The Rodney King incidents - the beating, the trial and the uprising - raised a number of questions about the connections between poverty, racial ideology, economic competition, and the exercise of political power. What is the relationship between the beating of Rodney King and the workings of racism in America? How was it possible for defense attorneys to convince a jury that the videotape it saw did not depict an excessive or unjustified use of violence? In the burning of Koreatown, what role did racial stereotypes of African Americans and Korean Americans play, and how, are we to understand the fact that not all of Los Angeles’ various Latino communities took part in the uprising? Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising includes essays by prominent philosophers, social scientists, literary critics and legal scholars. They explore these issues from a variety of distinct, theoretical perspectives, offering a complicated picture of the Rodney King incidents. Avoiding reductionism, they illuminate the complex interplay of ideological, political and economic forces impinging on urban America.