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The Riot Is the Language of the White Unheard
An Explosion of Intolerance Inside the White Cage
I felt like an outlier in a discussion on riots. I had to write a piece of my disagreement that blacks Americans are throwing “tantrums” are looting. From my preliminary investigation of “riots”, the term has been shaped by over 13 decades of one-sided violence. The violence starts almost always by a white invasion of mobs, in the case of lynchings and massacres, or police, in the case of the Detroit riot of 1967 for example.
Today, many people react to the visceral reaction on TV, like the breaking of windows and looting, saying black men are “throwing tantrums.” But that is focusing on one of the last frames in a movie and saying that the actress sucks. Today’s TikTok analysis is the depletion of context. We are not only missing the story around something, but we are also missing the reported-on stories that line-up the decades before it, making up a registry of language we pull from to describe instantly what we see. We’re taking a vast historical absence of information and turning into an instant judgment. We are empowered to decide by the reaction’s others have in looking at a blank face.
That technique of looking at the face that is expressionless in one of many developed by French New Wave Cinema in the 1950s and 60s, and this…
