Riots and Social Class

August 12, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Just a couple of thoughts about Faye’s post and the largely predictable response.

1. The old college try. A comment on Faye’s post about the London riots asked, “Can you show me a pattern or history of middle class or rich people rioting and looting?”

Well, yes.

I am old enough to remember hearing about the riot at the July 1960 Newport Jazz festival. The rioters were white, middle-class people – mostly college students. Probably, some of them wealthy. (Wealthy people do send their kids to college.)

Newport may have been one of the largest riots by college students (n = 12,000), but it was certainly not an isolated or unusual occurrence. The pattern of spring break riots has been so commonplace that vacation towns have had to weigh the lure of the student generated revenue against the costs and risk of riot. Here’s the LA Times in 1986 reporting on Palm Springs (a town not easily confused with Tottenham):

While Mayor Sonny Bono and other proponents of this year's crackdown pronounced the break the most orderly and successful in years, T-shirt merchants and others catering to the young crowds declared the week a disaster.

Sport too, especially football, has often brought out the inner rioter of college students.

Fierce fighting on the football field and in the streets of this town for two hours was the result this afternoon of the game. Members and followers of both teams were cut by blows from clubs, bricks, canes, and any other weapons that were handy, townsfolk and students joining in the melee.

That’s from the New York Times, November of 1903. But the history of these middle-class and rich people rioting pour le sport has carried on to the present. In the first decade of the current century, we’ve had fairly large riots after games at Tennessee, UMass, The Ohio State, Oregon, Minnesota (hockey), and perhaps others, and smaller ones at other schools.

In other countries, college student riots have an explicitly political agenda, but this is still a pattern, and the rioter-students, even more so than students in the US, are middle-class or rich.

2. Social class and mixed motives. Riots combine practical goal-attainment and irrational exuberance.

Urban riots, as opposed to college riots, are much more likely to start in poor or working-class neighborhoods. These riots usually begin as a collective expression of emotion, usually anger. In London, as in many of the urban riots of the 60s in the US, the immediate cause was the police shooting a person from the neighborhood. But for the youth in these neighborhood, that shooting is only one incident in a long history of unpleasant encounters with the police.

Such shootings do not happen in middle-class or wealthy neighborhoods, and in any case, people in those neighborhoods are less likely to have a history of what they feel is ill treatment by the police or a general dissatisfaction with their lot in life.

The comment also asks, “If the rich and middle class were rioting; wouldn't it make sense for them to tear up, burn down and steal in their own neighborhoods?” No. Regardless of your financial position, burning down your own neighborhood does not make sense. It is irrational. The burning and destruction are part of the expressive, emotional side of rioting (anger, excitement, exuberance, etc.).

But riots also have a practical, rational side – getting stuff for nothing. The lure of an easy bargain appeals to middle-class shoppers as well as to the poor. The middle-class might not have the numbers (or the nerve) to start looting in their own neighborhoods. But if the lootable shops – i.e., the ones that other rioters have already broken into – are not too far away, some middle-class people, especially adventurous youth, might well take their chances. Apparently, that’s what happened in London, though, as Faye says, we don’t know (and may never know) the true extent of middle-class representation among the looters. Middle-class people did not, as a comment on Faye’s post suggested they would, announce their financial position by driving their Bentleys into the middle of a riot where cars are being smashed and burned. The toffs may be greedy to the point of lawbreaking, but they’re not a damn fool. (In the 1960s riots in the US, there are documented instances of people driving to the riot zone from other neighborhoods, even the suburbs, to get a good deal on a television or other merchandise.)