Concern 2

This is a Riot and These People Are Out of Control

This section explores the role violence plays in protest, taking a closer look at the ways in which terminology is used to frame a “dangerous Black riot” versus a “righteous white protest.” It also covers how property damage is often conflated with violence, and whether this perception invalidates the efforts.

01

White Riots versus Black Protests

Short Video by Brave New Films [2:53 minutes]

This short film provides a useful overview of how the news media treats Black protestors with deep suspicion, denouncing their actions while generally laughing off the destructive behavior of white rioters. These are the double standards Black Americans face when fighting for equality.  

02

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Using data from more than 700 recent articles, this thoroughly researched piece provides evidence supporting the phenomenon known as “the protest paradigm,” in which news coverage negatively affects public opinion regarding protest movements and creates a “hierarchy of social struggle,” elevating the voices of some advocates over others.

“The general public’s opinions about protests and the social movements behind them are formed in large part by what they read or see in the media. This gives journalists a lot of power when it comes to driving the narrative of a demonstration.”

“The role journalists play can be indispensable if movements are to gain legitimacy and make progress. And that puts a lot of pressure on journalists to get things right.”

“Protests identify legitimate grievances in society and often tackle issues that affect people who lack the power to address them through other means. That’s why it is imperative that journalists do not resort to shallow framing narratives that deny significant and consistent space to air the afflicted’s concerns while also comforting the very comfortable status quo.”

03

The Double Standard Of The American Riot

By Kellie Carter Jackson, The Atlantic (June 1, 2020)

A short article from Wellesley College Assistant Professor of History Kellie Carter Jackson, tracing the history of American protest and rebellion, which are seen as patriotic when employed by white people, but dangerous and even “un-American” when employed by Black people.

"The philosophy of force and violence to obtain freedom has long been employed by white people and explicitly denied to Black Americans."

“Since the beginning of this country, riots and violent rhetoric have been markers of patriotism.”

“The American Revolution was won with violence. The French Revolution was won with violence. The Haitian Revolution was won with violence. The Civil War was won with violence. A revolution in today’s terms would mean that these nationwide rebellions lead to Black people being able to access and exercise the fullness of their freedom and humanity.”

“A riot may be temporary violence, quick and dirty, but it could become a revolution. And though slow and long-lasting, when it is fully mature, a revolution is irrefutable change.”

04

Don’t Fall For the ‘Chaos’ Theory of the Protests

By Megan Garber, The Atlantic (June 2, 2020)

This article argues that the pervasive labeling of the protests as “chaos” by American media outlets obfuscates the protests’ intentions, underlying causes, and goals. Protests, Garber argues, are valid forms of political action with their own language and logic—and they’ve succeeded in advancing goals time and time again in American history. Calling them chaos simultaneously delegitimizes them and legitimizes the use of violence to suppress them.

“With the efficiency of a single word, the American paper of record took the purpose of the Lafayette gathering in the first place—the protest of the killing of George Floyd—and obscured it in the fog of ‘chaos.’”


“Deployed as an assessment of human events, though, chaos can suggest a dereliction of duty. It is incurious, and resigned to the incuriosity. The word implies a mayhem so extreme that there is no logic to be found in the tumult.”

“Protests, after all, have a language and a logic: … They have their own grammar. They make their messages scannable through signs. They are legible; their purpose, in fact, is legibility.”

“That is not chaos. And to dismiss the protests in that way, as swirling eddies of inscrutability, is to erase their message.”


“Chaos, deployed as a journalistic summary of civil unrest, works in the way that invocations of evil might after a mass shooting: The term throws up its hands. It ratifies the status quo. Evil just is; chaos just is; one must accept those facts and move on.”

05

This Is What You Get

By Ashley Reese,
Jezebel (May 28, 2020)

This article provides an examination of the dehumanizing pattern of prioritizing property over the lives of Black Americans, as illustrated by outrage over small incidents of looting compared to silence and apathy in response to police killings of Black people.

“The pattern is easy enough to follow: A police officer is alleged to have killed an unarmed Black person, a viral video emerges, protesters assemble, and the police respond to peaceful protest with suffocating tear gas and rubber bullets. By then, all bets are off, and so begin the fires and so-called ‘looting’ while America’s moral arbiters play judge and jury.”

