Street rebellion, p.28
Street Rebellion, page 28
Race and the White Riot
Race is a significant element of this study insofar as histories of racial violence are woven into the fabric of social movements for justice, contentious protest, and policing. In chapter six, race is particularly central to discussions of decolonization and movements in South Africa. But there is a great deal more that can and should be said about race as it relates to violent protest. As I discussed in the introduction, the “race riot” has become its own term, and one that has meant a variety of things in different contexts over time. In some senses, the riot itself has become a fundamentally raced concept.12 In the black bloc study presented in chapter five, specific discussion of race is sparse, but that should not indicate that racial dynamics are absent. As sociologist George Weddington has pointed out, movement studies have often boxed race into its own category of analysis separate from otherwise “race-neutral” analyses, whereas in reality, race permeates the social fabric of the U.S.13
Especially considering recent instances of violence in Black-led racial justice protests being blamed on white anarchists, it is both highly relevant and also fraught to center a study of riots in the U.S. on mostly white anarchists. Part of the decision to focus there had to do with the political import of this perspective; another aspect had to do with my capabilities as a researcher and the possibilities of conducting robust qualitative research as someone with trusted connections in anarchist milieus. In South Africa, my outside position as a U.S. American may have enabled me to partially bypass intra-country racial tensions, while it probably created additional barriers in other ways. The decision to focus on student movements was in part due to my experiences as a graduate student labor organizer, who had in the past taken part in campus occupations in the U.S., which gave me some legible common ground with interviewees.
While the majority of U.S. interviewees were white, several were not, which kept me from digging into a deeper racialized analysis of the “white riot,” as Joe Strummer and AK Thompson have put it—that is, the will on the part of some middle-class white people to riot alongside Black uprisings—since I did not want to erase the experiences of non-white interviewees. At the same time, there were not enough non-white interviewees to merit comparison groups. In the South African case, the overall sample of interviews was fairly small, and I did not have the background there to venture in-depth racial analyses. Nevertheless, there were differences along racial lines in both U.S. and South Africa studies that are worth mentioning.
Activists I spoke to in South Africa, most of whom are Black, tended to describe a euphoric sensation during violent protests less often and less centrally than did interviewees in the U.S., most of whom were white, instead speaking more to feelings of humanization and catharsis in the face of repression. At the same time, feelings of humanization and catharsis were also present in U.S. interview responses. In the U.S., only three interviewees are Black, which is an extremely small sample, but of those three activists, two of them described heightened effervescent feelings in substantially similar ways as white participants in the black bloc, while the third was more matter-of-fact about their experiences and affectively less heightened when discussing riotous moments. Two white interviewees were also emotively nonchalant about their experiences with riots.
While there were differences within groups, it seemed the difference between nationality came into play more than did race within each national study. The heightened and cathartic experiences relayed by white South African student activists who had participated in protests that included rock-throwing and fighting with police resonated closely with the experiences of Black and Coloured South African Fallists, just as the experiences of Black U.S. anarchists was in many ways similar to that of white anarchists when it came to the heightened sensation of the riotous space. Still, each sample was far too small to say more, and the study was not designed to answer comparative questions like this. While there has been a wealth of research into “race riots” and urban rebellions against racial violence, research specifically on racial composition and experiences within contemporary protests and riots is an important area for further study.
Of course, in the face of resurgent fascism, “white riot” can also take on a very different meaning. The far-right insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was often referred to in the media as a riot, and groups like the Proud Boys have been increasingly engaged in aggressive public demonstrations and pogrom-like attacks. Precisely these sorts of demonstrations have been significant to the rise of political fascism in the past. Counter-violence confronting the far-right from antifascists or “antifa” groups has also been a source of some unarmed street violence in protests in recent years, as well as entrenched arguments over these actions’ legitimacy and effect.14 In the introduction, I distinguish between pogroms and riots based on the direction of social power and violence flowing through a crowd. That the police nearly always take sides against the antifascists and in some cases even collaborate directly with fascist protesters in such encounters clearly demonstrates the institutional violence behind rightwing demonstrations and the anti-institutional violence behind those who confront them.15 But the January 6 attack admittedly bears elements of both. The studies in this book are not designed to examine the experiences of racial or religious supremacists and fascists during riots. Those groups’ political ideology, violence targeting the marginalized and vulnerable, and disposition towards the concept of authority—all of which are starkly different from those I interviewed—makes me hesitant to comment further based on this research, though it is conceivable that some of the findings apply.
