“You turn on the TV any time of day or night and you would see Rodney King getting beaten down,” Armour said. In the professor’s view, that image saturating the airwaves should have been enough to make mere hooligans act out. But instead people waited for justice.
“
The black and brown community in L.A. waited for the verdict and didn’t take to the streets until the promise of justice seemed so flagrantly flouted by that Simi Valley verdict contradicting what their own eyes had seen,” Armour said. To call the explosion of anger and frustration that followed a riot would, in Armour’s view,
undermine the very real justification for that anger, and all the deep, simmering injustice at play.
On the other hand, Stevenson explained, “those who term the events
‘civil unrest,’ ‘uprising,’ ‘rebellion’ and ‘sa-i-gu’ speak from the position that
there was a breakdown in protection under the law that had to be, was attempted to be addressed, or that was not addressed.”
Sa-i-gu, which quite literally translates to 4-29 (or April 29) in Korean, is commonly used to refer to the events in L.A.’s Korean community.
“Uprising” — and, to a lesser degree, “rebellion” — has long been used to describe the events (particularly in less-white corners of the city), but the term
pervaded the establishment in recent years.
In 2017, when numerous institutions staged exhibits and symposia to grapple with the
25th anniversary of the events,
“L.A. Uprising” was used as a title for multiple events, and in the written materials for others. Although “riot” remains the official style for many major newspapers (including this one), online and alternative outlets are increasingly opting for “uprising” in some headlines.
And somewhere between “riot” and “uprising,”
“civil unrest” has
emerged as a more neutral, politically correct option.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti almost always refers to the “civil unrest of 1992” when speaking publicly, and even the
Los Angeles Police Department calls the events the
“1992 Civil Unrest” on its website. (The LAPD’s Civil Unrest page is categorized under “interesting facts” in the website’s history section, alongside Pope John Paul II’s 1987 visit and the 1994 Northridge earthquake).
Armour was surprised when I told him that the nation’s third-largest police department had begun opting for “civil unrest” on its website. “That may be a reason to be a little suspicious of it too, when that kind of thing starts to happen,” he said, expressing concern that the tepidness of the term might “defang” the events they sought to categorize.
It seems there may be no neutral way to refer to what transpired in Los Angeles 27 years ago. But then again, little was neutral about the events of April 1992.
And now,
here’s what’s happening across California:
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