The Fire This Time

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FOR MORE THAN A YEAR HE had been a writhing body twisting on the ground under kicks and nightstick blows in what may be the most endlessly replayed videotape ever made. Then on Friday afternoon TV finally gave Rodney King a face and a voice -- a hesitant, almost sobbing voice that yet was more eloquent than any other that spoke during the terrible week. "Stop making it horrible," King pleaded with the rioters who had been doing just that in Los Angeles -- and to a lesser extent in San Francisco, Atlanta, Seattle, Pittsburgh and other cities. He sounded almost dazed by the violence that followed a jury's acquittal of the cops who had beaten him: the killing, burning and looting, he muttered, were "just not right . . . just not right." As to black-white relations: "Can we all get along?"

Would that the nation's leaders, of both races, could find such plain but heartfelt words. Then perhaps the quiet that will return after the fires and the fury burn themselves out -- whenever that is -- could cover healing. Which would make it very unlike the totally deceptive quiet that preceded the King verdict.

It had not exactly been unknown that race relations were worsening; a hundred voices had said so. But not until last week did many whites and blacks realize how deep an abyss had been opening at their feet. And last week's violence is all too likely to make the gulf still wider and deeper. For blacks the acquittal, and for whites the aftermath, tended to confirm each race's worst fears and suspicions about the other.

Blacks have far more than police brutality to worry about: high unemployment, widespread poverty, poor schools, drug peddlers and criminals who prey on their neighborhoods. But it is no accident that nearly all the great ghetto riots since the 1960s have been triggered by some incident involving arrested blacks and white cops. To an extent that whites can barely even imagine -- because it so rarely happens to them -- police brutality to many blacks is an ever present threat to their bodies and lives.

Indeed, few things more vividly illustrate the extent to which whites and blacks live in different worlds than their reactions to police brutality. A white who was sickened by the tape of King's beating would probably have said to himself something like, Look what they're doing to that poor guy. A black would be almost sure to say, My God, that could be me. And nothing makes blacks feel more helpless than the thought that they cannot do anything about it. However innocent a black may be, and however outrageously he or she may be treated, the criminal-justice system simply will not convict policemen of using excessive force.