Riots are destructive, but can lead to social reforms
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vox.com
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1) They make us talk about motives and where the reaction is coming from.
2) They inspire empathy. They often start out as peaceful protests that go ignored -- they can be understood as the suffering going unheard.
3) They require urgent response. They are an extreme reaction, so they must have an extreme reason. And in some cases the reasons are valid (mass oppression & living in terror qualifies, I'd say). Invalid cases: Sporting events, bigotry.
In re #6:
> 6) They end up costing a lot of money, on the order of 10s to 100s of millions of dollars. Legal fees, fees paid for civil rights abuse, property destruction, hospitalization fees, and more. Most of which tax payers foot the bill for. A drop in the bucket, maybe, but this money could do a lot to improve a community instead of repair it.
You could just as easily count the number of incarcerated blacks, lives taken by cops, time caged for crimes as simple as not being able to pay a fine for "manner of walking in the street." Looking at this money in isolation without considering the poverty on the other side is myopic.
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> The only thing that riots do, in my view, is give a more negative view/stereotype of the class in question - I wouldn't say they are a step forward, but a step backward.
This assumes the reaction to the riots is a stereotype and not people trying to empathize or understand where it's coming from. While there may be some like you who seem to react in the former, journalists and bloggers (and even this discussion! thanks for engaging) are doing their best to make the outcome the latter.
> As for #6, yes, the cost of incarceration is a problem as well, but rioting is not fixing that problem in any way, only making it worse (by putting more people in prison).
Actually rioting is in response to the problem in hopes it'll change, so in the long term making it better. What I'm saying is yes short term cost of riots are a thing. Long term benefit is much greater, long term harm/suffering caused by no awareness is much greater too.
Gandhi protests were peaceful, but disruptive of the normal functioning of the Colonial State, like for example the Salt March[1]. That was feasible because indians were a majority in the country. I can't imagine so many forms of economically disruptive protests that won't be considered violent in one way or another performed by a minority in a country. Specially when the people suffering the most are "de facto" segregated from most of the functioning economy.
You need to reread Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...
It's MLK on the subject of white tone trolls.
Every time I see this, I feel we should remember that the proverb was "few bad apples spoil the whole bunch" not "few bad apples are annoying but the whole bunch is pretty okay".
Dead black guys, of course, come free?
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Of course it will not make the moderates agree. But the moderates were okay with people being tortured or murdered by police for fun.
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Frankly, the victims have no reason to care about the moderates' inner mental state - only their observed behaviours.
It's easy to argue that 'democracy is the answer' when you are comfortable and enfranchised. But flip that around – put yourself in the place of someone who is poor, continually subject to discrimination, and does not have the same influence on democracy.
The natural response of people in that situation is to say "fuck it". From their view, what's the point of engaging with a system that is comprehensively biased against them?
Now, I won't defend property destruction and looting. But I do understand how it can happen. If you feel completely alienated from society, then the advice to 'solve problem peacefully using democracy' is less than useless.
Democracy fails when it is manipulated for abuse and harm.
You literally don't comprehend that the rioters weigh up property damage versus the danger of being randomly murdered by police, and don't give a hoot? OK.
People who have hope, don't riot.
This. Riots happen because the system is broken and can't be reasonably changed. (Or at least that is the perception.)
I don't think assholes rioting over sports are equivalent to savagely oppressed rioting for their livelihoods and for their suffering to be heard.
There's a more detailed explanation of this viewpoint here: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5911.html
You should look at this from the same perspective as irrational rage, or nuclear war. The risk of a destructive conflagration even when it is also harmful to the people who start the destruction is an impetus to solve disputes peacefully and fairly, and to not push structural power imbalances too far to gain an advantage.
In Baltimore it was pretty much black people throwing stuff at everyday white people. The difference in race allows for a stronger generalization by both parties.
Similar to when we attack institutions, we just go against all politicians. We fail to understand that many of them are not corrupt and are on our side.
Generalization is a scary thing.
Citation needed. Lots of white people are protesting along with blacks. The protests in general are against law enforcement.
> We fail to understand that many of them are not corrupt and are on our side.
This doesn't seem relevant, the protests are not happening against "white people at large." Law enforcement is not on the side of the oppressed in this case. The corruption is systemic.
Your little country would still be a British colony of peasants and slave holders.
Also, Canada.
http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#the-american-revolution
>The Revolution was a bloodbath with ~100,000 casualties or fatalities followed by 62,000 Loyalist/Tory refugees fleeing the country for fear of retaliation and their expropriation (the ones who stayed did not escape persecution); this is a butcher’s bill that did not seem justified in the least by anything in Britain or America’s subsequent history (what, were the British going to randomly massacre Americans for fun?), even now with a population of >300 million, and much less back when the population was 1/100th the size. Independence was granted to similar English colonies at the smaller price of “waiting a while”: Canada was essentially autonomous by 1867 (less than a century later) and Australia was first settled in 1788 with autonomous colonies not long behind and the current Commonwealth formed by 1901.
