Race riots in France, Britain and the United States

Abraham H. Miller:

The French government’s report on the wave of Muslim riots that has swept across France has not yet been written, but if history is a guide, the report’s conclusions will be indistinguishable from the American Kerner Commission report on the Black urban riots of the Sixties and Lord Scarman's report on London’s 1981 Brixton riots.

In each case, the explanation of riots fell under the spell of liberal mythology. Slogans, oft repeated and contemptuously vacuous, became both explanation of and justification for the American and British riots. “Alienation,” “relative deprivation,” “discrimination” and other ostensibly sophisticated utterances were bandied about as if they had been discovered to be the causal explanations of the riots.

Tens of millions of dollars poured into research attempting to show this in a meaningful scientific sense proved ultimately to be an exercise in government waste as well as intellectual futility.

If riots took place in “poor” neighborhoods, then poverty caused the riots. The demographic composition of a rioter’s environment was parsed to become an explanation of riot behavior. Social scientists conveniently confused description with explanation and, worse, speculation with causation.

Ignored in all of this was that poor neighborhoods of many racial and ethnic minorities do not explode in riots. Appalachian whites, for example, often live in conditions blow that of African Americans and are not out in the streets rampaging.

Historically most riots in America--it is worth noting-- saw whites rampaging through and pillaging Black neighborhoods.

Ultimately the Kerner Commission ignored that the urban riots most certainly did not take place in areas where anti-Black discrimination, poverty and deprivation where at its worst. Otherwise the Black riots would have lit up the night skies of Jackson and Birmingham and not those of Los Angeles and Detroit.

In Brixton, the image of the American ghetto and the explanation of the American Black riots were reassembled for a London neighborhood and a British audience. As someone who visited and studied Brixton, I found it a multi-racial neighborhood not an American-style ghetto. Lord Scarman, who authored the report for the British government on the Brixton riots, asserted that racist behavior by the police and societal discrimination led to the violence there.

Discrimination is always with us. Riots are not. Riots do not take place where discrimination is at its worst. Scarman, like Kerner before him, found discrimination and he found riots. In a mentality of night follows day and therefore causes it, Scarman and Kerner both concluded that discrimination caused riots.

Scarman showed little sympathy for the police whose jobs were made far and away more dangerous by the continual and escalating crime and violence in Brixton perpetrated by both Black immigrants and white nihilists.

Police abuse was described as racially motivated without further explanation. Black crime and violence, Scarman asserted, needed to be both examined and understood against the social complexity of discrimination. Police behavior, however, simply needed to be labeled

Nor did Scarman really engage the motivations of white youth who joined rampaging Blacks at the Brixton triangle; youth whose motivations appeared more like those of college panty raiders and soccer rioters than motivations of victims of racial abuse and social alienation. These white nihilists joined the riot and later basked in their own behavior by announcing, “We want riots, not jobs.”

The one demographic factor that everyone knew was not an explanation of riots is ethnicity. You could no more say that Blacks rioted and thus being Black was a cause of rioting than you could say that Muslims rioted and being Muslim was a cause of rioting, albeit you could allege this about every other demographic characteristic rioters possessed. From a scientific perspective, both types of demographic characteristics when transformed into explanation are equally meaningless. The former is only more obvious because it is politically incorrect, while the latter takes on meaning because it resonates with liberal ideology that all behavior is socially induced. Liberals routinely see people being swept up in some sociological tide that is beyond their abilities to swim against.

What has been important in every contemporary explanation of riots and what will be important—I believe—in the forthcoming French report is that the rioters, not the people they burned, shot and killed, are the real victims. The rioters will be depicted as victims of virulent French racism that resulted in their unemployment and lack of acculturation.

There will be no meaningful discussion that this generation of Islamic youth has been told not to acculturate, and many have followed those exhortations. There will be no discussion that in post-industrial France, people who remain on the margins of acculturation generally have neither the educational skills nor the social skills to navigate in the world of the contemporary workplace.

After all, there was no meaningful discussion in the Kerner Commission report that children growing up with a single parent are more likely to be impoverished, less likely to finish school and more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. It was not politically correct to discuss either pregnancy or the maintenance of the family as consequences of ethnic culture and individual choice. The Kerner Commission refused to look beyond white racism to explain the complexity of the urban riots.

The French riots will be looked at no differently, for France's left intellectuals are also unlikely to author a riot report that will state that one chooses to enter a riot, to hurl stones at the police and innocent motorists, or to set fire to a woman on crutches. Individual volition does not play well in riot reports, which appear to be written to condemn society, not the rioters.

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