READING RODNEY KING READING URBAN UPRISING EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT COODING-WILLIAMSEndangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia Judith Butler The defense attorneys for the police in the Redney King case made the argu. rent that the policemen were endangered, and that Rodney King was the source of that danger. The argument they made drew from many sources, comments he made, acts he refused to perform on command, and the highly publicized video recording taken on the spot and televised widely before and during the trial During the tral, the video was shown at the same time that the defense offered a commentary, and so we are left to presume that some convergence of word and picture produced the “evidence” for the jurors in the case. The video shows aman being brutally beaten, repeatedly, and without visible resistance; and so the question is, E 2 evidence that the body being 1, the threat of violence, and, further, that eaten body of Rodney intention to injure, and to injure precisely beaten was itself the éfose police who either wielded the baton against him or stood encircling him? he Simi Valley courtroom, what many took to be incontrovertible evidence againa the police was presented instead to establish police vulnerability, that ss {to sport the contention that Rodney King was endangering the police. Later, «juror reported that she believed that Rodney King was in “total control” of the simation, How was this feat of interpretation achieved? ‘That it war achieved is not the consequence of ignoring the video, but, rather, of reproducing the video within a racially saturated field of visibility, If racismpores white perception, rcurng whit cin and camot apes within he vil evidence"? And bow he, det ch “orden” hae be ee rid ply, pane the rac poston of he viable whch vl pce ache ts own verted preetion ander the nbc of et ene ts the shove, without besten, Ite, he nde stones ae tag bray beaten.” And yet, Happens tate jury in Sn aly es what thy “aw” wa body trestening the yo, and ms ene ssuonible scion of pai oficrsinslf deme. fam tee omemreeen emerges, then, a context within the val Bll scheint creat ere is vse, one tht produced trough the atnton and tenes wh eld with the inverted projections of white prnoa Te veal emeeiae ofthe black male body beng besten on the stot bythe polneene et wa bo wat an up by trace iepette Remenork wo eos Kop _ the age of vilence, one whowe agency ephantamaialyinpicber ewe prcsdet and aneciet othe ramet we howe, Waeang ne ee aia forma sequence of manave lig ae that consolidates the racist figure of the black man: ‘“He had threatened them, and now g fae of th od them, and now he is being justifiably “If they cease hitting him, he wall release his violence, and now ie bee Jerdably restrained King’s palm tamed away fom his body, held above his ovin head, is read not as self-protection but as the incipient momen physical threat. : “ee How do we account for this reversal of gesture and intention in term ae e s ofa racial onthe ve elt tn cope esc ransaluton pony proper to a rcilzed eptemie? And does te postiiy of ache tee ee avetion whether whit “sen” nat alae presen nn 2 cern adit este produce st he Wl? Forte nas a on Rodney King's body a danger to the I “seeing” y King’ ger to the law, then this “seeing” requires to be read. as that which was culled, cultivated, reg voiced Jated—indeed, policed —in the couse production of the visible, the. workings of racial constraints on what it means to "see. Inded, the tril cal tobe rad ot ony we eineaiee en of secing but as a repeated and ritualistic prochction af blackness (a ferthes instanceof what Ruth Gilmore, in describing the deo eating, ls ws ac of “nation building”), This isa seeing is, sl bt one which everlew pass al a een” ean became for that white commu and for countless others, the same as seein, If what is offered here over and against what the jury saw isa different a inthe temporary inerpretve tanh of te dense atone conta King ER ENDANGERED/ENDANGERING as endangering. To claim that King’s victimization is monet true isto assume Ghar one presenting te ete os of sje ho don of 0 Ok | ahat the video “speaks for itself” is, of course for many of us, obviously true Bit if the Geldof the visible i rally contested terrain, then it will be politically imaperative to read such videos aggressively, to repeat and publicize such readings, APonly to further an anGsavint hegensony over the vinual fel. It may appear at first that over and agsnst this heinous failure to see police brutality, it is necessary to restore the visible asthe sure ground of evidence, But what the trial and its horrific conclusions teach ws i that there is no simple recourse to the visible, to visual evidence, that it stll and always calls to be read, that itis already a reading, and that in order to establish the injury on the basis of the visual evidence, an aggresive reading of the evidence is necesar, Tes