Reading Response 5-12-14

I think the strangest idea to me presented in the “Reel Time/Real Justice” article by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Gary Peller is the concept of disaggregation. In the case of Rodney King, they took the video that captured his beating and broke it down into components. In these components, these still shots of the scene, they explained what the officers were doing in each shot and how each part of the beating was justified as actions to subdue aggression. When you watched the tape as a whole, the racism was easily sighted, but by breaking it into components, the evidence was presented to a jury in a way that seemed justified. The more shocking discovery was that, this concept wasn’t something new. The idea of disaggregation was also present in the Richmond vs. Croson case of 1989.  It seems as if people in general see blatant racism and understand it, but instead of addressing it, they choose to break these events down in a way that takes the racism out of these situations.

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