torious for the manner in which the four police officers, none of whom lived in the city, fired forty-one rounds at the defenseless twenty-twoyear-old, hitting the victim nineteen times. Shortly after Diallo's death, protests and demonstrations erupted all over the city, frequently drawing over a thousand people. Like the Rodney King trial, however, the case was moved out of the large, racially diverse metropolis and into a nearby city. Unlike the Rodney King trial, however, the national media fairly ignored the trial, despite evidence of demonstrated interest. Another distinct difference from the Rodney King trial contributed to this neglect: there was no videotape to be played over and over on the nightly news, or frame by frame from the witness stand, with each side battling over the meaning contained within. Further, the trial and the trial judge went to great lengths to keep the issue of race out of the trial, a seemingly impossible, but nonetheless accomplished, task. When the officers were acquitted, despite having to prove that each individual bullet in the forty-one-round shooting was itself justified, there was no rioting, due chiefly to AfroAmerican leaders organizing and urging restraint, but also due to the fact that the media had stayed away. Their neglect provided an important support for race to be rendered a nonissue.

These examples, only three in what could be a very long list, demonstrate one rather obvious -- though frequently denied -- fact about contemporary American society, succinctly expressed by Cornel West: Race matters. These examples also demonstrate an equally obvious fact: the contemporary status of race in mainstream American culture is intimately bound to the process of representation within and through the mass media. As the King trial so clearly demonstrated, the meanings generated by images are neither inherent, nor ideologically neutral. What first popped up on American TVs seemed self-evident, but was later rendered differently, first by situating the "meaning" of the tape within a broader context -- the high-speed chase that preceded the police actions -- then through the imposition and application of different codes and modes of interpretation applied frame by frame.

What this book will demonstrate is that race matters precisely because racism is a social institution within American culture, and representation is the foundation upon which it stands. Indeed, racism has been an integral component of American culture since its founding upon the genocide of Native Americans, and the forced slavery of Africans and AfroAmericans. Contemporary American society is multiethnic and multiracial, but it is not color-blind -- much as it would like to claim to be. ²

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