchy” among those involved.

Karen Surman Paley

Long Beach