Has Anything Changed?

Abstract

The 1990s represented the worst of America: the 1991 Crown Heights tensions that exploded after a rabbi’s motorcade accidentally killed 7-year-old Gavin Cato, a black boy, and a group of black men killed 29-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish student, for revenge; the 1992 acquittal of four white policemen videotaped beating Rodney King, and the resulting riots in Los Angeles; the 1995 terrorist bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City; massive government infusions of money for prisons, but not for schools; the 1998 death by dragging of African American James Byrd in Jasper, Texas; the 1999 New York City shooting 41 times of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed young African immigrant street peddler, by four white policemen; and the 1999 shooting rampage that left 15 dead and several more injured at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. These were terrible times.

[The 1992 Los Angeles riots] were a multiracial, transclass “display of justified social rage” that “signified a sense of powerlessness in American society … a lethal linkage of economic decline, cultural decay and political lethargy.”

—Cornel West, quoted by the Office of Cultural Affairs at Michigan Technological University in the Michigan Tech Lode, 16 September 1994.