Americans Need to Stop Seeking Comfort in Feel-Good Riot Stories

Today marks one month since George Floyd was killed by four Minneapolis police officers. The uprisings that resulted from Floyd’s murder continue to rage across the country, and will likely continue for some time. In a number of cases, they’ve had significant positive results.

Despite their continuation, news coverage of the uprisings has significantly died down. In the slightly quieter moment in which we find ourselves, it is useful to take stock of what we can (and should) learn from the past month, including what we can discover about common reactions to the protests. Since I study the history of rhetoric, I think it is useful to look for historical parallels from which to draw insight.

The most obvious parallel, in my mind, is the Los Angeles riots, which were a reaction to the acquittal of the four police officers who ferociously assaulted Rodney King in the first widely-circulated police brutality video in America. The circumstances were obviously different, but there are nevertheless illuminating similarities, including what I describe below as “feel-good riot stories.”

Despite being the victim of a nearly 15-minute assault at the hands of police, King was dismayed by the protests in his name. On May 1, 1992, three days into the LA Riots, King gave a press conference in which he famously appealed for an end to the uprising: “Can we all get along?”

Rodney King’s press conference did not stop the LA Riots — they carried on for two more days. But his plea is still widely quoted because, after all, isn’t getting along what we should all want?

As a professor of rhetoric, I study how people interpret and attempt to affect the world through language. Politicians, for example, often tell intensely personal anecdotes about blue collar supporters in Iowa or sick kids in Ohio to convince voters they understand “bread-and-butter issues.”

Viewed through the lens of rhetoric, King’s call for everyone to “get along” was an effort to affect the world through an appeal to peace and unity.

It was also a diversion.

King was undoubtedly sincere in his desire for peace and unity, but his press conference is a prime example of what I call a “feel-good riot story” — a widely-shared story or anecdote calling for unity and harmony, which pops up in moments of significant social unrest.

Feel-good riot stories are generic — that is, the specific details change to meet the unique historical circumstances, but the form of feel-good riot stories is relatively stable. They are a common kind of response to the destabilization of social unrest. Feel-good riot stories assert our common humanity in trying times and bring us all together — to “get along.”

At the same time, however, feel-good riot stories allow observers — particularly people who aren’t directly affected by social unrest — to look away from the actual causes of protests and riots. They provide cover for people who just want everyone to get along without having to grapple with systemic injustice, institutional racism, and police brutality.

Our media landscape has changed dramatically in the three decades since the LA Riots. But once again, the media — traditional and social — has been filled with “feel-good riot stories” of the sort King has (unfortunately) come to represent.

Police officers have been hugging and kneeling with protestors in Portland (OR), Fayetteville (NC), Coral Gables (FL), and Los Angeles (CA), among other places; police chiefs in Atlanta, Houston, and elsewhere were affectionately profiled for publicly sympathizing with protestors; children made artisanal #blacklivesmatter signs; contrite celebrities shared #onelove and #blackouttuesday hashtags and (awkwardly) took responsibility for making a better world; and so on. They’re comforting reminders of our shared humanity in a troubling time.

They’re also — now as ever — a diversion from the actual problems raised by the protests.

For people who are focused on the feel-good riot stories, it is easy to miss the persistence of systemic injustice that caused the protesting in the first place.

In Houston, for example, less than two days after Chief Art Acevedo paraded through the streets, meeting with protestors, he faced intensifying criticism because his officers were involved in multiple acts of brutality, both before and during their efforts to put down the protests.

In Atlanta, soon after Chief Erika Shields assembled with protestors, listening sympathetically to their concerns, she had to fire two officers and discipline three others for brutalizing two college students from local HBCUs and destroying their car. Although Shields acknowledged that the officers had unnecessarily introduced the violence into the situation, she also called the charges filed against them by the Fulton County District Attorney “a tsunami of political jockeying during an election year.”

Less than two weeks later, Shields also resigned after Atlanta police killed 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in what Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms described as an unjustified use of deadly force.

The stories about Acevedo and Shields and other good people doing good things may indeed be genuine. But they don’t solve systemic problems. Likewise, the more general calls for “getting along” don’t solve the problems at the heart of the unrest. They disguise the fundamental problems by asserting that we can heal the world by just being kinder to one another.

More specifically, feel-good riot stories provide comfort and diversion for people who aren’t directly affected by the police brutality or social uprisings. They make it possible — and seemingly logical — for people to wonder how activists can demand defunding police, for example, when so many police are nice, kind, thoughtful people. They provide cover for people who really just want an excuse to ask, “Why don’t people want us to get along?”

To be sure, getting along is a desirable goal. But in case after case, feel-good riot stories turn out to be either (1) fleeting exceptions in otherwise disturbing patterns of behavior, or (2) utterly inconsequential for advancing social change. And social change is where our attention should be directed if we ever hope to achieve peace and unity.

Nearly 30 years on, we can still learn important lessons the uprising in South Los Angeles. Among them, it is well past time for people to stop seeking comfort in feel-good riot stories. It is well past time for us to stop seeking diversions that allow us to look away from the systemic injustice that drives social unrest and rebellion. It’s well past time for us to assert our own humanity by — at the very least — sitting with the uncomfortable realization that systemic injustice persists, at least in part, because we insist on attempting to affect the world by telling ourselves stories that make us feel good instead of making us feel committed to justice.