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The British Empire ended the slave trade everywhere they could reach at the point of a gun.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline
> 1807, 25 March: Abolition of the Slave Trade Act abolishes slave trading in British Empire. Captains fined £120 per slave transported. 1807, 22 July: The constitution of the Duchy of Warsaw abolishes serfdom.[41] 1807: The British begin patrols of African coast to arrest slaving vessels. The West Africa Squadron (Royal Navy) is established to suppress slave trading; by 1865, nearly 150,000 people freed by anti-slavery operations. 1811: Slave trading made a felony in the British Empire, punishable by transportation for British subjects and foreigners. 1815: British pay Portugal £750,000 to cease their trade north of the Equator. 1817: Spain paid £400,000 by British to cease trade to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo.[45] 1817: New York State sets a date of 4 July 1827 to free all its ex-slaves from indenture.[46] 1818: Treaty between Britain and Spain to abolish slave trade.[47] 1818: Treaty between Britain and Portugal to abolish slave trade.[47] 1818: France abolishes slave trading. 1818: Treaty between Britain and the Netherlands taking additional measures to enforce the 1814 ban on slave trading. 1827: Treaty between Britain and Sweden to abolish slave trade.[ 1834: The British Slavery Abolition Act comes into force, abolishing slavery throughout most of the British Empire. Legally frees 700,000 in West Indies, 20,000 in Mauritius, and 40,000 in South Africa. The exceptions, territories controlled by the East India Company and Ceylon, were liberated in 1843 when they became part of the British Empire. 1835: Treaty between Britain and France to abolish slave trade. 1835: Treaty between Britain and Denmark to abolish slave trade. 1838, 1 August: Enslaved men, women, and children in the British Empire finally became fully free after a period of forced apprenticeship following the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. 1839: British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society founded as a successor to the Anti-Slavery Society. (The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society exists today as Anti-Slavery International.)
Given a regime which imprisons the most people in the world, strangles black people to death on camera in broad daylight, shoots black children dead...
And given a regime which sends "uniformed killers" (as Mark Twain put it) across the world, and cheers/supports Ukrainians to lob petrol bombs at THEIR police...
Then yeah, what kind of halfway ethical person gives a fuck all about "property destruction and looting"? When whites go rioting because some sports team... well, I don't actually know what goes on in their savage minds... it's not an emergency. But when black people decide maybe they should not get slaughtered and humiliated, it threatens the white way of life and must be eliminated.
No wait, perhaps you meant "without resorting to violence" to affluent, white people?
Because it's clear that state sanctioned violence against black people is A-okay with you.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviole...
and then this as background infomation:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on...
Every time I hear about protests and think about people standing outside the whitehouse all I can think of is how futile it is. Especially after Occupy Wallstreet where the media did it's hardest to discredit the entire movement.
Occupy Wall Street failed to express any unified goals and demonstrated a lack of understanding of specific reasons why they felt grievance was justified. In many ways it was more of a mob and its message was lost.
But it's also difficult to claim that it does not represent a growing fear and pain felt by a fairly large number of people. An emotional plea if not a logical one. A representative government should have an ear to such things and the fact that it appears not to is about as clear a statement of purpose for OWS as I think history will ever have.
This is often the case with civil unrest of any kind. When a system for representing the needs of citizens fails to do so---whatever the reason---then by the notion that the powers of government are given by its citizenry it becomes important to create a message to show the extent and damage of this failure. There are a lot of ways to do this and people will find the ones that they feel might work. They might fail and pick methods which do not work (riots, e.g., which invite pollution of message, judgement, loss of support, and legitimate reason to oppose) and they might be forced into methods which are poor.
But I fear to live in a place where the government fails to hear these things for too long. Not individuals in government, either, but government.
Voting is not the only tool of civil will. It's supposed to be designed well enough to keep civil will from turning to less constructive tools, though.
Successful protests have leaders are not nearly as organic as they initially appear. OWS participants failed to realize this and instead sat around empathizing with each other.
But if you read analyses of people in it (take for example "The Democracy Project" by Graeber), the goal was direct action. It spawned a lot of organizing to fix problems without begging elites. Nor did they decide to become another Tea Party (flunkies to billionaires/politicians). Once they decided to do that, the state and corporate media decided it was an enemy, not a tool. Hence endlessly repeated talking points about how it "discredited itself".