The Class Struggle
Economic class background is another area that many interviewees spoke to which I chose not to make a central part of this analysis. There were many discussions of class among Fallists, both in terms of individual class and the class association of university spaces, which I discuss in chapter six. But there was significantly more to it than I felt able to speak to, especially given my position as a foreign researcher. One of the most significant limitations of that study in particular was my inability to interview activists from Tshwane University of Technology and other technical colleges, who activists almost universally named as the originators of the student movement, and whose protest actions were consistently the most physically contentious. There was a stark class difference in engagement with the official Fallist movements between activists at the institutions from which I interviewed people—the ones that received media attention and thus the ones I as an outsider had been aware of—and the activists at less prestigious and poorer institutions, who typically come from poorer backgrounds, and in many cases were restricted from participating in physical or virtual organizing with the former group on that basis.
The application of Fanon’s theories to class in black blocs is a central theme in one of the most prominent works on black bloc rioting, AK Thompson’s 2010 book, Black Bloc, White Riot. Thompson focuses of the cultural alienation of white middle-class suburban life—the ways in which “the category ‘white middle-class political being’ is experienced … as a contradiction in terms.”16 I had been aware of Thompson’s analysis, and class did indeed emerge as a topic in some of my interviews with black bloc participants—mostly as interviewees relayed their personal histories. After analyzing interview responses, I chose not to follow these threads in this study. Among the interlocutors in the U.S. case, many interviewees were not from middle-class backgrounds (some were from working-class and poor backgrounds, and at least one grew up wealthy). Although I had some stories and reflections that related to class positionality, and there is certainly analytical hay to be made there—riots are most frightening for those of us with something to lose, and black bloc anarchists are perhaps an exception, since those among them with something to lose are often trying to lose having something to lose—I did not feel as though the subject had enough qualitative data for inclusion as a main focus.
Class struggle is another area that does not get much treatment this book. It shows up in chapter five in the discussion of alienation, through the connection between workers’ struggles and student struggles in chapter six, and implicitly through many of the theorists I deploy and because everyone I interviewed to a person identified as an anti-capitalist. It is also implied in the critical discussion of the role that professionalized non-profit movement organizations can play in moderating and attempting to govern resistance. And in the broadest view, this study shares with Marx attention to what Arendt calls “the very basis of leftist humanism,” namely the idea that people can create themselves.17 However, I do not utilize a historical or materialist frame to understand riots and violent protest—for something closer to that, I encourage readers to see Joshua Clover’s 2016 book, Riot. Strike. Riot.
Repression
“It’s amazing how police influence the direction protests take.” That quote had been relayed by the South African activist I interviewed who was most critical of violent protest actions. She was lamenting how many protests that could have—and in her view, should have—remained nonviolent turned violent as a direct result of police violence. Among South African activists who were more enthusiastic about their experiences with confrontational tactics, the overwhelming sentiment was still that in most cases protests escalate to riots because of actions taken by police or security forces. In the U.S., where most interviewees discussed actions in which they showed up ready to escalate, in some cases with the explicit intention of rioting, many still described initially coming to black bloc tactics following experiences of being assaulted by police during peaceful demonstrations. As one interviewee put it: “I was very aware that nonviolent protest, if you’re doing anything actually disruptive, it gets met with violence if they want, and the narrative will become that the protests were violent no matter what you do.” Research on this phenomenon has demonstrated that the best predictor of police repression is how threatening a protest is deemed to be by authorities.18 Historian and law professor Elizabeth Hinton, meanwhile, has shown that racist police violence is a direct precursor to Black rebellions in the U.S.19 And, in the quote above we see how nonviolent protest is often treated as though it were violent when it is sufficiently disruptive, and then called violent by authorities after the fact in order to justify the repression; a sort of reverse backfiring mechanism, if such a term makes any sense.
