The point of a riot is that if enough other people are breaking the law, you feel like you can get away with it too. A few hours after Martin Luther King was murdered, by future wife looked out the window at her street in the Austin neighborhood of the West Side of Chicago: "Hey, Mom, look! Everybody's getting free TVs. Let's get one!" Her mother nailed the door shut.
Sports rioting traces back at least as far as the clashes between the fans of the Blue and Green chariot racing teams in Constantinople that almost overthrew the Emperor Justinian the Great in 532 AD. The concept of the Victory Riot after the local team wins the championship was largely unknown in the U.S. until the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan won their second consecutive NBA championship in 1992, a little over a month after the Rodney King riot in LA.
The Michael Jordan riots caught everybody by surprise, since the accepted narrative of urban riots going back to the Watts Riots of 1965 had been that they were set off by Urban Anger. But everybody in Chicago was happy. And there hadn't been riots when the Bulls had won the year before. The MJ Riots were worst in the 'hood, where a couple of Arab shopkeepers were murdered, but even the exquisite little Stuart Brent Bookstore on the Magnificent Mile was looted by white yuppies who stole coffee table art books. The next year, the cops were out in force on horseback, but there was still a fair amount of rioting in Chicago. But when the Bulls won their second threepeat in 1996-98, nothing much happened. So, there's a high degree of randomness. Plus, there's target hardening. For example, the Niketown store that opened on Michigan Blvd. in Chicago after the MJ riot is a fortress designed to be unlootable.
Now that I think about it, I suspect there would have been riots after the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl in 1986 if the temperatures hadn't been subzero. There were scary incidents on Division Street, and then during the official Loop victory parade a few days later when it was still no more than zero, a mob charged a high school marching band and bent their brass instruments. Why? Well, the point of a riot is Why Not?
Never having won anything, Vancouver (a.k.a., Loserville, North America) has no tradition of the Victory Riot. It does have a tradition of the Defeat Riot going back to the 1994 Stanley Cup Final. I suspect, however, that some of yesterday's Vancouver rioters are undergoing an agonizing reappraisal of this whole riot and post pictures on Facebook idea. For example, this guy with the blond crewcut who was photographed setting a police car on fire. My guess is that the police really don't like you setting their cars on fire, and therefore will find him.
My God, what a hideous pair of shoes.
ReplyDelete"The concept of the Victory Riot after the local team wins the championship was largely unknown in the U.S. until the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan won their second consecutive NBA championship in 1992, a little over a month after the Rodney King riot in LA."
ReplyDeleteSimply not true. There were victory riots in Detroit when Pistons won before the LA riots.
There was rioting in Chicago after the Bulls' victory because Chicago was one of the cities that didn't riot after the Rodney King verdict. So, blacks thought 'we missed out on a golden opportunity' and used the Bull's victory to get their slice of the riot pie. Better late than never.
ReplyDeleteWhy did some white yuppies act crazy? Maybe they had to prove they're badass too.
Generally, whites fear blacks, so a city with lots of blacks will tend to have black rioters while white kids avoid the streets altogether. But in mostly white Vancouver, white kids don't fear blacks--who are few and far between--, so white kids take to the streets and act out. If Vancouver was 50% black, most of those white kids would have stayed home and watched black kids rioting on TV.
Black rioting tends to be more aggressive and primal while white rioting tends to be more about attitude--"look ma, I'm badass"--or 'radical' in message. Beerheads and 'anarchist' types generally get together and trash the place to party or to 'make a statement'. To some bratty leftist kids, anything that angers cops or creates disorder is 'meaningful'. It's like their own mini-May 68. For beerheads, it's just rock n roll. Those factors, more than the desire to steal lots of stuff, seem to be at the core of white riots.
I swear, I'm a little less racist now that I know white people will riot and loot for no reason. Vancouver, of all places! It might as well be Portland.
ReplyDelete"I swear, I'm a little less racist now that I know white people will riot and loot for no reason. Vancouver, of all places! It might as well be Portland."
ReplyDeleteIt's topdog-ism. In Vancouver with few blacks, whites are topdogs, so white rowdies mess up the place to show how tough/rough/barbarian/badass they are.
