Videos of Police Killings Are Numbing Us to the Spectacle of Black Death

We get to see black men tortured or killed by police a lot more often these days, so it’s worth recalling why, a generation ago, it mattered so much to see what happened to Rodney King. We had certainly seen the black-and-white photographs and videos depicting police abuse of African Americans, and we’d seen the grainy images of lynchings past, but the conventional ignorance was that this wasn’t t...