A comrade of mine during Occupy Wall Street once remarked to me that nothing radicalizes a person quite like getting cracked over the head by a riot cop. Qualitative interviews in this study indicate that police repression is variously responsible for: 1) the escalation of many protests into riots, and 2) the radicalization of activists who experience police violence during nonviolent protest. How the police behave is responsible for a great deal of what happens in protests at a granular level too, from march routes and duration to tone, affect, and physical escalation. Broad research exists in this area, mainly focusing on categorizing and describing types of repression, and outlining the militarization of police forces in recent decades.20
Sociologists Jennifer Earl and Sarah Soule identify two main factors that predict police violence against protests: first, the police anxiety around maintaining control, and second, fear of getting hurt.21 While this is a useful starting point, many anecdotal counter examples do not appear to fit, specifically when police initiate violence against non-confrontational crowds, which if anything raises the chances both of police losing control of a situation and their getting hurt. In addition to their social role as internal defenders of a political and economic regime, police training has been increasingly oriented toward a “warrior mentality” that encourages and glorifies the use of violence.22 One study found that police in India learn to orient their moral compass toward violence to such a degree that they can torture detainees while believing they are ultimately upholding human rights.23 And, of course, Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow teaches us that the police and the criminal justice system are through one lens simply contemporary enforcers of a racial caste system, which clarifies a great deal about how police forces—institutions that in the U.S. evolved from Southern slave patrols—view social justice protests today.24
There remains a great deal we do not know about how police strategize and experience what movement scholars call repression. Police and military forces study riots in order to hone suppression techniques and improve command and control capabilities during popular unrest, but much of this material is not publicly available.25 There are obvious barriers to researching police tactics in protests, and much of what the public learns comes via direct experience or leaked documents.26 There also exist activist manuals and training materials designed to help participants understand and prepare for riotous protests.27 An interesting area for future study may be to approach demonstrators and authorities as both separate forces and as an interconnected dynamic. In a recent foray into this type of research, sociologist Chloe Haimson examined interactive engagements between Black Lives Matter protests and police regimes, focusing on how authorities try to enforce control and the ways protesters evade and push boundaries.28
***
As for opportunities for future research on the dynamics of riotous resistance, for better or worse, there is no reason to believe there will be a shortage of emergent case studies in the near future. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, police departments rushed to stock up on riot gear. When storefronts began boarding up their windows, it wasn’t to keep the coronavirus out.29 One of the few economists who predicted the collapse of the housing market in the early 2000s recently advised that we are headed for food riots in major U.S. cities.30 As inequality worsens and the ecologies that sustain life are consumed for profit, the wealthiest people see pitchforks on the horizon. War games at the Pentagon now include training exercises for a youth-led civil rebellion.31 Street rebellion is a part of our political moment. We would do well to take seriously its full range of possibilities.
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1. Michael Loadenthal, The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 23.
2. See World Bank GDP per capita data: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD.
3. See Janet Box-Steffensmeir, John R. Freeman, Matthew P. Hitt, and Jon C. W. Pevehouse, Time Series Analysis for the Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
4. CounterPower, Organizing for Autonomy: History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2020), 12–14.
5. My travel was made possible by the Stanley Prostrednik Memorial Scholarship for graduate students.
6. Kathleen Blee and Verta Taylor, “Semi-Structured Interviewing in Social Movement Research,” in Methods of Social Movement Research, eds., Bert Klandermans and Suzanne Staggenborg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 92–117.
7. Vivian Shaw, “‘Extreme Pressure’: Gendered Negotiations of Violence and Vulnerability in Japanese Anti-Racism Movements,” Critical Asian Studies 52, no. 1 (2020): 109–26.
8. Tammy Kovich, “Gender at the Barricades: The Politics and Possibilities of the Riot,” Coils of the Serpent 7 (2020): 113–45.
9. E.g., Javier Auyero, Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Francis Dupuis-Déri, Who’s Afraid of the Black Bloc: Anarchy in Action Around the World, trans. Lazer Lederhendler (Oakland: PM Press, 2014); Shon Meckfessel, Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance (Oakland: AK Press, 2016).
10. Kovich, “Gender at the Barricades,” 138.
11. See Barbara Alpern Engel, “Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I,” The Journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (1997): 696–721; Lynne Taylor, “Food Riots Revisited,” Journal of Social History 30, no. 2 (1997): 483–96; E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136.
12. Raven Rakia, “Black Riot,” The New Inquiry, November 14, 2013, https://thenewinquiry.com/black-riot.
13. George Weddington, “Political Ontology and Race Research: A Response to ‘Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives,’” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 2 (2019): 278–88.
14. See Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2017).
15. For example, see Erik Ortiz, “‘Disturbing’ texts between Oregon police and far-right group prompt investigation,” NBC News, February 15, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disturbing-texts-between-oregon-police-far-right-group-prompts-investigation-n972161.
16. AK Thompson, Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (Oakland: AK Press, 2010), 20.
