If Rioting is Wrong, I Don’t Want to be White

by Drew Franklin on October 20, 2014

The jokes write themselves, really. Who could expect a riot of pumpkin-wielding white people to be anything but a punchline generator? The pumpkin spice latte puns were just begging to be made.

On the other hand, to seriously engage with Saturday’s riots in Keene and Morgantown, and subject them to a thoughtful political analysis, is apparently unthinkable. Sure, we can point out the media’s disparate treatment of these white rioters versus Ferguson’s Black uprising. But this is a rather elementary observation, isn’t it?

Instead, I’ll submit that the Great Pumpkin Riots, as pointless as they appeared to be, were inherently political and subversive acts.

My first piece of evidence to support that claim was, unfortunately, taken down from Instagram just hours after it was posted. But, luckily, I left it open in my browser, and so I can still observe the scene from New Hampshire: Hundreds of young people, who have apparently seized a block full of row-houses and commandeered its porches, surround a bonfire in the street and sing their warrior cry, in that familiar sports arena cadence. “FUCK-THE-PO-LICE!”

I do believe Eazy-E would be proud. There is no political slogan that is more decidedly lumpen than the phrase popularized by NWA two decades ago. But for whatever it may lack in sophistication, Fuck the Police articulates rebellion in a language that finds enduring appeal among succeeding generations, white as well as Black.

An analysis centered on privilege will inevitably be confounded by the sight of entitled white college students flipping cars for no apparent reason. But if we center the police, the historical antagonists of the working class, the overseers of post-Reconstruction white supremacy, and the common denominator of all riots, we can begin to make sense of all this.

“It’s a rush. You’re revolting from the cops.” – Anonymous rioter, via Raw Story

The police have one job: to maintain social order through violence. In the United States, that capitalist social order is structured around property relations, which in turn are mediated by white supremacy. Whiteness, therefore, is upheld by police violence. So how does this square with the anti-police mantra of Keene’s white rioters?

Nothing forces a breakdown in conventional wisdom about the rules of the game like a good riot. Ideologues of all stripes scramble to reconcile the chaos with their essentialized notions of respectability, justice, victimhood and, of course, identity. The resultant competing narratives are invariably, laughably absurd.

This is true of Ferguson, and it was true of the massive and diverse London riots in 2011. The Pumpkin Riots are no different. Those who sought to excuse or shift blame for (but rarely justify) the arson and looting along West Florissant, because it drew attention to systemic injustice, have not hesitated to ridicule white rioters for having no good reason to be so disorderly.

But moralizing in the name of social justice is not fundamentally different from moralizing in the name of the status quo. It artificially imposes sanitized rules on a dirty game that has no rules, by its very nature. Let’s not forget that innocent people are sometimes killed in riots triggered by the noblest of causes. This is the inconvenient truth for the puritanical Left.

To the contrary, riots lack some degree of political focus and intentionality by definition. They are the rawest expression of collective rebellion, and this lack of sophisticated awareness is bound to have tragic outcomes. But their messiness hardly negates their natural political consequences.

It’s unlikely that any of the rioters in Keene or Morgantown were making a self-conscious effort to subvert their own whiteness. But if whiteness is defined, in part, by a special relationship with the police, then “fuck the police” is an implicit repudiation of that.

To be clear, white extremists also antagonize and even kill cops for reasons that have nothing to do with negating whiteness. But these political actors are explicitly propertarian, and therein lies the difference.

Enter Cliven Bundy. This white militant made himself a right-wing icon by organizing an armed militia in a protracted standoff with federal authorities, to defend his claim to ownership of the public land his cows were grazing on. Later, predictably, he outed himself as a racist and immediately fell out of favor with his Newscorp sponsors. His only mistake, as far as his mainstream supporters were concerned, was being too overtly bigoted–a lesson that some old white celebrity racists are forced to learn the hard way.

Despite the fact that they pointed assault rifles at police for hours, not one projectile of any sort was fired at the Bundy Ranch militia. This is in stark contrast to the unarmed rioters in New Hampshire and West Virginia, who encountered a militarized police response that is all too familiar to Ferguson by now. How do we account for this glaring disparity?

It’s quite simple. Cliven Bundy was protecting private property, and the rioters were destroying it.

Property destruction of this sort is a political act, whether its participants realize it or not. While looters can be said to be expropriating private property, window-smashers and arsonists are simply desecrating it. You might laugh, but property destruction for its own sake has revolutionary implications. It is both a violation of the sanctity of capitalist ownership and an infringement on the state’s monopoly on violence. The manner in which police respond is a testament to this reality.

Instead of uncritically deriding white rioters, I implore radical Leftists to be serious for a moment and consider the opportunity moments like this present for political agitation and, yes, movement building. Because riots have no rules, because they’re ideologically ambiguous, we will always encounter wholly undesirable attitudes and behaviors within them. But they nonetheless reveal a propensity for rebellion against property — and by extension, whiteness — among all kinds of people. Instead of writing off the participants on the basis of their racial identity, we should more closely examine their content and assess their potential for political education.

I believe the pumpkin rioters show more promise than we’re giving them credit for. “Fuck the police” is a message we can all get behind, a rare example of commonality between white suburbia and the hood that can be cultivated. We have a long way to go to make it substantial, but that slogan represents the best shot we have at a united lumpen front. Let’s take it. After all, tear gas tastes the same no matter where you come from.