not, then, a question of negotiating between what is “seen, on the one band, and a ‘reading’ which is imposed upon the visual evidence, on the other Ina sense, the problem is even worse: to the extent that there is a racist organ zation and disposition of the vibe, it will work to circumseribe what qualifies 2s visual evidence, such that iti in some cases impossible to establish the ‘truth’ of racist brutality through recourse to visual evidence. For when the visual is fully visual evidence” to which one refers will always schematized by racism, the and only refute the conclusions based upon it; for it is possible within this racist épisteme that no black person can seck recourse to the visible as the sure ground of evidence. Consider that it war possible to draw a line of inference from the sion that this black male body motionless and beaten on the street to the con very body was in “total control,” rife with ‘'dangerous intention field is not.neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an The visual episteme, hegemonic and forceful Inthe whit world the man of color encounters dices nthe evelopment CF his bly cher, Cass ofthe body toe a negating sey Tis ahd perso conslouess The bodys surounded by an atmosphere Of erin uncer ow hati want to ok Tal have Peach ht my right rm and ake the pak of ears ing a he ober end oft table "The matches, however, re in the tamer onthe Ie nT sal ave te lean boc sgl, And ll ofthese mowernent are ade not oof abi But out of mp wedge, A sl composton nya body in he mile of patil and temporal word—vich scm to be the cher Below he cnpre vem hd sketched [thre rin acl chem The meth wed ad been provide forme.» byte oe, he white Inn whoa woven me out fs thowrnd deta, ances, str. eg that what Ih in hand was constr pytigtl elo blace Space to locale semton, an here Iva elle on or moreee UR “Look, 2 Negro 2 Negro” Ie was an external stimulus that liked over m passed by. Timade a tight smile al aoe “ook, a Negro!" twas tue. It amused me "Lo, a Negro The cle was drawing eit ge. I made no secret of my amusement, * - “Mama, se the Negro! I'm faghtened!”Fghened™ _ righted! Now they were beginning tobe alfa of me, 1 mae pm mind to laugh myself to tears but laughter had become impossible! ° pobng which cremmwctes a dangers lety ace eae visas and the Other as the whive male, and perhaps we ought forthe moment to let racist fear of the black male body a clear anxiety over the possiblity of sexual dang heres the repeated references to Rodney King’s ‘‘ass" by the sur- rounding policemen, and the homophobie circumscription of that locus of s0 as a kind of threat, aa tn Fanon rection ofthe act interpeltion, the black body is ctcomscibed 4s dangerous, prior to any gesture, an rising of the band, and the infntized site reader i pstioned inthe sone a one who I helpless in elton to tat lack body, as one definitionally in need of protection by his/her mother or, pethaps, the police. The fear is that some physical distance will be crossed, and is that some pk © | and the virgo sanctity of whiteness will be endangered By that proximity. The police afe thus ructially placed to protect whiteness agaltt uolehee whore idence isthe imminent action of that black male body. And becaute within this imaginary schema, the police prdiect whiteheis, heir own violence annot be read as vio. lence; because the black male body, prior fo any'video, the ite aid Source of danger, a threat, the police effort to subdue this ‘body, even If in advance, is Justified regardless ofthe circumstances. Or rather, Ue conviction of that just fication reacranges and orders the circumstances to fit tht conclusion, What struck me on the morning after the verdict was delivered were reports which reiterated the phantasmatic production of “intention,” the intention inscribed in and read off Rodney King's frozen body on the street, his in to do harm, to endanger. The video was used a “evidence” to rapport the clan doh was used as “evidence” to support the claim that the frozen black male body on the ground receiving blows was himself prosucing those blows, about to produce them, was himself the imminent threat ‘ i ENDANGERED/ENDANGERING of a blow and, therefore, was himself responsible for the blows he received. That bordy thus received those blows in retura for the ones it was about to deliver, the blows which were that body in its essential gestures, even as the one gesture that body can be seen to make isto raise its palm outward to stave off the blows guns it, According to tis racist episteme, he is hit in exchange for the blows | he never delivered, Bit Which he is, by virtue of his blackness, always about fo | deliver. a Haze we can sce the splitting of that violent intentionality off from the police actions, and the investment of those very intentions in the one who receives the blows. How i this splitting and attribution of violent intentionality possible? And bow was it reproduced in the defense attorneys’ racist