It Takes A Riot
By Simon J Black
Published: 08/06/2006
In 1992, the acquittal of four LAPD officers charged with the brutal beating of Rodney King prompted some of the worst urban unrest the United States had seen since the 1960s. What younger ‘heads might be unaware of is that three days of rage in the city of angels coincided with the T-Dot’s very own riot. Los Angeles was burning. Yonge Street too. Black youth took to Yonge Street in solidarity with the LA insurgents and to protest against the police brutality that plagued their very own city. The then NDP provincial government commissioned Stephen Lewis (now known for his work around the global AIDS pandemic) to produce a report that investigated the causes of the Yonge Street riot and more broadly, the conditions of racism and alienation which fueled unrest among Toronto’s black youth. In the report, Lewis stated that “What we are dealing with, at root, and fundamentally, is anti-black racism...It is blacks who are being shot, it is black youth that is unemployed in excessive numbers, it is black students who are being inappropriately streamed in schools, it is black kids who are disproportionately dropping out.” The provincial government acted on a number of recommendations laid out in the Lewis report. But by 1995, the Conservatives controlled Ontario and Mike Harris’ Common Sense Revolution had little time for anti-racism policies.
Fast forward to 2006 and the problems described in the Lewis Report persist. Another Yonge Street incident has prompted another wave of government promises. The shooting death of Jane Creba amongst the bustle of Yonge Street’s Boxing Day sales led Mayor
David Miller to announce the Community Safety Plan—this latest initiative mimicking many of the recommendations brought forth in the Lewis Report. The government reaction to the Boxing Day shootout and the Yonge Street riot tells us something about how the ruling elite determine when to intervene in a social crisis and when to let it fester. When elites feel threatened by social disorder they run for the police, but they also reach for their chequebook and start looking for ways to ease their conscience and ensure the safety of their own backyards. Governments who claim they are cash-strapped manage to find the resources to put out the social fire; they cough up money to deal with social deprivation because the threat of disorder to the system as a whole becomes very real.
For the poor, this has always been the case. History suggests that disruption is the main political resource of the poor. This argument, put forward by intellectuals Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in their classic book Poor Peoples Movements (if you haven’t heard of it, check it out) contend that throughout U.S. history, governments acquiesced to the demands of the poor when social order was threatened. The 1960s riots in Detroit, Chicago, and across major U.S. cities pushed the government to introduce new social programs aimed at easing the unrest. This trend is not isolated to the U.S. In the early 1980s, riots in the UK cities of London and Liverpool forced a Conservative government to rethink cuts to social spending. More recently, the black and brown youth of France’s ‘banileus’ (the poor suburbs that ring major French cities) who rioted last year initiated both a police response and a response from the French government which provided an emergency funding package to community services operating in poor neighborhoods and pledged to improve job opportunities and schooling.
This brings us back not only to the streets of the T-Dot but to cities across Canada in which youth struggle with problems of poverty, alienation and racism. Whether its aboriginal youth on the streets of Winnipeg or black youth in the boroughs of Toronto, young people in Canada could come to the realization that sometimes, it takes a riot.
Published in POUND Issue 34 - Sept 2006