firing of 11,000 air-traffic controllers did in the US. Though Thatcher was hardly beloved among miner ranks, it was the helmeted face of police which, for many, served as the face of the violent conflict. Images of police waving generous overtime checks in the face of literally starving miners on picket lines were not soon forgotten. Consequently, in the narrative of some participants, the long-standing motto “ACAB” or “All Coppers Are Bastards,” a watchword within British prisons since at least the 1920s, became a favorite slogan in the miners’ struggles. The slogan has since entered widespread global usage, helped along by its ubiquitous presence in the youth uprising of 2008 across Greece, and has been widely manifest in contentious protests since.
Similarly, the phrase “Fuck the Police,” often abbreviated “FTP,” has more recently come to hold a central place in struggles against racism and economic inequality. The words gained popularity through 1990s hip-hop, which was itself largely inspired by the street rhetoric of the 1992 Rodney King riots, for which the phrase served as the most recognizable slogan. For all of their force and magnitude, the 1992 riots are still only occasionally remembered in the annals of Black liberation or social justice history, and they are generally dismissed as somehow more of a race riot than anything political. Only if critique of policing (and the racialized practices of policing) is somehow construed as a personal or collective psychological abnormality, divorced from history, can such a claim make sense. The Rodney King riots came at the end of nearly a decade of policing and incarceration policies that had resulted in an exponential growth in incarcerated youth of color and a level of surveillance unrivaled in human history.48 While falling outside the pale of “Black Power” or other recognized political movements, that uprising dwarfed all previous riots in American history by an order of magnitude: it greatly exceeded each of the famous riots of 1965 in Watts and 1967–68 in Newark, Detroit, and Washington, DC, in terms of arrests, injuries, deaths, and fires set. The monetary damage of the 1992 riots totaled three times the combined damage of the previous three.49 The Rodney King riots were not, however, unusual in their cause. Other than the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, every major riot in the United States since WWII has been set off by police brutality or murder of a youth of color: in Miami and Tampa alone, police violence triggered large-scale riots in 1980, 1982, 1987, and 1989. Dismissing these as “race riots” elides the importance of their obvious concern with policing but also belies their evidently multiracial constituency. In the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, 52 percent of arrests were Latinos, 10 percent whites, and only 38 percent African Americans.50 Similarly, although the Tunisian revolution was triggered by Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in response to humiliation by police, and Egypt’s Tahrir revolution by Khaled Said’s death by torture in police custody, the issue of policing as constitutive of Arab Spring revolutions is generally ignored. Michael Brown’s murder had been certainly not the first, but merely the latest, of a long and even global history of police murder of the marginalized; it was precisely this lineage that was invisible to so many confused white Americans, who struggled to understand what could have been so special about the youth. His murder was not special but absolutely mundane, which is precisely what drove the residents of Ferguson, and soon every major American city, to strike out with such brilliant rage.
Even within communities of color, the recognition of policing as a central social movement concern has often been starkly generational. Research concerning perceived causes of the massive 2005 riots in the Paris banlieues is borne out by analysis summarized in Figure 1, looking at 366 statements culled from Le Monde.51 Older neighborhood residents, spokespeople for the government and opposition parties, and Sarkozy himself favored explanations blaming either personal discriminatory attitudes, structural exclusion from access, Sarkozy and the parties in power, or, predictably, excessive immigration and youth delinquency. Of the seventeen statements by neighborhood youth, not one of them mentioned any of these as a related issue; fully 100 percent of their statements attributed the riots either to police (40 percent) or to other causes (60 percent) not understood as “political.” Not one of the 145 statements by older inhabitants or political figures mentioned police. Experts and volunteer associations, presumably comprising and having contact with both of these constituencies, offered even more mixed statements. Older inhabitants’ responses more closely resembled those of political parties than their own youth; this would indicate more of a generational divide rather than solely an ethnic, class, or geographical one.
Figure 1
Source: Donatella della Porta and Bernard Gbikpi, “The Riots: A Dynamic View,” in Seferiades and Johnston, eds, Violent Protest, Contentious Politics, and the Neoliberal State (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 95.
So why haven’t police been understood as a core concern by older and more establishment respondents? This is a question for future research, but for the purpose of understanding the particular situation faced by contemporary social movements, one brief hypothesis will suffice: the centrality of policing, particularly in the neoliberal era of hypertrophied penality, is not taken up as a legitimate social concern because of its very centrality. Seeped in the ideology of the age, even policing’s strongest critics find it next to impossible to imagine life without policing—although the Ferguson and Black Lives Matter movements have begun to change this.52 The purpose of the vast networked apparatus of dissent management might well be understood as an elaborate means of talking around this difficulty. While I will return in the next chapter to the slippage of “nonviolence” from a means of conflict with power to an excuse to avoid it, the propensity of such “talking around” the issue at the center of contemporary conditions of repression suggests a tragic, self-defeating hope for risk-free social change—one often expressed in our time through appeals to nonviolence.
From Masses to Publics
Why Elizabeth Is Alive but Erin Is Dead
On the morning of September 4, 1957, taking the recent Brown vs. Board of Education at its word, Elizabeth Eckford and eight other black students attempted to attend classes at Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas, but were prevented from doing so by the National Guard, in coordination with a virulent mob of whites. After three-quarters of a century of the rule of white terrorism that undid the gains of Reconstruction, themselves won by force of armed freed slaves,53 Eckford and her colleagues’ dignity and courage could very well have been met with immediate and lethal response. Only two years before, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till had been murdered and horrifically mutilated in Money, Mississippi, for allegedly flirting with a white woman. After Till’s gruesome murder, Till’s mother had courageously insisted on circulating a photograph of his disfigured face to recently established Black newspapers and magazines around the country, and the image played a key role in galvanizing national support for the civil rights movement. Just as that photograph worked to bring the systemic violence of southern white-supremacist rule into the national arena, so the mass media coverage of the Little Rock Nine helped ensure Eckford’s survival in the midst of a venomous white mob and the quick success of the immediate aims of the integration campaign:
The drama…was played out before a national, even a world, audience. The affair at Little Rock was not an isolated event in a provincial backwater. News cameras and reporters captured every move of both Elizabeth and the segregationists. In the contest for this larger audience, although greatly outnumbered, Elizabeth won.… When Elizabeth, joined by eight other black students, reenrolled at Central later that month the reporters were again there. This time the crowd beat four reporters—a sign that racist whites understood the implications of the presence of the media—and officials withdrew the students for their own safety. Again, however, isolation was not possible. On the next day President Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent paratroopers to guarantee that the nine African-American youths could proceed with their education.54
Strategists of the civil rights movement were well aware of their dependency on mass media; their articulation of nonviolent tactics was an explicit response to the novel occasions presented by television and the still novel technologies of newsreel, radio, and print. Such tools opened unprecedented opportunities for a heavily disenfranchised
