John Minchillo/AP Photo
Protesters demonstrate outside a burning fast-food restaurant in Minneapolis, May 29, 2020, four days after the police killing of George Floyd.
One of the most common messages repeated by prominent figures inside and outside of government is that riots serve no social purpose. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo claimed that property destruction “accomplishes nothing, because we’re losing the moment and we’re not even making the political point that the protesters want to make, which is a good point.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott similarly claimed “the destruction of property is unacceptable and counterproductive.”
This bipartisan consensus is familiar, yet strange. For starters, the United States was famously founded by rioting, violent white men. They tarred and feathered political officials, destroyed buildings, looted property (throwing some of it in Boston Harbor), and ultimately shot and killed British soldiers in large numbers. As professor Kellie Carter Jackson brilliantly stated in her Atlantic essay, “The Double Standard of the American Riot”:
When our Founding Fathers fought for independence, violence was the clarion call. Phrases such as “Live free or die,” “Give me liberty or give me death,” and “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” echoed throughout the nation, and continue today. Force and violence have always been used as weapons to defend liberty, because—as John Adams once said in reference to the colonists’ treatment by the British—“We won’t be their Negroes.”
In comparison to American patriots, modern-day looting of largely corporate retail chains by a minority of protesters is practically tame. Readers may be inclined to dismiss this point as a historical curiosity, but it serves to reinforce a historical truth: Rioting has often worked in North America, and petitioning political elites usually doesn’t.
Peaceful protests against police violence have been going on for decades. After Ferguson, which wasn’t purely nonviolent, there have been peaceful Black Lives Matter protests for six years, which have been ignored and dismissed. Establishment liberals, especially white liberals, who invoke peaceful protest need to face the fact that conditions for Black Americans haven’t improved at all since. The hopelessness fueling property destruction and the futility of embracing cops at police violence protests was best expressed by an anonymous protester:
… all of this, “getting cops to kneel” and “oh the cops are cool with us”, that’s what’s going to be on the news and not our message. [They’ll repeat] the message of “only peaceful protest is okay”. We’ve tried that so many fucking times and it hasn’t worked and I’m not about to watch a cop kneel and say “oh good for you” I’m not going to do that anymore. We’ve tried so many things and they haven’t worked and I’m mad, and I deserve to be!
We can debate how much militancy alienates white people who claim to be sympathetic with protesters and how much it spurs action from others. However this, in some respects, misses the point. Martin Luther King Jr. was wildly unpopular among white Americans during his lifetime, with majorities of whites asserting that he was “hurting the cause” of Black people. If alienating white America prevented change, King would have gotten nowhere. Instead, his strategy was to put direct pressure on politicians to effect change through protests which raised tensions and provoked police violence—as activists are doing today.
At every turn, property damage and rioting made the case for a social democratic alternative to the status quo, and King explicitly highlighted that fact. Take, for example, his February 1968 quote to The New York Times that “our summers of riots are caused by our winters of delay,” explicitly putting the burden for stopping rioting on policymakers. King added that “White Americans cannot see the cities die because that is where they make their money … They may live in the suburbs, but as a matter of self-interest we believe they will not allow the cities to go up in flames.” Only the large-scale riots after King’s assassination created enough pressure for the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which finally passed five weeks after his death.
So what happened in the aftermath? The combination of assassinations, violent police, and FBI suppression shattered the civil rights movement, while a political campaign among elite politicians to present incarceration and policing as a solution to the race problem produced what professor Vesla Weaver calls a “frontlash”.
This pivot away from confronting poverty was profoundly damaging. In 1975, Coretta Scott King, speaking on behalf of the Full Employment Action Council, which she co-founded, went so far as to say before Congress that “many of the gains of the last two decades are threatened by the disastrous levels of joblessness among minority Americans. I fear that the civil rights legislation we struggled for, and some died for, is about to be repealed by the harsh reality of high unemployment and persistent poverty.”
Everyone resisting oppression would prefer not to have to act. It’s far easier for protesters if the powerful create justice on their own. However, they rarely do.
The Ford administration took advantage of the splintered state of the American left in this period. Future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, then chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, boasted that the administration was able to rebuff demands for economic stimulus because “the response to these higher levels of unemployment was remarkably mild.” Greenspan referenced a newspaper columnist’s surprise “at the failure of social radicalism to emerge as a consequence.” In other words, the lack of rioting in the 1970s enabled the soaring inequality that followed in later decades.
Emboldened by these earlier experiments, President Carter’s Federal Reserve appointee Paul Volcker raised interest rates over 20 percent. Protests, letter writing, and other actions emerged, but none at the level of militancy that would have been required to abort the experiment. Greenspan, later appointed Fed chair by Reagan, continued this tradition during his nearly two-decade reign at the central bank, explicitly saying that only “increased job insecurity” led him to target lower unemployment rates.
Everyone resisting oppression would prefer not to have to act. It’s far easier for protesters if the powerful create justice on their own. However, they rarely do. When the population doesn’t militantly resist and disobey those who bring carceral and economic violence upon them, policymakers are emboldened to continue their actions. In the absence of social unrest, systematic police violence and breathtakingly large police budgets have been deemed politically acceptable, even as social spending at the state and local level is cut to the bone. On the national level, congressional pandemic response programs have been dysfunctional and political leadership of both parties seem comfortable with an extended period of depression-level unemployment, which is clearly contributing to the unrest.
Militant property destruction has been a successful tactic for resisting oppression in America since the 18th century. The real reason politicians condemn this tactic is they know the enormous political pressure it puts on them. Policy decisions are not pure reflections of the preference of the population as a whole. Instead, politicians tend to operate under a variety of constraints from organized interests and what they believe the wider population will accept. While the result of any individual riot is uncertain and complex, in violent and repressive societies the results of a sustained lack of rioting are clear: Politicians feel no need to challenge entrenched interests and the violent arm of the government acts with impunity.
Now, after decades, a Black-led coalition of Americans will only accept a positive peace which has the “presence of justice.” Politicians seeking a return to peace must have the courage to stand up to out-of-control and violently brutal police forces and give up on futile pleas for protesters to unilaterally demobilize. There is no going back.