pedagogy, thus implicating the defense attorneys ina sympathetic racist affiliation with the police, inviting the jurors to join in that community of victimized victimizers? The attorneys pro ceeded through cultivating an identification with white paranoia in which 2 white Commuvity is always and only protected by the police, against a Give whlch edgy King’s body emblematives, quite apart from any action it can be suid to perform or appear ready to perform. This is an action that the black male body Is always already performing within that white racist imaginary, has always already performed prior to the emergence of any video. The identification with police paranoia culled, produced, and consolidated in that jury is one way of recon tuting a white racist imaginary that postures ar fit were the unmarked frame of the visible eld, laying claim to the authority of “direct perception. ” the interpretation of the video in the trial had to seork the possible sites of identification it offered: Rodney King, the surrounding police, those actively beating him, those witnessing him, the gaze ofthe camcorder and, by implication, the white bystander tho perhape feels moral outrage, but who is also watching from a distance, suddenly installed at the scene as the undercover newsman, In a sense, the jury could be convinced of police innocence only through a tactical orchestration of those identifications, for in some sense, they are the white wit ness, separated from the ostensible site of black danger by a circle of police; they are the police, enforcers of the law, encircling that body, beating him, once agin They are perhaps King as wel, but whitewashed: the blows he suffers are taken to be the blows they would sulfer if the police were not protecting them from him. Thus, the physicel danger in which King is recorded is translerred to them; Hay Wenfy with that Vlnerablty, but construe it as their own, the vulnerabilty of whiteness, thus religuring him as the threat. The danger thet they believe themselves always to be in, by virtue of their whiteness (whiteness as an episteme tes the circuit operates despite the existence of two nonwhite jurors), This comp of paranoia: the projection of their own aggression, and the subsequent regarding of that projection as an external threat. The kind of “seeing” that the police enacted, and che kind of “seeing” thatJUDITH BUTLER the jury reenacted, is one in which a further violence is performed by the diss vowal and projection of that violent beating, The actual blows against Rodaey King are understood to be fair recompense, indeed, defenses against, the dangers that are "'seen"” to emanate from his body. Here “seeing” and attributing are indissoluble. Attributing violence to the object of violence is part of the very mechanism that recapitulates violence, and that makes the jury's “seeing” into a complicity with that police violence The defense attorneys broke the video down into “stils,” freezing the frame, so thatthe gesture, the raised hand, is torn from its temporal place in the visual rarative, The video is not only violently decontextuslized, but violently recon- textualized; it is played without a simultaneous sound tack which, bad it existed, ‘would have been litered with racial and sexual sts against Rodney King, Inthe plce of reading that testimony alongside the video, the defense attorneys offered the frozen frame, the magnification of the raised hand as the hyperbolic figure of racial threat, interpreted again and again as a gesture foreshadowing violence, a gesture about to be violent, the frst sign of violence, violence itself, Here the anticipatory “seeing’’ is clearly a ““reading,”” one which reenacts the disavowal end the brutality itself, and paranoia that enable and de (Over against this reading is required an aggressive coutnerreading, one which the prosecutors failed to perform, one which might expose through a different kind of reiteration of what Fanon call ‘the historico-racial schema" through which the “'seeing’” of blackness takes place.* In other words, itis necessary to read not only for the ‘event’ of violence, but for the racist schema that arches- trates and interprets the event, which splits the violent intention off from the body who wields it and attributes it to the body who receives it ead as If the raised gesture can b idence that supports the contention that Rodney King is “in contri,” “totally” of the entire scene, indeed, as evidence of his own threatening intentions, then 2 circuit is phantasmatically produced whereby King is the origin, the intention, and the object of the sefiame brutality. In other words, if itis his violence which impels the causal sequence, and itis his body which receives the blows, then, in effect, he beats himself: he is the begin- hing and the end of the violence, he brings it on himself. But if the brutality which he is said to embody or which the racial schema ritualistcally fabricates as ” of his body, if this