From Racial Cleansing to Compensatory Rebellion: A Typology for Examining American Race Riots, 1866-1968

• In Event: 3520 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 6. Politics and the State

Abstract

Sociologists have yet to develop an adequate framework for understanding the significance of events historically known as ‘race riots,’ and historians have not examined them as related event unfolding across time. I trace American race riots across historical periods, arguing that at their core, riot events are struggles over equal citizenship and the corresponding rights and privileges that accompany being an American. Thus they can be treated as expressions of racial boundaries on a continuum, tracing back to the Civil War, to the Reconstruction era and the debate concerning the rights of the ‘freedmen.’ Using Donald Black's pure sociology as an analytical lens, I conduct a comparative historical analysis and identify factors that distinguish American race riots; the paper offers a riot typology which considers both the direction of collective violence in social space, its style, and its consequences. I present four ideal types of riot events: racial cleansing, disciplinary riot, reciprocal riot, and compensatory rebellion. I examine the economic, political, and cultural conditions most likely to produce each type of riot event and illustrate how third-party response proves critical in determining the intensity of the riot event (i.e., the frequency of reported disturbances and the duration of disruption) and its severity (i.e., the total devastation, as measured in terms of casualties, injuries, arrests, and property destruction). The paper concludes with a discussion of how white-initiated collective violence has proven instrumental, historically; conversely, black-initiated collective violence has been used to justify militarizing urban police forces and has proven largely detrimental.

Author

• Jordan Christopher Burke, University of New Hampshire