Same is true with bullying. We've all heard news reports of it being a big problem in Japan--where some kids were even driven to suicide. But do we hear of Japanese-Americans bullying kids here? Of course not. Whom are small Japanese-Americans gonna bully? Bigger blacks, whites, and Hispanics? So, Asian-American kids, who might otherwise be bullies in Asia, tend to be better behaved here.
I think American whites tend to riot less because blacks are topdogs--especially in urban streets. So, blacks take over the streets, and scared whites stay home and think, 'they're so crazy, we're so civilized'. But if US had no blacks, we might have white rioting, like UK has white soccer hooligans. There's always some males in any society that wants to act crazy and badass. Blacks do it more than others, but whites and Asians will do it too.
And notice that some elements on the Alt Right, even as they condemn black rioting, endorse Russian thugs beating up minorities in Moscow in the name of white power. And there are many on the Alt Right who are obsessed with WWII imagery, pagan barbarianism, mixed martial arts fighting, Brock Lesnar thuggery, fratboy drunkenness and rowdiness. And Buchanan's RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING relishes the memory of fights and sucker punching, etc.
If a park has a lot of beagles, beagles will bark the most and act aggressive. But if pitbulls enter the park, beagles will move to the side while pitbulls make most of the noise.
I think, in some ways, black thuggery and the ensuing white fear has had a kind of civilizing impact on whites.
In the past, when whites had been more confident in their power, they rioted and hung blacks from lampposts. But whites had legal and political power over blacks back then. Once those advantages vanished, it was white fist vs black fist, and black fist won, and so American streets are owned by black mobs when rioting happens. Or Mexicans--not because most Mexicans are tough but because there are so many of them and since they're not burdened by 'white guilt', therefore thinking in more tribal terms.
So, though whites may be less violent than blacks generally, the dichotomy of black thuggery vs white pacifism is a myth. There are bullies and rowdies among all peoples. It just so happens that in America, the black bully and rowdy have power over the white bully and rowdy, who thus humiliated, tries to rationalize his defeat by pretending he's a man-of-peace.
Many Alt Right guys even scoff at the entire sports culture as stupid and dumb, unworthy of their intellectual/spiritual attention, but would they feel this way if most top athletes were white?
How people rationalize defeat indeed.
It's like German physicists rationalizing that they intentionally chose not to build the Bomb out of decency after they lost the war. In reality, they did try their best, but in defeat and total humiliation, the only crutch was 'we sabotaged the program out of higher morality'. hmmm.
Vancouver's population is 51 per cent ''visible minorities'', so it is not a mostly white city. Granted, most of the visible minorities are not black.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=bb0fee45-b305-490a-b161-a21bcb1d7329&k=34160
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteThere was rioting in Chicago after the Bulls' victory because Chicago was one of the cities that didn't riot after the Rodney King verdict.
I'm pretty sure L.A. was the only city where blacks rioted after the Rodney King verdict.
Elite (I assume) white men (I assume again) acting up!
ReplyDeleteThere was a drunken brawl at the Royal Ascot horse race meeting yesterday(THE social event of the year).Things are definitely looking up.
ReplyDeleteOr down.I'm not sure.
I recall that a few tears ago Montreal residents rioted during a blackout while New Yorkers remained civil during a similar blackout around the same time. I'd be curious as to why our supposedly more civilized neighbors to the north seem to act more uncivilized at these times.
ReplyDeleteAnon 12:48 has made several good observations.
ReplyDeleteThe black violence cult has had a civilizing effect on whites. When I read about or hear stories about the sheer level of aggression and approved violence just 2-4 generations back in the rural south, and I'm not talking white on black, I'm blown away. For example, it was an accepted tradition in one of our counties to settle fights after church on Sunday at a certain sawmill. Sticks and knives were acceptable. This went on up to the 40's and even later. Initiatory violence at high schools didn't really fade out until the 70's (watch the film Dazed and Confused to catch the last vestiges of all that). You can see all this declining as in-your-face black aggression increased. The spread of black gang culture to rural areas in the 80's pretty much sealed it.
Has anyone seen other pictures of some of the rioters? Some of the rioters were of east and south Asian descent! Check out picture 5 of 13 on this website:http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/06/16/bc-riot-thursday.html
ReplyDeleteVancouver, as someone else has noted, is 51 percent non-white. Hardly qualifying it as a 'white city'.
Simply not true. There were victory riots in Detroit when Pistons won before the LA riots.
ReplyDeleteAnd there were the victory riots after the Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1984. In fact they produced one of the most iconic sports-riot photos of all time. (Stick "Bubba" in your Google search.)
Vancouver's population is 51 per cent ''visible minorities'', so it is not a mostly white city. Granted, most of the visible minorities are not black.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to city life, a lot of those visible minorities don't exist. They stick to themselves. This riot was at least 80% white. Here is my take on it.
http://dominionofcanada.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/i-wanna-riot/
NAMs and white anarchist Vancouverites would be less likely to riot if they thought their law-abiding fellow citizens were armed and dangerous. That would explain why there are never any riots in the South, the region of the country with the highest percentage of black residents in the US.
ReplyDeleteyou're a little ahistoric...
ReplyDeleteRiots after sports triumphs go back at least as far as the Pittsburgh Pirates 1979 World Series victory over the Baltimore Orioles
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteBlack rioting tends to be more aggressive and primal while white rioting tends to be more about attitude--"look ma, I'm badass"--or 'radical' in message. Beerheads and 'anarchist' types generally get together and trash the place to party or to 'make a statement'. To some bratty leftist kids, anything that angers cops or creates disorder is 'meaningful'. It's like their own mini-May 68. For beerheads, it's just rock n roll. Those factors, more than the desire to steal lots of stuff, seem to be at the core of white riots."
I entirely agree with your analysis, and when blacks riot, I adopt a que sera sera kind of attitude. When whites riot, however - especially spoiled white kids acting gangsta', flashing gang-signs and satan-horns - I say turn the cops loose and beat the living hell out of them. Those white a**holes brazenly, wantonly engaging in acts of senseless destruction deserve to get f**ked up real good - the missing teeth, hurts-when-I-pee, gammy-leg-for-the-rest-of-my-life kind of f**ked up. It would be instructive to the others.
Those hideous UCLA trainers will make it easy to ID that perp.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt his lawyer will argue he wall trying to save the cop car by pulling the gas soaked rag out with a lighter in his hand.
No wonder USC dominates UCLA. Do better logos and team colors result in better performance?
In football, the Denver Broncos and Iowa Hawkeyes got a lot better when they manned up their team logos and colors.
You got the three main types of core rioters in decreasing order of personal danger:
ReplyDelete* Criminal Wilders
* Drunks
* Social Justice
A fourth will be opportunist and mob followers who probably make up the bulk of most riots, but would never initiate one.
Whites tend to fill the latter two types. My guess is the Vancouver victory riot was mainly Drunks and followers compared to the Piston/Bull riots where I suspect more thefts and injuries happened.
There a PhD thesis waiting for anyone willing to create a league table for such riots.
How 'bout Testosterone Riot for a title? Hard to believe that loser setting fire to a police car is surging with masculinity but there's not much more of an explanation, is there?
ReplyDelete"Granted, most of the visible minorities are not black."
ReplyDeleteExactly. They are not topdawg minorities.
They look like G8 rioters. A SWPL riot isn't a proper riots. They're just acting black like MTV tells them.
ReplyDeleteSWPL gangbangers
http://nationalpostnews.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/riot2.jpg
hipster looter
http://nationalpostnews.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/riot8.jpg
violence and danger makes you horny
http://nationalpostnews.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/riot34.jpg
I like former Charleston, SC police chief Reuben Greenberg's approach.
ReplyDeleteIn the eye of Hurricane Hugo, amid massive damage in the city and reports of looting, he radios his officers, "Don't make any arrests. Just beat 'em. We don't have any place to put them."
They were rioting to show that the city had some tough guys, unlike their hockey team...
