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There is, undoubtedly, a stigma that surrounds rioting and protesting in the United States. If you turn on the radio, you can hear music glorifying riots, talk show hosts discussing recent developments in large metropolis areas, and the collection of opinions surrounding police brutality, the use of military force, and the freedom of speech. In the midst of negative finger pointing at the radicals and crazies that initiate riots, the root cause of the problem is often lost and the public categorizes the group involved in a riot based on the most obvious commonality; race, gender, ethnicity, or other social signifiers. But, the fact remains that riots are a call for help and although they may not be completely productive, they are not always counterproductive.
The American landscape has changed drastically over the last 100 years, and most notably with the inception of the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Rights Movements of the 1970s. When minority Americans started to gain a voice in the public eye, the scales of social justice started to tip considerably. Although the “appearance of fairness” was granted under the law, a generation that was accustomed to treating certain groups of people with disrespect continued to live and breed. It wasn’t until the famous riot and trial of Rodney King in Los Angeles of 1992, that the public started to realize just how engrained this discrimination really was in our society. Although the riots were unproductive, in terms of economic cost, they really paved the way for a new comprehension of how skewed the social system had become and what measures people could take to enact changes .
Today, police brutality is a common term that we hear in the media. The advancement in thinking, on behalf of society as a whole, has brought America to the point where police brutality is an overused and abused term, and often overused for the wrong reasons. The backlash of the riots and protests that have brought society to this point have steered the public eye in the wrong direction, concerning people more with race relations than with the actual problem at hand. The riots of 1992 in Los Angeles were not about race. They were about unfair treatment. There were different races and ethnicities involved in riots of 1992, but because of the media exposure that Rodney King gained and the easy accessibility of a race defense, the problem took on a new meaning .
This problem that still exists today is the unfair treatment of minorities, but what has been blurred is the line defining who the minorities are in America. The minorities are not just African American or Latino. The minorities are the lower class people of America who don’t have the power, the wealth, or the prestige to stand out above the crowd. People can only suppress their anger with a system for so long before they decide that it is time to take action and it is through collective behavior that lower class people find strength.
The collective behavior of rioters and protestors has helped raise awareness of the need to practice social equality, however it has had some detrimental impacts on the minority population. It has sent a message that this type of behavior is acceptable and it has also brightened the spotlight on the minority population. Fear is never a good way to gain cooperation among fellow human beings and the overused and abused race defense has started to desensitize Americans to acts of bigotry, further dividing groups and tension between races. The claim that unfair treatment is received only by specific race groups is losing credit, and the new form of productive social change seems to be the convergence of diverse groups towards a common goal.
References
A&E Television Networks, LLC. (2016). This Day in History. Retrieved from History: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/riots-erupt-in-los-angeles
Carl, J. D. (2013). Think Social Problems 2013. Pearson.
