The Real Reason For Race Riots

Minorities rarely riot against majorities for the practical reason that rioters are cowards and they want to have the numbers on their side. A riot is less often a symptom of injustice and more often a sign that they have the numbers and that all they need is a pretext to go out for a fine day of looting and maiming. A riot isn’t a response to injustice, it’s a power play by people who believe that they are above the law and that their victims are outnumbered.

It’s a rather odd development that white people in America took on the role of the Chinese in Indonesia or the Jews in Russia, long before they became a demographic minority, but not entirely so. Race riots have mostly happened in cities where white people had become or were on the way to becoming a minority. And all three groups share the vital characteristic of being hard-working types whose success is overestimated by the looters looking for a taste of that success without having to go out and work for it.

The hated groups are not satisfied with their lot in life, instead they go out and strive for more possessed of the peculiar belief that they can rise above their station in life through hard work and ingenuity. Their neighbors rarely appreciate this attitude. In their world someone who has more than they do probably stole it from them. And when they booze up and riot, they’re only getting back what’s rightfully theirs.

In the mythology of the looters, they are the persecuted ones, and when the government sympathizes with the looters, that is the message it sends out. The mythology of a white grip on power driven by bone deep racism and privilege has its echoes in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a conspiracy theory that justifies every act of violence against them.

But if riots were really triggered by a black and white racial disparity, then Asians wouldn’t be the victims of African-American riot rage from New York to Los Angeles. If anyone can be exempted from charges of shipping slaves or conspiring to employ their privilege to keep people of color down, it would be Chinese and Korean immigrants. But it isn’t really race that’s the issue, it’s being a successful minority.

Chinese, Jewish and white storeowners in America are targeted by rioters for the same reason that Chinese storeowners in Indonesia are. Because they are members of an outside group who are working hard and getting ahead and that is the worst imaginable crime to people who believe that success through honest work is impossible. That anyone who succeeds has taken advantage of a rigged system and is exploiting them to get ahead.

That mindset is no longer confined to a few ghettoes; it finds open expression in city government, in state government and even in the White House and the Justice Department. The ugly resentment, the selfish greed by those who have never worked for a living, is dressed up with American flags and the looting is described as wealth redistribution, but it’s still the same thing. Except now the government functionaries do the looting.

The American city was once the heart of an industrial machine manned by workers who believed that they could get ahead in life. And then the worker became a minority in cities dominated by the indolent, by municipal unions, by social workers, community organizers and bleeding heart college graduates who squeezed him out. When the looters came for the American worker, he fled to the suburbs, the city declined, and the rioters unleashed their rage on the Chinese who came to take his place.