ReplyDeleteNo HBD here, but the Cup Finals saw a team with a group of highly skilled but not so tough Scandinavians brought to heel by a gigantic Slav, Zdeno Chara, and tough Canadians (Bruins goalie/stone wall Tim Thomas being the only native born American on the team). The defining moment in the series was when Bruins pest Brad Marchand punched one of the Sedin brothers in the face FOUR times and all he could do was look for a referee!
An object lesson in will defeating skill.
"Granted, most of the visible minorities are not black."
ReplyDeleteNo, a big % are gay, though.
Steve, apparently the blond guy in the crew cut lighting the police cruiser on fire was outed as a promising young water polo star:
ReplyDeletehttp://publicshamingeternus.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/nathan-kotylak-water-polo-all-star-lighting-police-car/
Rioting: not just for black folks anymore.
ReplyDeleteRight?
Human beings are restless in nature. Too long the peace, more likely the riot. Any thing can be a trigger. Arab spring, sport riot, tibet riot, monglian riot, intifada, WTO meeting riot, are all the same.
ReplyDeleteProfessional hooligans are every where.
Sweetheart says:
ReplyDelete"I think, in some ways, black thuggery and the ensuing white fear has had a kind of civilizing impact on whites."
OK, but.....
Very unpleasant riot, this Vancouver thing, but let's not go overboard. Compare this Vancouver thing to Miami, 1980. White people dragged from cars, hacked and torn apart. Really ugly stuff.
Google "arthur mcduffie". It's dropped down the memory hole.
Google "Benny Higdon".
The third anonymous had an excellent post.
ReplyDeleteTake a look at the pictures of the rioters. Overwhelming majority are white. I'd estimate that maybe 75-85 percent are white, 10-15 percent are Asian/Chinese, and maybe 5 percent are other ethnicities (ie Arabs, East Indians, etc.) Whites are clearly overrepresented here.
ReplyDeleteI agree whites are generally scared of urban blacks, but there have been plenty of riots (Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit) where white mobs clashed with black mobs. In those times, however, there was more racial solidarity among whites and white politicians would often call for violence.
During the Zoot Suit riots, white mobs thrashed Mexicans with a lot of ferocity.
"Simply not true. There were victory riots in Detroit when Pistons won before the LA riots."
ReplyDeleteI am also pretty sure the victory riot was a well-established tradition before 1992. It may have originated in Detroit, but not for the Pistons - there were riots there in 1984 after the Tigers won the World Series.
Anonymous said... "There was a drunken brawl at the Royal Ascot horse race meeting yesterday(THE social event of the year)."
ReplyDeleteMy cousin's baby-daddy (ugh) goes to Ascot every year and he ain't nobody. Anybody can get into Ascot nowadays.
white people rioted in philadelphia after the phillies won the world series. philadelphia is one of the blackest cities in america. what happened there, anonymous? i thought whitey was on good behavior because they just get their asses kicked by "black fist"?
ReplyDeleteI remember shop windows being broken in Montreal when the Habs won the Stanley Cup in 1985 (beating my Flames).
ReplyDeleteAnd the BC Lions have won the Grey Cup, but I'm comfortable with Americans not caring about that. Heck, most Canadians don't either.
"Now that I think about it, I suspect there would have been riots after the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl in 1986 if the temperatures hadn't been subzero."
ReplyDeleteThe Russian Revolution happened in two bursts, in February and October of 1917, in St Petersburg, the largest city in the world of its size that far north. The November event was planned by the Bolsheviks, but the original February Revolution, the one that threw out the czar, started as a spontaneous riot. I think I remember reading that it was pretty cold out.
"white people rioted in philadelphia after the phillies won the world series. philadelphia is one of the blackest cities in america. what happened there, anonymous?"
ReplyDeleteIt could have been in the whiter side of town. Also, baseball is more a white passion sport than a black passion sport. Like hockey, it brings out more whites into the streets than blacks. I don't see too many blacks going nuts about baseball these days.
why do mexicans not only get violent sometimes, but directy engage not only europeans but also africans? they are routinely in race riots in california with africans. what happened to "black fist" anonymous? in reality, nothing happened to "black fist" because this "black fist" idea doesn't exist.