“Property is inanimate. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t have hopes, dreams, or mouths to feed. There are properties we cherish—our homes, our places of worship, buildings of historical and cultural significance. A Target is not one of these places, and neither is an Arby’s, a Wendy’s, an Aldi, an Autozone, or an empty construction site. It’s safe to say that the aforementioned establishments are better insured than many Americans. But just as a destroyed CVS became a symbol of the unruliness of protesters following the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, so too is the Minneapolis Target store that provided protesters with a sliver of catharsis in the face of an uncaring police force, an uncaring society.” 


“For far too many Americans, it is easier to mourn the destruction of a series of chain stores, owned and operated by millionaires, than the death of a Black American. A stolen lamp is worthy of a kind of empathy that a Black person could only dream of.”

“‘All this is replaceable, all this is replaceable,’ he said, gesturing toward the burning buildings around him. ‘But life? When you take lives... you can’t replace it, you know what I’m sayin?’”

06

How White America Excuses Its Own Violence

By Emily Tamkin,
New Statesman (May 29, 2020)

From the perspective of a U.K.-based publication, this essay offers multiple examples of U.S. news media outlets treating the protests against police brutality as riots and looting.

“If this reads as familiar, it’s because it is. This is also what happened after Michael Brown Jr. was killed by the police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. It is also what happened after Freddie Gray died in the back of a police van in Baltimore, Maryland in 2015. A Black man—or child, in the case of Brown—dies at the hands of the police and white Americans point to the violence of the protests.”

“...If the looting of a Target in Minneapolis had happened in a vacuum, then perhaps we could sit around condemning taking something from a Target. But we are not in a vacuum.”

07

Black Riot

By Raven Rakia,
The New Inquiry (November 14, 2013)

An argument for property destruction as a useful tactic and an explanation of why and how deeply elites fear and seek to discredit black and brown protestors who employ this method.

“When the same system that refuses to protect Black children comes out to protect windows, what is valued over Black people in America becomes very clear.”

“With the destruction of property, violence can turn from an aspect of self-defense to a useful offensive tactic. Nothing gets the attention of the elite like taking away or destroying what they value above all else: property.”

“One cannot discuss the immorality of damaging property without devaluing the rage that brought protesters to this point.”

“Selective historians consider this unnecessary; they will use the Civil Rights Movement’s nonviolent resistance as an example. They will demand that you stand perfectly still as you get sprayed by water hoses and attacked by police dogs. They’ll conveniently forget to mention that while MLK was leading non-violent resistance in the form of sit-ins and marches, “riots” were raging through America’s Black ghettos.”

08

When Rioting Is The Answer

By Noche Diaz,
Time Magazine (July 9, 2015)

This article, from Arizona State University Knowledge Enterprise’s Magazine, polls four experts from different backgrounds on whether riots are a legitimate means of achieving social change in American history. 

“America was founded on riots.”

“From the Boston Tea Party to the Los Angeles riots to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, violent resistance has sometimes led to positive social change. Most often, rioting has drawn attention to oppressive authoritarian rule (sometimes by kings, sometimes by police). In some cases, it has also spurred investigations into law enforcement or other government systems. Occasionally, it has even forced corrupt or incompetent leaders to surrender or resign.”

“Riots are not great solutions, but riots are usually caused by real injustices. Thousands of people do not take to the streets for no good reason. That was true during the American Revolution, and it is true today. Riots are often the desperate response of people who feel they have no other recourse. We can reduce rioting by providing better access to justice for everyone.”

“But the recent Black urban uprisings aren’t seen in the same way. Even though they show a historical continuity between America’s past and present, the constant reality of drug raids, pat downs, and ‘jump outs’ is often not taken seriously as a justification of violence, because these violations of bodies usually aren’t violations of law.”

“A Baltimore teenager said to me, ‘I know Freddie [Gray]’s family didn’t want rioting… and people don’t want us destroying our community… but we don’t want police killing us. If they won’t stop, we do what we have to.”

09

This is a short clip of an interview with activist Angela Davis from a California State Prison discussing violence.  This is taken from a longer documentary The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2012), which examines the genesis of the Black Power Movement.

When being asked about violence and confrontation: “The real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies in the principals and the goals you are striving for, not in the way you reach them. On the other hand, because of the way this society is organized, because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions you have to expect things like that as reactions if you are a black person and live in the black community all your life and walk out on the street every day seeing white policemen surrounding you…”

Extended Readings

 

  1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

  2. Cornel West, Race Matters, Introduction (1993)

  3. Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (2019)

  4. I Am Not Your Negro (2016) - Film

  5. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)