As race riots tore through cities across Britain recently, Brits everywhere seemed to feel that, like the proverbial popular film you are assured would soon come to a theatre near you, this dreadful bedlam would equally soon be visited upon their own. And it was. So pervasively had these riots spread.
Race riots are not an odd or rare phenomenon. They have broken out far and wide across cultures and eras throughout human history, all the way from the Indian Subcontinent to the New World and from Africa to Europe.
But there are race riots and there are race riots — those driven by nativism, which at heart is fear of the other, a social poison that in time triggers culture wars, normalises racial hatred (a sentiment for which social reformers are yet to find an antidote), and those by persecuted people driven by anger at discrimination, inequality, segregation, poverty and other grievances.
And that alone makes these two types of riots dialectically opposed to one another — not withstanding then President Donald Trump’s observation at a press conference in August 2017, which had it that there were “very fine people on both sides” in the Charlottsville, Va., clashes between white supremacists and those with the gumption to stand against them, an observation that seemed to assign moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those protesting against the venom that hate secretes into the bloodstream of society.
Waiting for an excuse
As is well known by now, the recent race riots in Britain — clearly not the first of their kind to break out there in recent decades — came after a stabbing attack that led to the death of three children in Southport, a seaside town less than 20 miles from Liverpool, where the suspect, one Axel Rudakabana, 17, is said to be a British citizen born in Cardiff, Wales, to immigrant parents from Rwanda.
Truth be told, the attack could’ve been committed by someone other than this kid and occurred elsewhere in the country, and the riots would still have taken place anyhow, for already there had been fire in the blood of the rioters waiting for an excuse to have it lit.
Indeed, soon after the tragic stabbing of the three children hit the news, rioters began assaulting hotels housing asylum seekers, throwing bricks and Molotov cocktail bombs at mosques and marching in the streets hollering racist anti-immigrant slogans and demanding, “We want our country back”.
It didn’t take long for the riots to spread to the streets of other cities in Britain — and the grievance that underpinned their spread was, at the end of the day, nothing more and nothing less than racial animus, namely opposition to the presence in these rioters’ midst of non-White folks, folks who ironically were these rioters’ own fellow citizens, perhaps even their own neighbours and colleagues, with roots in Britain going back at least three generations, folks whose only sin was that they were people of colour.
To call these rioters “protesters”, as some news outlets both in the US and in Britain have done, is wrong — unless you believe that they have the right to protest against the colour of your skin, your ethnic background and your religious affiliation.
Call them instead, I say, by what people who study, write about and are conversant with the constitution of personality of rioters like that: Psychologically disturbed, underachieving individuals alienated from their culture — and culture is shared meaning if it’s nothing else — who sublimate their loss of self-esteem, inadequacies and insecurities through the code of the bully.
And do by all means call “protesters” those other, brave Brits who also took to the streets, in this case to hold up placards with reassuring slogans such as, “Immigrants are welcome, racists are not”.
Acts of mayhem
The word “riot”, along with the term “race riot”, has always gotten a bad press, for it always evokes in our minds the image of rioters looting, burning, destroying, killing and committing other acts of mayhem.
In other words, there we see them as modern-day Guy Fawkes engaged in violent offences against public order. But we need to distinguish between rioters who hail from long neglected, discriminated-against communities whose alienation has reached a critical mass, where, as Martin Luther King put it, “rioting is the language of the unheard”, and rioters motivated by the need to impose on society the hegemonic role that white supremacists demand for themselves in society.
In short, the difference between the violence committed by the one and the other is similar to the difference between the violence committed by the slave to break his chains and the violence committed the slave-master to subdue him.
There are, I say, race riots and there are race riots. And being aware of the dialectical tension that can sometimes separate them enables us to guard against equating Southport with Ferguson.
— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile
