John Hudson Aug 10, 2011 5,617 Views Comments (19)

With British Prime Minister David Cameron authorizing the use of rubber bullets and water canons in wake of the turbulent London riots spreading through Britain, questions have been raised about how authorities in the U.S. would respond to a similar domestic disturbance threatening the nation’s stability. According to National Journal’s White House correspondent Marc Ambinder the U.S. already has a game plan in place. “If what happened in London ever happened in the US, the military has plans — CONPLAN 3501 and 3502 — to suppress the ‘insurrection,’ he tweeted. The mysterious reference to a numbered military plan generated a flurry of interest on Twitter as NPR hostMichele Norris shot back:”I want to know more about the military’s plan to suppress any potential ‘insurrection.’— CONPLAN 3501 and 3502????”

Later in the article is a copy of a military document that reads:

Indicators of potential violence:

1) High unemployment rate among minority groups.

2) Increased crime rates among minority groups.

3) Protests arising from income disparities between minority and majority groups.

4) Declining rapport between local officials and minority groups.

5) Migrations of large numbers of minority groups.

6) Protests by minority groups to such conditions as slum conditions, segregation in housing and schools, lack of jobs, lack of recreational facilities, police brutality, and local overpricing practices.

So overall, who does it look like the culprit is, across the board? Minority groups!

torayot:

iamwhoiamandidontgiveadamn:

sugaredvenom:

cheesethatiscake:

I’m sorry. But at this point there is no reason behind the riots. It’s a mob mentality and it is ignorance at an incredibly sad level.

You want to fight your government… Do so. But don’t destroy innocent peoples lives in the process. The ideals you think you are raging against are lost because of the piss poor tactics being used: violence and mayhem just for the sake of violence and mayhem.

I really like how you used those stats as a springboard to add nothing of relevance to a conversation about police racism and brutality.

No-one’s saying the violence against other people is jsutified for FUCKS SAKE, all we’re saying is there’s a political, social and economic backdrop to this that can’t be ignored.

So stop rushing to feel smug about how you’ve told everyone how bad you think it is at every fucking opportunity.

Okay so wait, is the headline and the first entry…is that like someone posted the fact and then the person up there responded?  or is that the non sequitor of non sequitors?  What the hell?

Anyways, all about sugaredvenom’s response right there.

Sibz is being awesome again.

Also, I don’t buy the idea that all of the groups of youths involved are one cohesive movement despite the mainstream media’s attempt to paint them all as one threatening monolith. They are not merely a horde of creatures who cannot understand human decency - it is absolutely loaded to describe them in comparison to animals. I imagine that, for at least some of them, the people involved are simply doing what makes sense. And unless you’ve been in their marginalised position, you cannot possibly understand why rioting would make sense. This doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is absolutely right, or that their position purchases them indemnity. It does mean, however, that we have to understand the context and actually listen to communities, because people obviously don’t suddenly go around destroying things if they’re busy having fulfilling lives.

You don’t give people less than the bare minimum, ignore their complaints when they try to play by your rules, shun them for not being acceptable, and then be surprised when there’s backlash.

There are “friends” on my Facebook page who are joining groups named ‘Not rioting because you have more than 1 GCSE’ or ‘Looting your gyal a weave cos you think she’s da one’. I see retweets of a quote by a Waterstone’s employee saying that the book shop will stay open so that the rioting youths will hopefully learn something. Apparently, being poor and/or black and being given sub-par life opportunities and education is just so funny! /sarcasm

And then you get still others saying that any of these people absolutely can’t be as poor and oppressed as they think they are because they have smartphones and wear expensive trainers which cost hundreds of pounds. Actually, you can get Blackberries for free if you pay something like a £20-30/month mobile phone tariff, so people aren’t dropping hundreds at once. The conspicious consumption of expensive trainers and up-to-date smartphones is anyway due to capitalism and consumerist culture. And they’re just nice things. I mean, do poor people not deserve nice things? Does it make them “dishonest” poor people who do not fulfil the Tiny Tim fantasy that privileged people like to indulge in? Hmmm.

So there’s an acknowledgement that the people involved in the riots are marginalised and have limited opportunities and resources… and that this is funny. This somehow co-exists with the denial that the people’s lives are actually that bad because they have the temerity to have nice things.

People need to understand that class is more than about possessing status goods: being middle class also comes with a sense of self-satisfaction, having connections, speaking the “right” way, expecting certain things from life and so on. Just because someone has a fairly fancy phone doesn’t mean that they can actually afford food at the end of the month, or that they can have the education/job/future they want, or even that they’ll be respected if they open their mouths to speak their minds.

