The Boston Tea Party is a major event in American history, so much so that an entire political movement has grown up around it. It was by no means the first riot in American history. Previous riots had actually been a lot more destructive. British colonial citizens were guilty of assaulting tax collectors, burning private property, and threatening with bodily harm agents of their government. The most infamous act by American rioters was probably that of tarring and feathering a victim and riding them out of town on a rail. Many citizens suspected of supporting the Crown's taxes were also forced to drink boiling tea (which, as you might imagine, is not particularly pleasant).
White people rioting over tea and taxes. It's an integral part of our national folklore. While some professional historians have attempted to make the civil unrest in early America more nuanced (as they well should), the public image of these riots remains essentially the story of a group of white citizens taking drastic steps to gain liberty from a tyrannical government.
I'd like to take a brief moment here to make some disclaimers. I am fully aware that the Revolution was not a strictly white endeavor. I am aware that the actions of the colonists and whether or not they were egged on by cultural and social elites has been endlessly debated. I am aware that making comparisons of Ferguson to the Revolution is essentially bad historical practice.
However, while neither strictly true nor untrue, the popular image most American citizens have of the period matters. While I would like most Americans to have the understanding of the American Revolution that professional historians do, they don't. Largely, Americans view the pre-Revolutionary events in Boston as a bunch of white dudes fighting for liberty through unconventional and extralegal means. Again, it is this image that is important, rather than its veracity.
I say the image is important because it is primarily people who invoke this exact image, no matter how flawed, of the Boston Tea Party who are the biggest critics of the Ferguson Riots.
I don't condone looting or destruction of private property. However, I find it deeply ironic that a wing of a major American political party named after one of the most important riots in American history is standing staunchly on the side of law and order in the case of Ferguson, Missouri. The biggest argument I see from the Tea Party, its sympathizers, and even ordinary Republicans is that rioting isn't justified in this case, and that it won't be effective. Instead, say these men and women, the citizens of Ferguson should have used the proper channels.
Putting aside the irony I've attempted to detail above, I think it's important to consider that the entire reason the men and women of Ferguson, Missouri are rioting in the first place is a complete failure of the proper channels those condemning the riots are espousing. The "proper channels" in this case shot an 18 year old boy and then refused to be particularly forthcoming with certain pieces of evidence. There is some evidence that the boy in question was going for the officer's gun or had entered the car, but we can't say for sure, because the police department is being squirrely about what they release. Furthermore, the police story and the eyewitness stories don't match up, and while that's to be expected, questions of why so many shots were fired and in what context these events occurred have not been properly examined. For this exact reason, the actions of the officer who killed Michael Brown will not be further looked into. He may be an innocent man who acted in self-defense. But he also may be a racist murderer, and due to the actions of the courts in Missouri, we simply will never know. And that's a problem.
I'm a big fan of the concept of innocent until proven guilty. However, I'm also a fan of an investigation being based on all the available facts. When a police department is allowed to withhold evidence and then use lack of evidence as a reason to dodge an indictment, it brings up the question of the legitimacy of the "proper channels."
In other words, don't stack the deck against a large group of people and then expect them to play your game.
Of course, as I said before, I'm completely against the destruction and looting of private property, but I think it's important to question this assumed link between the protesters, the rioters, and the looters. What exactly is it that causes those on the right to assume that these are essentially the same people? I've heard the claim, multiple times, that the Ferguson protesters are destroying their own community or that rioting simply isn't the best way to effect change. In this claim is the unstated assumption that the looters in question are looting because they're protesting what happened to Michael Brown, and not simply because they're taking advantage of a situation caused by Michael Brown's shooting and the subsequent legitimate protests and arguably legitimate riots. In this unspoken assumption that equates looters and protesters, I hear an uncomfortable echo of the claim that all people of a certain group act the same way and, as someone who has studied race for six years, I have to ask why that is, and whether, had this been a white neighborhood, the media would be failing to make that distinction.
Regardless of racial motives, the equation of looters with legitimate protesters is problematic because it takes away from the legitimacy of those protests. Holding up a sign, or even torching a police car, have totally different connotations than robbing a Toys R Us. There's no need to assume that those taking advantage of the protests in Ferguson have the same motives and to project the motives of looters on the protesters, and to lump them all in the same group distracts us from the very real grievances those protesters who did not destroy property, or who targeted police and police vehicles, might have.
There's no doubt that the situation in Missouri is a mess, but the bottom line is that those who advocate approaching the indictment decision in a way that does not involve protest do so because they largely live in a community where no protest is necessary. They aren't targeted by the police, don't have a deep-seated distrust of law enforcement and the courts that stems from centuries of systemic abuse, and don't have to deal with the massive social and economic issues caused by that systemic abuse. Middle class whites (or blacks for that matter) can safely advocate not rioting because they will never be placed in a situation that calls for it. No one is going to put 12 bullets into their young men for stealing a pack of cigarettes. None of them fear they're going to be next.
Perhaps rioting isn't the solution. Perhaps the solution is to create the same atmosphere in the lower-class black communities of the South that middle-class whites enjoy. Perhaps the solution would have been for the Ferguson police department to cooperate with an outside investigation and be open with the forensic evidence. Perhaps the solution would have been to try and figure out what really happened to Michael Brown. Perhaps the solution is to not have police outfitted with equipment taken from the arsenal in Battlefield Hardline. Perhaps the solution is to address the concerns of a major community before they feel like rioting is the only option left open to them.
If you want people to use the proper channels, you have to make those channels actually work. Until then, people are going to carve their own channels, and those channels aren't pretty. Ultimately, and this is the key point, you don't have to condone the riots in Ferguson to have expected them. And you don't have to be a social scientist to figure out what that expectation says about the United States, race, and the increasing militarization of America's police forces. Until we address these issues, instead of choosing to ignore them, as the Ferguson Grand Jury did, don't expect Missouri to be the last place such rioting occurs.
