Americans: We Love Rioting

Despite every freak out when black people riot, white Americans love rioting too and always have. From the Boston Tea Party to any given sports championship, white people love raising some hell in the streets. But of course they are white and so it’s OK. Heather Cox Richardson with some context and many examples of white people rioting.

As long as America is a democracy, we will have riots. But they will not all be viewed in the same historical light. Riots bring popular attention to a perceived inequality. Once people start paying attention, the unfairness of the underlying situations in places like Ludlow or Watts or even colonial Boston, make them sit up and work to fix those inequalities. But as often, popular attention to the rage of rioters makes it clear that the rioters are the ones trying to maintain inequalities. Popular disgust for the mobs in the New York City Draft Riots or at Ole Miss moved society forward too, but not in the way those rioters anticipated. Far from achieving their ends, the rioters in New York City in 1863 or the ones a century later at Ole Miss created a backlash that advanced the very policies they opposed.

The people who are burning Baltimore are not thugs. They are Americans, acting in a grand American political tradition. Calling them thugs and demanding non-violence prejudges them as those who are out of step with modern America. It says that, like the New York City Draft Rioters or the segregationists at Ole Miss, the wrongs they are protesting are in their own heads. That the city of Baltimore has paid damages to more than 100 victims of police brutality in the past three years, and that Freddie Gray’s spine was mysteriously severed and his larynx crushed in police custody, makes it seem unlikely that today’s protesters are imagining injustice.