Don’t Believe the Hype on Milwaukee: It’s Never “Just a Riot.”
I was on a family trip yesterday, so I missed the news about Milwaukee’s riots when it first broke. But when I heard what happened, I did what people do when they need to get up to speed. I checked Twitter.
The first thing I saw were tweets criticizing people for “rioting in their own streets, burning down their own hood’, and looting their own stores.”
As I read them, I thought, “Really? At this late date, people are still framing these events as senseless acts of violence? Come on man.”
Sometimes, I can underestimate how short American’s memories really are. So for my fellow citizens who need it, here’s a quick lesson: it’s never just a riot.
Towards the end of the Civil Rights movement, riots swept the nation. Newark, Detroit, and Watts were all engulfed in the fervor. On the heels of the passage of the most progressive civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, black people appeared to be angrier than ever (and in the liberal West and tolerant Northeast of all places!). The nation was baffled. To get to the bottom of these uprisings, the federal government appointed the Kerner Commission.
They were tasked with finding the answers to three basic questions about the riots: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?”
The commission found ‘white racism’ and the ‘racial ghetto’ where chiefly to blame for the explosive conditions that sparked the riots.
“Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment” read the report. “White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” it continued. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.”
The Kerner Commission shows us that what initially appeared to be senseless riots were actually profound expressions of frustration. And nearly 25 years later, America would receive the same lesson.
In 1992, the Los Angeles Riot ripped through LA county. There were 55 deaths, over 2,000 injuries, 11,000 arrests, and 1 billion dollars in property damage. Again, the nation was in shock, but again, as the dust settled, the causal issues were made clear.
The city was pushed “to the bursting point by urban neglect and rampant, unchecked police violence,” reads The Nation magazine. “It was the 45 percent unemployment-rate of African-American males in South Central. It was Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and his violent programs of police enforcement like the infamous Operation Hammer. It was deindustrialization and the loss of union jobs.” Here, upon closer inspection, we see the people labeled as angry and violent, are revealed as oppressed and marginalized.
Nearly another quarter century later, history would repeat — this time in Baltimore. Last summer, after decades of police brutality, black residents in Baltimore had enough — they protested and destroyed property for six days. But yet again, the community was vindicated.
Just last week, a report released by the Justice Department found that for years, Baltimore police “routinely violated the constitutional rights of citizens, used excessive force, and discriminated against African Americans.” (All of that is enough to make anybody want to burn down a CVS.)
Fast forward to yesterday’s events. With all this history, there is no way we can look at Milwaukee’s unrest out of the greater context. Just last year, NPR ran an article on the city titled, “Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People?” They found it was a combination of too “few resources, and an educational and criminal justice system that is often stacked against” black residents. And sure enough, as time passes, these underlying issues will come up to the fore of public debate as well.
Looking back over the last 50 years of the black freedom struggle, it becomes clear: black people don’t riot without reason. They mediate, they lobby, they protest, and they plead. They make their case however they know how. But after trying all that, when things still don’t change, sometimes tensions spill over. Even the most peaceful amongst us can understand this. After all, it was Martin Luther King Jr himself who said it best: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
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