>But if you read analyses of people in it (take for example "The Democracy Project" by Graeber), the goal was direct action
Of course people that participated are going to claim that action was their goal. However, the fact that they had no experience organizing people (or chose not to organize people through leadership) led them absolutely nowhere.
But some people don't even like protests because they "make them be late to work" or whatever, when they block traffic. Well guess what, the point of riots, protests and even strikes is to inconvenience to the point where change has to be made and demands listened to.
Otherwise if you just go and protest on a mountain, like the Tibetans do, nothing will ever change since you won't be inconveniencing anyone in the slightest.
Then, you were never on their side, anyway, and it makes no difference who you're angry at.
The protesters are making it very clear who they're angry at, and making it clear they're willing to escalate in the interest of altering the status quo, even if it costs them more than it costs those in power (and it always does). That's what desperation looks like.
I'm personally uncomfortable with the status quo, if the status quo has large segments of people who feel so unheard that they have to riot to get media, to get the attention of those in power, to have any sort of voice at all. Whether I agree with the tactics, or not, I recognize how much this means to so many of my fellow Americans, and I recognize that means there's something really wrong, even if I don't personally feel it in my daily life.
In short: I don't like people getting hurt. I don't like people going to jail. I don't like random acts of destruction. But, even moreso, I don't like my country stepping on the throats of ~13% of the population to maintain the privilege of a few. So, I'm gonna go to the events in my city in solidarity with the folks in Baltimore. Just like I went to the solidarity events for Michael Brown and Eric Garner. And, I'll go to the events for Larry Jackson, an unarmed black man who was gunned down by an Austin police officer, despite having committed no crime (in a rare instance of sanity, the officer has been indicted on a manslaughter charge). I'm a white, middle class, male. I don't necessarily understand all of this...but, I know I can't tell an oppressed person how to respond to their oppression.
Actually, it sounds like you understand it quite well.
How many people are you prepared to have killed on your behalf to achieve this?
The current situation with National Guard deployment is reminiscent of the setup to the Kent State shootings, almost exactly 45 years ago.
Instead of just seeing "riots are happening" the goal is for more people to ask "why are riots happening" -- with hopes of unveiling blatant injustices within our system.
That said, engaging in the conversation here is exactly a product of the riots, and exactly what is needed to effect change.
That's all despite the fact that our local coal mine has been bleeding money for years. There was no profit shown for almost a decade, they have resisted any plans for reforms or plans to sell the mine to private investors. Not to even mention that the management was hugely corrupt, consisting of family of family and friends of friends, where you could get a great position just by knowing the right people.
When it has finally reached the point where the mine could not possibly operate any further and had to be closed down, hundreds of those miners went on the streets, blocking traffic, burning tires, destroying local shops and tipping cars. As someone who lives in the same city - I cannot possibly sympathize with those people. They behaved like the worst mob, holding everyone else hostage just so they could remain in their comfy job with huge benefits.
I do understand that Baltimore is not the same. Not even remotely. But rioters who destroy other people's property are not gaining themselves any favours.
I saw the destruction caused, had 'friends' on social media (no longer, obviously) who were bragging about what they had looted. There was absolutely no aim or order to these riots, a lot of independent shops were trashed and looted, people lost livelihoods and for what.
I am acutely aware of my inherent distaste for rioting, I understand that was just one riot and they are not all the same, but it has given me a subconsciously dismissive attitude to riots as a criminal element abusing unrest to get away with robbery and assault.
It seems like you've analyzed the motives and privilege of the rioters in that case, which is exactly what you should do. Just like rioters after sports games (e.g SF Giants riots, Seattle Seahawks riots) are not OK, it sounds to me like your hometown's protests were poorly motivated and terrible.
However, just as you state here they are NOT EQUIVALENT.
Consider their privilege and motives, and it's pretty clear. That's why these Baltimore riots are important and effective and distinct.
I'm not saying people / establishments harmed in the riots deserve to be. But I am also saying the riots as an event should not be simply decried but understood.
No. Nothing changed since the last riots systemically, so of course there are more riots. We are now however raising public awareness of previously unheard injustices, and by doing so (hopefully, if our system works correctly), inducing positive change.
Riots are happening because people literally don't know what else to do. The system has failed them. The system has decided it's OK for white cops to kill and imprison and mistreat black men en masse. Very public trials aren't yielding change, poor blacks continue to be terrorized, prejudiced tickets and arrests further amplify vicious cycles of poverty. Riots are acts of desperation that get a lot of attention (for better or for worse, depends on the system, many variables are unknown).
When the system moves in response (to correct in injustice at hand) that is when the riots will stop.
(Unfortunately that means either oppression will reign or true social change will be effected.)