The Rioters Are Not the Problem — We Are
Without the police brutalizing and murdering George Floyd, Minneapolis would not be on fire. But if we listen to the protestors chanting “No Justice, No Peace” and carrying signs that said “Stop Killing Black People,” Floyd’s murder was not the match that lit the flame. The failure to bring Floyd’s murderer to justice was.
The distinction may seem merely academic, but it’s not. Floyd’s murder was at the hands of a ruthless and pitiless police officer, egged on (or at the very least ignored) by three of his equally pitiless colleagues. That is a problem of four bad police.
But having seen damning video from three angles that shows the officers ignoring Floyd’s pleas for more than 5 minutes to let him breathe, the Hennepin County Attorney General has, until today, failed to arrest or charge the officer(s) involved. The police killed a helpless man — not in a split-second bad decision, but in a long, drawn-out, deliberate act. And while they lost their jobs for the murder, they were allowed to walk free for nearly a week. That’s a system problem, and it’s one that’s played out time and time again across the country throughout our history.
What the protestors in Minneapolis — as well as Memphis, Louisville, Denver, New York City, Los Angeles, and Phoenix — have repeatedly said is that they are protesting a racist system. This system not only allows Black men and women to be killed by police — or really by anyone — but it appears to sanction such killings by doing nothing to prevent them and little-to-nothing in the pursuit of justice when they happen.
The protests, then, are not solely about George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Ahmaud Arbery, or any of the thousands of other Black and Brown people who have been killed without justice. They’re about all of the people who have been denied justice. They’re about a long history of abuse at the hands of a broken justice system that sanctions the murders of Black men and women, which tragically includes George Floyd.
In other words, the protests — rightly called riots — erupting across the country exemplify Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous quote about riots from a speech he gave at Stanford in 1967: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
In Minneapolis, Floyd was literally unheard by the policemen who refused to listen to his pleas for his life. The subsequent riots are people’s demands to be heard on Floyd’s behalf.
But King’s speech should give pause to those of us who are watching the events in Minneapolis and elsewhere unfold from a distance — and especially those of us inclined to condemn the rioters.
As a professor of rhetoric, I have spent years studying speeches about social and political movements in America. And while I understand why King’s line about the riot being the language of the unheard is poignant and imminently meme-worthy, the full speech merits our attention because it is not a defense of riots. It is an unambiguous indictment of the people who are not rioting.
In his speech, called “The Other America,” King offers a penetrating diagnosis of the causes of American riots, including the 1965 Watts riot:
[W]hat is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.
King unequivocally condemns riots, but ultimately his speech is not about riots. It is about justice. It is about “ordinary” Americans’ failure — in fact, refusal — to hear the pleas for justice from America’s poor and dispossessed. It is about America’s willingness to spend money on a war in Vietnam and a trip to the moon while its citizens live in poverty. It is about a white society that is “more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.” It is about non-rioters’ responsibilities for preventing riots by fighting for a better America.
To solve the problem of riots, King tells us, those of us who have the privilege of standing idly by and denouncing the rioters should instead work to change a system that makes riots seem like the only way for some people to be heard.
Specifically, King advocates for legislation: “federal law declaring discrimination in housing unconstitutional,” “a federal law dealing with the whole question of the administration of justice,” and “a guaranteed annual income.”
But as King points out, these things cannot be accomplished without the support — and, in fact, the dedicated efforts — of white Americans working alongside Black Americans, and all the other Americans who find themselves victimized, brutalized, or simply disregarded in our nation. Justice does not come by waiting for racism and white supremacy to go away on its own. It comes through the efforts of people — the people who need justice as well as the people who already have it.
It’s not an accident that he gave this speech at Stanford — a haven of white, wealthy privilege. King was demanding that his audience take responsibility for helping people that they traditionally felt disconnected from and threatened by. King demands that his audience learn to listen to the language of the unheard and to hear it.
Sadly, King’s message has never not been relevant. If we learn nothing else from the riots across the country, it’s that those of us who stand apart need to teach ourselves to listen better. But I hope we learn more than that.
I hope we learn that these riots are our fault because we have failed to work hard enough for justice. I hope we will learn that we are responsible for preventing future riots, but that the only way we can do so is to make a better, more just country. We can’t just hear — we must also act.
