Heather Ann Thompson

So the question is, what is it that just kind of unleashed it in that moment and has been, I think, unleashing it since?

Race.

I mean, there is an inescapable race.

story here about the way in which this case and subsequent cases like it were fueled and animated and legitimated by the sense that the people who had been killed or harmed or damaged had deserved exactly what they got.

And all of that is framed in such a way that it is just inescapably racialized.

So to me, that is the through line.

And of course, once you normalize public violence to that extent, it will have spillover, right?

It will also be directed at people that we disagree with politically or that we see as a threat in other ways.

But the violence we have unleashed, the lawlessness—

the disregard for a rule of law and the absolute eradication of truth as something that matters, facts as something that matters, when that happens, nobody is safe.

It doesn't matter if you live in Minneapolis.

It doesn't matter if you live in Denmark.

It doesn't matter where you live.

If the rule of law doesn't matter anymore, and if truth doesn't matter anymore, and if facts don't matter anymore, we are all in danger.

Well, if you were to look at the media at the time and you were just to read the newspaper reports, not just the tabloid media but even the mainstream media, you would see an account of these being dangerous thugs.

And animals and articles that recounted all of the criminal charges that these teens had mounted against them.

And I went back to the beginning and just started to unpack, first of all, who were they?

Where did they come from?

Daryl Kaby, for example, who ends up in public housing in the South Bronx because he is originally as a kid living in a house with his mom and dad and his brothers.

And his dad is hardworking, supporting the family.