Stuff White People Riot About

When the St. Louis-area police brought out all its military
equipment and camouflage to bear against its own citizens
protesting the shooting of Michael Brown this summer, they finally
drew some national attention to the serious problem of
overmilitarized local law enforcement agencies. On Last Week
Tonight with John Oliver, the titular host mocked the town
of Keene, New Hampshire, for requesting a BearCat military vehicle.
They defended the addition because town’s annual pumpkin festival
could be a target for terrorist attacks. How silly!

This weekend, Keene’s annual pumpkin festival was ruined by
violence. Whoops! Okay, they weren’t terrorists, though; they were
rioting drunken college students, and arguably police
militarization still isn’t a needed response. Still, it’s amusing
to note, though perhaps not if you’re a resident of Keene. There
have been
dozens of arrests and, yes, police came out in force to use
tools like pepper spray to disperse the crowds. There have been
extensive reports of property damage. People were struck and
injured by thrown rocks and bottles. There may be more arrests
coming.

Keene, New Hampshire, is a pretty white city, so now folks are
comparing the way the riots there have been described compared to
the mostly peaceful (but not always) protests in Ferguson.
Photo memes have become the weapon of choice, comparing words
used for each protest:

My one criticism of the above comparison is that while it’s true
these words were thrown around to describe both incidents (or
series of incidents, I guess) they didn’t all come from the same
media mouths.
CNN may have called the Keene kids “rowdy,” but did they call
the protesters in Ferguson “thugs”? Looking at the media as one
great big “them” is an impediment in actually trying to any
particular media outlet to account for careless use of language.
Also, it can illustrate more of an obsession with optics or
semantics over the real issues involved. I don’t think anybody is
suggesting what happened in Keene was anything other than flat-out
riots and violence.

There’s also some, “Black people riot like this. White people
riot like this,” discussion that’s worth taking a look at.
In Ferguson, people were rioting over perceived abuse of police
power that left a young man dead. In Keene, people were rioting
over. … well, nobody’s really sure, actually.
Luke O’Neill and
Jordan LeBeau at boston.com have a couple of pieces analyzing
the way we look at black people rioting versus the way we look at
white people rioting and the reasons behind them that are worth a
read. The one thing I find worrisome is the idea that O’Neil
suggests that it’s not that police are too hard on black rioters,
but rather they’re not hard enough on white rioters. While there
are a number of incidents of drunken white dudes causing all sorts
of damage in response to sports or … mostly sports, I guess … these
riots still don’t happen in the frequency where we need to be
suggesting that the problem is that police aren’t aggressive
enough.