ReplyDeletethe reasons europeans don't riot or get violent much anymore is because
1) most of them do pretty well now, have a decent standard of living, and have a lot to lose by getting into fights. for decades now, getting into a fight is a good reason for your employer to fire you.
2) medical bills are expensive. who wants to risk breaking a bone or two even in a fight you think you can "win". you don't really win a random fist fight over something stupid anyway. in a situation in which you might get in a fight over something retarded, the only way to win is to just walk away. doing anything other than walking from most altercations is the same as losing. it never leads to anything good.
3) probably most important, the average european understands that the authorities and laws are against them, and america's police and politicians don't look kindly on europeans getting together and steamrolling "diverse" citizens. during the civil rights era, when many europeans still saw themselves as a united group with interests to defend, they routinely went hand to hand with rioting africans. that was only 45 years ago. today any europeans who did something like that, under the pretense of defending a neighborhood or a school or whatever, they would all be arrested, they would all be fired from their jobs, and they would all be sued.
i have been a security guard for rap concerts and let me tell you what a huge psychological factor it is to know whether the establishment and city are on your side or not. if i'm doing my job, and i'm completely in the right, and i HAVE to beat down some black guy who is out of control, can i count on management to back me up? or can i count on them to sell me out, to fire me, and then to allow the guy who was out of control, to sue me and the venue and the city et cetera?
a far more likely hypothesis is that africans have a lot less to lose on average. their unemployment rate is, generously, 25%, so 1 in 4 of them doesn't even have to worry about getting fired from their job if they go on a rampage. did this anonymous guy miss all those jokes about the million man march? you know, the one where your friend asks you "Hey you know what the best part about the million man march was?" and you say "No, what?" and your friend says "Only 5 guys missed work that day!"
ReplyDeleteand, as should be evident to everybody by now, not only are the police themselves often hesistant to come on down on africans with a strong show of force for fear of being fired and sued by their own legal system and then having jesse and al show up to force the police department to "show tolerance" by hiring unqualified officers, but that same legal system has a different set of laws for africans. hate crime laws are not applied to them and heck, even in slam dunk violent crime trials, the PROSECUTING lawyers are sometimes trying to find ANY reason to reduce the charges. then you get to the judges, who can practically throw out a case now if some witness testifies "but they called him the N word!", among various other allowances they make.
europeans though, can be assured the police will come down on them with the full force of the law, and this factors into their thinking. nobody is looking to protect europeans and each european person is own their own, since they don't have a group or identity we are told. how about that tranny who got beat down at that mcdonald's? no hate crime charges filed until AFTER the authorities were certain it was a tranny. the highest ranking lawyer in the united states says we are cowards for not talking about race, then comes right back and says "These laws were not meant to protect whites." LOL @ this.
heck, today we have politicians who used to be governors and who now want to be president, who have to answer questions like "Why did you let that career criminal out on parole, when everybody knew he was just gonna kill again?" a near endless reservior of compassion for proven super violent africans seems to be very common among european authority figures now. wimp and girly man roger goodell forced the NFL to have a moment of silence for chris henry, a 5 time arrested scumbag, who was accidentally killed while in the process of trying to beat up his own girlfriend.
I remember shop windows being broken in Montreal when the Habs won the Stanley Cup in 1985 (beating my Flames).
ReplyDeleteNo, you don't. Edmontom won in '86.
I remember shop windows being broken in Montreal when the Habs won the Stanley Cup in 1985 (beating my Flames).
ReplyDeleteNo, you don't. Edmontom won in '86.
You are both wrong. Edmonton won in 1985. Montreal won in 1986.
Haitians control the streets of Montreal now.
The reason there was white rioters in Philadelphia was because there are lots of Irish in Philly.
ReplyDeleteThere is a rule in american city life. The Irish keep out blacks. But then you're stuck with the Irish...
To follow up TD's comment from last year, here is the contemporaneous article on the fate of Bubba Helms; a hint at the victory-riot/deranged-gunman unified field theory perhaps
ReplyDelete