British people are fed the myth that anyone can make it. So you go to your shitty state school and somehow make sense of an irrelevant and unengaging curriculum. You get your handful of A* - C GCSEs and go onto a better sixthform or further education college. You do your A-levels, get into university with your 360 points, try to make sense of an educational content and style that’s meant for better-off people used to more rigorous and encouraging schooling, and then graduate with your 2:1. You get a good graduate job with a good graduate salary. Congratulations, young parvenu, you’ve made it! And if you’ve made it, anyone can, right?

No. They can’t. And they shouldn’t be shamed for that. Despite the fact that I have essentially outlined my life story in that paragraph there (save actually getting a job), I resent that there ought to be any prescribed path to respectability, or that middle-class “respectability” should be on the cards at all. But the unfortunate fact is that you’re more likely to be listened to if you are the “good” working-class kind who want to “better” and “lift” yourselves. Ugh. My parents had internalised this racism and classism, and have always been eager for me to differentiate between us and those poor brown people. I went to school with people who grew up on estates and were gang members, and where there were police officers outside the school at hometime. I thought I knew the difference between us and them. I looked down on them, not knowing the damage I was doing. Once upon a time, my opinions would have matched the classist and/or racist shoutings and roaring going on in my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

The riots probably fulfilled some atavistic white and/or middle-class fantasy where the unwashed dark masses rise up and desecrate everything — without acknowledging their own contribution to the marginalisation of those communities. These attitudes help no-one and there needs to be change.

Bolding is mine.

I do not live in the UK. I have never been to the UK! I am not trying to say the riots are good, bad, justified, terrible. That is not my decision to make; it is not my fight and no one asked me to referee. That is exactly what I was responding to, how quickly outsiders will condemn a situation that they are completely removed from—so much more removed from it than they even know—either geographically, or along class, race, or other social lines.

My purpose in doing any amount of writing about the riots has solely been with the aim of people asking more questions about why this is happening, why things have come to this point, instead of assuming it is more destructive than people’s everyday lives already are.

If you ignore someone until they pick up a weapon and point it at you to get you to listen, it seems like at that point you should at least half-assedly listen for once.

If poor urban people of color rioted in the areas they live in, in cities in the US, in a serious huge way, what fraction of property destroyed would be their own? What fraction of people rioting would be destroying property of their own, their friends and families, people they’d ever even met? A tenth? A hundredth? What must that look like in the UK right now—whose property is being destroyed?

I’m wondering this because of the argument that people are destroying “their own neighborhood,” which has always come off to me as being steeped in a middle-class misunderstanding of other people’s poverty. Who owns the house they live in? In New Haven, almost all the houses in the POC neighborhoods are subdivided to be rented as separate floors. I literally know 3 couples in the city who own the house they live in; 2 of those couples are either my past or present landlords. If my block rioted, for the most part we would not be destroying our own property.

Are the riots destroying more than the police do? (They’re the only ones within this story who have killed someone.) Are they destroying more than unemployment and hunger do? Are they destroying more than developers would; are they doing the developers’ work for them anyway? What about the community being destroyed when people are evicted, when people hide out or move away because of racism or xenophobia, when people are convicted of crimes and locked up under a penal system built on oppression, when people are taught collective self-loathing in school, when people are forbidden to speak their own languages?

And what does that mean, “their own neighborhood?” What does ownership of the place you live mean, if you don’t even have the money or skin color to own it? What does ownership mean if you live in public housing and know that, any day now, the city can sign it over to real estate holders who will tear it down and build condos with no remorse? What does ownership mean when there is no longer a place to get sufficiently healthy food in your neighborhood, or there is but the only people who shop there come from other parts of town, or there is but only because the white people moving in aren’t being ignored the way your family was for generations?

How can you force ownership, from afar, onto communities that have been made this deeply alienated from where they are and how they relate to the people and places around them, if they have never before been allowed or encouraged to own anything, property or otherwise?

If you loot a shoe store of a company run by a white man overseas that makes billions of dollars, that cuts costs by using sweatshop labor of people of color and then marketing them back to a different demographic of people of color; if you steal a pair of pants from a clothing store that won’t hire people of color from the neighborhood and follows them around the store when they come in; if you break the window of a multi-billion dollar fast food chain restaurant whose $1 meals are, on a bad day, all you have money and time to feed your kids, knowing that the food you are feeding them is damn near toxic but having no alternatives; are you doing anything to your real community? Will you ever meet the people who actually own all of that?

For real. And even then, not sure I wanna hear about it from anyone besides the people who have reason to riot, who are going to face the repercussions of the riots when it’s over, regardless of their participation or not or their support for it. Cause I also am not curious about what white reporters or cops or the middle class have to say about it, not just on tumblr but everywhere. “OMG how dare you respond to your life in your city in a way that I’ve never had to do” is not constructive discourse.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011 - 04:52 - UK Riots - Al-Jazeera UK Riots Live Blog

How’s that for some understanding, huh?