If Your Goal Is to Eliminate Racism, Then Rioting Is Counterproductive
A Response to Those Who Say, “Let it Burn”
What’s troubled me the most during this past week has not been the sight of rioters, looters, and insurrectionists ravaging our country. It has been the ones who are encouraging their behavior.
Last Friday, Mark A. Weiss, an editor of The Polis, published his criticism of nonviolent protest:
No options, no progress. That is the unfortunate reality of the oppressed person of color today. You will have to forgive me . . . for not feeling a modicum of sympathy for Target’s lost profits, or even a city on fire. Let it burn.
Weiss claims that nonviolent protests yield ‘no progress’ and that such circumstances justify setting ‘a city on fire.’ Let us examine that which has led him to such a vile conclusion.
Weiss’ first objection to nonviolent protests is that they receive criticism: he recounts the denunciation of nonviolent activist Colin Kapernick by right-wing political commentator Tomi Lahren. In an interview on The Daily Show, Lahren said that Kapernick “went about [protesting in] the wrong way.” This prompted the host, Trevor Noah, to ask, “What is the right way?”
“Here’s a black man in America [Kaepernick] who says ‘I don’t know how to get a message across,’ ” explains Noah. “If I march in the streets, people say I’m a thug. If I go out and I protest, people say that it’s a riot . . . . What is the right way for a black person to get attention in America?” According to Weiss, “[Lahren] never directly answered Noah’s question. But that in itself,” he says, “is enough of an answer.” In other words, every form of demonstration — even nonviolent protest — is met by criticism. Ergo, people of color have ‘no options’ other than resorting to violent rioting, looting, and insurrection.
There’s just one problem with this logic: it features the false assumption that the right way to demonstrate would not be subjected to criticism. This is an unreasonable standard since nearly every protest is criticized. Instead, to determine whether a protest is done in the right way, we should consider (1) the validity of the criticism against it and (2) whether it achieves its stated objectives.
The fact that people criticized nonviolent direct action, the kind of activism championed by MLK, does not automatically mean that participants of nonviolent direct action were protesting in the wrong way. Instead, advocates of these demonstrations considered the criticism and responded to it by correctly explaining why it was invalid. MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail is an eloquent example of such a response.
Furthermore, contrary to what many on the Left believe, nonviolent direct action actually works. In his recent study on the subject, Dr. Omar Wasow (2020) of Princeton University found that “[s]trategies that try to appeal to persuadable members of the majority, like nonviolent civil disobedience, are expected, on average, to generate more sympathetic coverage of subordinate group claims” (p. 1).
Contrast this with violent rioting, looting, arson, and insurrection. As I will discuss, the criticisms against these actions are valid. But not only is violence wrong, Dr. Wasow’s study also shows that violent demonstrations are in fact counterproductive to the demonstrators’ own objectives.
Public Opinion on the “Most Important Problem,” 1950 to 1979
Public opinion polling from 1950 to 1979 shows that a plurality of Americans viewed “civil rights” as the “most important problem” in the mid-1960s at the height of nonviolent civil disobedience. The rise of violent activism, however, caused attention for civil rights to decrease in exchange for an increase in attention for “social control.”
Using the data from the graph above, along with the data from election results and term frequencies in news articles, Wasow developed a model of differing media and political responses to nonviolent and violent activism:
Model of How Activist Agenda Seeding Influences Media and Politics
Thus, the evidence shows that nonviolent protesters conveyed their message effectively by shifting the national focus onto the issue of “rights” whereas violent activism inadvertently caused the national focus to settle on “riots” and “disorder” instead of the message it sought to deliver. The fatal flaw in violent activism is that it makes the issue of the messenger more important than the message. When looters rob and vandalize a Target store, the issue of looting overshadows any messages about ensuring justice for George Floyd or solving the problem of systemic racism.
Weiss’ second objection to nonviolent protests is really more of an objection to those who advocate for nonviolence: Weiss interestingly quotes MLK when he says that such advocates are “ ‘more devoted to “order” than to justice.’ ” I say ‘interestingly’ because this is a major perversion of MLK’s “beautifully-written takedown of the white moderate who demands order in the face of injustice” (Weiss). The white moderate that MLK speaks of is one who is opposed to nonviolent direct action, not one who is opposed to violent riots and insurrections.
I agree with MLK that we should not be satisfied with maintaining order at the expense of justice; however, his point was that we should support just action even when it disrupts order. On the other hand, rioting, looting, and insurrection are rightly condemned for disrupting order because they are unjust actions. They violate the fundamental moral principle of respecting another person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. “I have consistently preached,” wrote MLK (1963), “that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends” (p. 9).
To eliminate racism in America, we need to have a discussion that explores the ways to identify it, discover where it exists, and determine strategies to stop it. Unfortunately, riots and insurrections necessarily sideline these discussions since they are an injustice that threatens the lives and livelihoods of countless innocent people. The sooner the rioting ends, the sooner we can return to the discussion.
If your goal is to eliminate racism, then do not cheer on the burning. Condemn the rioters, the looters, and the insurrectionists because their actions are counterproductive to the dream of liberty and justice for all.
References
MLK, (1963, August). Letter from Birmingham Jail. Retrieved from https://swap.stanford.edu/20141218230016/http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/kingweb/popular_requests/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf
Wasow, O. (2020, May). Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting. American Political Science Review. doi:10.1017/S000305542000009X
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