Maria and Julio are joined by Tanya Ballard Brown, executive editor at Government Executive, and Vann Newkirk II, senior editor at The Atlantic and host of the podcast Floodlines. They reflect on 30 years since the police officers who brutally beat Rodney King were acquitted and the uprisings in Los Angeles that followed. They also get into the Biden administration’s potential plans for student loan forgiveness, and the latest on voting rights in the lead-up to the midterms.

This episode was mixed by Kieran Gannon.

ITT Staff Picks:

• “The 1992 riots were in many ways a product of segregation. The sense of disorder they caused only accelerated white flight,” writes Héctor Tobar in los-angeles-violence.html">The New York Times Magazine.

• In this thread on Twitter, journalist Michael Harriot expands on the pay, wealth and education disparities between Black and white Americans, and its connection to student loans.

• For The Atlantic, Van Newkirk II interviewed Crystal Mason, a Black woman who was convicted to five years in prison for attempting to vote in 2016 and unknowingly violated a Texas voting law.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci