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-two-
year-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 dif-
ference 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, de-
spite having to prove that each individual bullet in the forty-one-round
shooting was itself justified, there was no rioting, due chiefly to Afro-
American leaders organizing and urging restraint, but also due to the fact
that the media had stayed away. Their neglect provided an important sup-
port for race to be rendered a nonissue.

These examples, only three in what could be a very long list, demon-
strate one rather obvious -- though frequently denied -- fact about contem-
porary American society, succinctly expressed by Cornel West: Race mat-
ters. 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 me-
dia. 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 differ-
ently, first by situating the "meaning" of the tape within a broader con-
text -- 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 inte-
gral component of American culture since its founding upon the genocide
of Native Americans, and the forced slavery of Africans and Afro-
Americans. Contemporary American society is multiethnic and multira-
cial, but it is not color-blind -- much as it would like to claim to be. ²

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