brutality is that of the white police, then this isa brutality that the police enact and displace at ones, and the incipient and inevitable “intentio Rodney King, who appears for them as the origin and potential instrument of all danger in the scene, has become reduced to a phantasn of white racist aggression, a phintasn that belongs to that white racist aggression as the externalized figure of iss own distortion. He becomes, within that schema, nothing other than the sate at which that racist violence fears and beats the specter of its own rage, In f i k k ENDANGERED/ENDANGERING 2 this sense, the circuit of violence attributed to Rodney King is itself the cfreuit of white racist violence which violently disavows itself only to brutalize the specter that embodies its own intention. This is the phantasm that it ritualistically pro- duces atthe site of the racialized other Is it precisely because this black male body is on the ground that the beat 5 becomes intensified? For if white paranoia i also to some degree homophobia, then is this not a brutalization performed as a desexualiztion or, rather, as a punishment for a conjectured or desired sexual aggression? The image of the pulice standing over Rodney King with their batons might be read as a sexual degradation which ends up miming and inverting the imagined scene of sexual elation th aa" positions” “The Feversal and clsplacement of dagerous inention mentioned above con- iC appears to Wait and to loathe; the police thus deploy the ““props"* ervice of its aggressive denial tinued to be reiterated after the verdict: first, in the violence that took place in Los Angeles in which the majority of individuals killed were black and in the streets, killed by the police, thus replaying, intensifying, and extending the scope of the violence against Rodney King. The intensification of police violence against people of color can be read as evidence that the verdict was taken as further state sanction for racist police violence; second, in remarks made by Mr. Bush on the day after the verdict was announced in which he condemned public violence, noting first the lamentabilty of public violence against property(!), and holding responsible, once again, those black bodies on the street as ifthe figure of the brutalized black body had, as anticipated, risen and raised its forces against the police. The groups involved in street violence thus were construed paradoxically as the originators of a set of killings that may well have left those very bodies dead, thus exonerating the police and the state again, and performing an ident feation with the phantasmatic endangerment of the white community in Simi Valley; a thir, inthe media scanning of sect violence, the refusal to read how and where and why fires were lit, stores burned, indeed, what was being artic- ulated in and through that violence. The bestialization of the crowds, consolidated by scanning techniques which appeared to “hunt down” people of color and figure their violence as “senseless” or “*barbar production of the visual field If the jury's reading of the video reenacted the phantasmatic scene of the crime, thus recapitulated the racist reiterating and re-occupying the always already endangered status of the white person on the street, and the response to the reading, now inscribed as verdict, ‘was to re-cite the charge and to reenact and enlarge the crime, it achieved this ‘in part through a transposition and fabrication of dangerous intention. This is hardly 2 full explanation of the causes of racist violence, but it does, perhaps constitute a moment in its production. It can pethaps be described as a form ofJUDITH BUTLER ‘white paranoia which projects the intention to injure that it itself enacts, and then repeats that projection on increasingly larger scales, a specific social modality of tition compulsion, which we still need to learn how to read, and which as eading, performed in the name of law, has obvious and consequential effect, Note Fanon, The Fact of Blacks," (New York: Grave Pres, 1967), 11 Bleck Sin; White Macs, trans, Charles La Marka 2, Tont mean to suggest by “white racist epttemne” «static and closed system of seing, but rather an historically slfrenewing practice of reading which, when lef interrupted, tends to a taing way “how white people see,” but ae allered here a theoretical hyperbeles which are «extend ts hegemonic force. Cleary, terms like white paranoia” de not describe in meant to advance a strtegclly aggresive counter-reading. Ruth Wilson Gilmore [A] cvilnation maddened by its own perverse ascumptions and contradictions is looe on the worl Ceri Robinson Civilization is nothing but the glory of incessant struggle —Gabriele D’Annuristo Poreadth of L.A. County—my regular commute to UCLA. When I hit the radio Bion to gota trafic report [found intends atthe middle of the AM band © Gp sed excessive force aginst Rodney King. 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