the days that followed, young men from the town marched through the streets cursing and throwing garbage at the police. A massive nonviolent march was followed by more police actions including the shooting of tear gas into a mosque filled with women and children. Following the tear gas incident, then minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy, having unjustly accused the three teenagers of criminality two days before, gave an inflammatory radio address denying the responsibility of the police or the need for investigation. Hurt and angry, young people retaliated, setting cars and buildings aflame. Fires spread from one poor minority suburb (banlieue) to another, until 280 suburbs, cities, and towns across France were ablaze. For three weeks youths of predominantly North African and African descent set fire to an estimated 10,000 cars and attacked 255 schools, 233 other public buildings, and scores of private businesses. Despite the arrest of nearly 5,000 people, the police subdued the burning banlieues only after the government imposed a curfew—a means last used against Algerian Frenchmen during the Algerian war.5
These two series of events, taking place on opposite sides of the Atlantic, in strikingly different settings and half a century apart, nonetheless display some startling similarities. In both, police violence resulted in the death of one or more minority teenagers. In both, the ensuing uprisings began where the boys had been killed but soon spread to neighboring sites and then distant towns and cities. Following both events, the respective states used the riots to justify harsh new criminal policies targeted at poor minority youths—launching a war on drugs in the United States and harsh new criminal policies in France.
These parallels raise three critical questions. First, why did police forces in such dramatically different settings interact with distinct minorities in such similar ways? Second, why did these interactions lead to riots in New York and hundreds of cities across the United States during the 1960s and in Paris and across France in 2005? Third, why have riots been so rare in New York and most of the United States since the 1970s, even where police brutality and racial profiling have grown? This puzzle is all the more striking since the socioeconomic divide in American cities, like New York, ranks among the world’s widest, whereas the divide in French cities, like Paris, ranks among the narrower. As Michael Katz observes, “Today the most intriguing questions are not why the riots [of the 1960s] occurred but why they have not reoccurred…. With the exception of Liberty City Miami in 1980 and South-central Los Angeles in early 1992, American cities have not burned since the early 1970s. Even the botched response to Hurricane Katrina did not provoke civil violence. The question becomes all the more intriguing, in the light of October 2005, when riots erupted in at least three hundred towns across France.”6
How can we explain the conundrum that Katz identifies? The short answer to this puzzle is that many of the factors that make life unbearable in American slums have little to do with riots. Misery is ubiquitous; riots are exceedingly rare. This is not surprising as a) poverty and unemployment dishearten rather than mobilize and b) people often blame themselves for economic failure. Police violence, in contrast, and the killing of unarmed minority youths by white police in particular spark moral outrage, activate racial boundaries, crystallize grievances along a single us/them boundary, and provoke riots.
No feature of a racially divided society is a more potent symbol of racial domination or instills the message of subjugation more forcefully than police. The frequent identity checks, the stop-and-frisks, the disrespect and brutal manner with which police address minority youths, and, worst of all, the utter impunity that allows the most racist and sadistic officers to commit gross violations of human rights and homicide: all these constantly and painfully remind youths of their subordinate status. As the French rapper Monsieur R notes, police “just by the way they look at you they give you the feeling that you are a second-class citizen, even if you were born here. Children are stopped for inspection five times, just on the way from their home to the metro! And I’m talking of a walking distance of less than 10 minutes…. Today in France the police logic is simple…. Here, if you’re black or Arab, it doesn’t matter if you have money or a good job, you’ll remain black or Arab your whole life.”7
In unequal, racially divided societies political elites rely on police to enforce categorical boundaries. When political rhetoric, distorted media attention, and public policy activate8 those boundaries, police violence against subordinate groups intensifies. Police violence further polarizes social relations around an us/them divide. Under such conditions an egregious incident of police violence may trigger riots and urban unrest. If social movements, courts, or other institutions offer alternative paths to justice, no matter how limited, riots are rare. Riots are the last resort for those who find all other paths to justice blocked.
Policing Racial Boundaries
All states draw boundaries that, as Eric Wolf puts it, “define rights to membership, construct justificatory ontogenies for their cadres and lay down criteria for denying participation and benefits to groups deemed unwelcome, unworthy or deleterious.”9 State building, by definition, entails the creation of unequal, bounded categories—Frenchman/German, citizen/noncitizen, and national/non-national. Extreme categorical inequality results when powerful groups conquer less powerful groups and force them into submission. During and following such historical processes members of powerful groups tell stories about members of less powerful groups to justify their own privileged position. As Adolph Reed notes, “Ascriptive ideologies are just-so stories with the potential to become self-fulfilling prophecies. They emerge from self-interested common sense as folk knowledge: they are ‘known’ to be true unreflectively because they seem to comport with the evidence of quotidian experience. They are likely to become generally assumed as self-evident truth, and imposed as such by law and custom, when they converge with and reinforce the interests of powerful strata in the society.”10
Categories simplify and facilitate exploitation (the expropriation of profits, labor power, and resources) and opportunity hoarding (the exclusion of others from access to valuable resources and opportunities). They “lock such differences into place by delivering greater rewards to occupants of the ostensibly superior category,” notes Charles Tilly.11 Because the categories solve pressing organizational problems and are costly to change, they often outlast their original purpose. Categories constructed for the purposes of slavery, conquest, or colonialism can later be used to reinforce unequal systems of remuneration, for example, “assisting employers in assigning workers to jobs for which they were racially suited.”12 One Pittsburgh company in the 1920s, Reed notes, classified thirty-six different racial groups by their supposed capacity for twenty-two distinct jobs, each demanding different atmospheric conditions, levels of speed and precision, and day- or night-shift work. Similarly, Anibal Quijano and Ramon Grosfoguel and Chloe S. Georas describe “colonialities of power,” in which social practices are “implicated in relationships among people even when the colonial relationships have been eradicated.”13
Adaptation reinforces categorical inequality when social networks form on either side of a categorical boundary. Those on one side of the boundary “claim solidarity with others on the same side … and invoke a certain sort of relationship to those on the opposite side,” notes Tilly.14 Over time both sides “attribute hard and durable and even genetic reality to the categories they inscribe. Wherever they come from the categories have serious social consequences.”15 That is not to say that racial categorizations are static and ahistorical, or that racism, as David Goldberg puts it, “is singular and monolithic, simply the same attitude complex manifested in varying circumstances.”16 Rather preexisting, yet malleable categories are used by a wide array of actors to navigate or control a complicated and evolving environment.
Several problems remain for state authorities. First, polarization can have “the unintended consequence of defining, legitimating and provoking group identity and mobilization, forging struggles for inclusion between state agents and emerging political actors,” as Anthony Marx notes.17 Second, racial, ethnic, or religious segregation may unintentionally provide a space for resistance, as Niall O Dochartaigh and Lorenzo Bosi observe
