Visual evidence is so racialized it rendered the Rodney King beating ambiguous.

Evidence

In this context the racialized nature of the contemporary city is likewise dependent on the processes through which the analytical world is rendered comprehensible as an object of study. At a simple level it becomes important to ask why it is that in Sim City you can have a riot but never a revolution; to think about the status of the film evidence that made it plausible that the police officers attacking Rodney King were innocent (Butler, 1993), The case demonstrated that the field of vision is so starkly racialized. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2291

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader cultural studies literature on the Rodney King video (Gooding-Williams’ ‘Reading Rodney King’, Butler’s work) discussed in the same book.
• SHARE: The Sim City analogy — a riot but never a revolution — is exactly the kind of sharp point a specific politically-interested friend would get.
• QUESTION: What does it mean for a medium to be so racialized that even footage of violence against a Black man is read as innocence? Worth chasing Judith Butler’s original argument.
• SEED: Essay angle: how simulation games encode political possibility — Sim City allows riot but structurally forbids revolution.