[while] degraded working-class banlieues, renamed ‘sensitive neighborhoods,’ have been the target of a concerted renovation plan under the heading of Neighborhood Social Development.”84
Wacquant’s explanation is unsatisfying. First, he does not explain why different processes in divergent societies led to similar outcomes. If the American riots were provoked by improvements in their environment (the crumbling of the caste system), why did French riots erupt when things were getting worse (the decomposition of working-class neighborhoods)? And why did the decomposition of working-class neighborhoods provoke riots only in France and only in neighborhoods where blacks and Arabs were concentrated? The decomposition of working-class neighborhoods was certainly a more global phenomenon. Wacquant fails to offer a systematic explanation.
Second, Wacquant exaggerates the stability, homogeneity, and isolation of black ghettos in American cities, particularly during the 1960s, which is when most riots occurred. Indeed, as Wacquant has observed, American ghettos were not yet “ethnically and socially homogeneous universe[s] characterized by low organizational density.”85 Many, such as Harlem, were characterized by high density and overcrowding. Others, such as the South Bronx and Brooklyn, were working-class areas in the process of decomposition—although admittedly decomposing far more rapidly than the French banlieues and spurred by different socioeconomic processes (specifically highway expansion, urban renewal, mass exodus of industry, and white flight). The timing of the new migrants was similarly miserable: black and Puerto Rican migrants arrived just as the last factories were closing and blue-collar jobs were exiting the city. Massive changes to the American city were blamed on the new arrivals, giving grist to politicians who promised to protect white citizens with punitive policing measures, much as French politicians did at the turn of the twenty-first century. Indeed both American ghettos and French banlieues, and not, as Wacquant claims, simply the former, were “anchored and aggravated by public politics of urban triage and neglect.”86 And both were only “ethnic” in the “demand that the state, precisely, cease to treat them as such.”87
Third, Wacquant’s admittedly neofunctionalist explanation is devoid of actors. If the 1960s riots in America were, as he claims, “propelled by the crumbling of the caste system,” why did blacks and Puerto Ricans abandon the streets before the caste system crumbled? If the real demands of rioting youths in France were “decent jobs, good schools, affordable or improved housing, access to basic public services, and fair treatment by the police and other agents of the state”;88 if anger was directed at police as the last “buffer between them and a society that rejects them”;89 and if the 1992 riots in Los Angeles were “as much about empty bellies and broken hearts as about police batons and Rodney King,”90 why do American youths so rarely riot now? If the prison, as Wacquant claims elsewhere, was the main medium of social control, why was there a fifteen-year gap between the denouement of the riots and the explosive growth of the prison system? Finally, what explains the willingness of black and Arab youths in France to set their neighborhoods aflame if they lived in a country devoid of racial exploitation and their neighborhoods had been the “target of a concerted renovation plan”?
Janet Abu-Lughod’s book Race, Space and Riots in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles is a useful point in contrast.91 Unlike Wacquant, who treats the United States as Chicago writ large, Abu-Lughod contrasts the riots in that city to those in New York and Los Angeles. Of the three, New York had the fewest, briefest, and least damaging riots. Abu-Lughod attributes this to police training and restraint. The heterogeneity, accessibility, organization, and political power of New York’s black and Latino neighborhoods were necessary conditions for the development of better policing strategies and better police resident interactions. Where neighborhoods were more segregated, as in Chicago and Los Angeles, police forces were less accountable.
A long history of black grassroots political organizing and a less violent white political establishment explain the smaller and less frequent riots in New York. Abu-Lughod’s analysis supports a boundary activation model. Nonetheless there are some flaws in her analysis. First, segregation in large parts of the city, according to most indices, was worse in New York than in either Chicago or Los Angeles in both the 1960s and the 1990s.92 Integration is not a good explanation for fewer riots in New York. Second, Abu-Lughod uses different explanations for different riots, making it difficult to derive theory from her comparative method. While she explains the riots of the 1960s as unique historical events ignited by the recession and the changing course of the civil rights movement, she attributes the 1992 riot in Los Angeles to the superimposition of race, space, and poverty. Yet Los Angeles was hardly alone. Why did so few American cities follow suit, or in Katz’s words, “not burn”? Why did riots instead erupt in Paris in 2005, Manchester in 2011, and Stockholm in 2013?
Despite Abu-Lughod’s recognition that police violence sparked riots in five out of her six cases (she blames the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. for the other), she barely explores the phenomenon. She claims that police training and restraint discouraged riots in New York, and yet police abuse spiraled during the 1990s. These gaps aside, Abu-Lughod’s keen insights and attention to the role of racial segregation and police violence in provoking riots, and the mitigating role played by social movement organizations in preventing them, provide a rich avenue for theorizing.
In “Why Aren’t U.S. Cities Burning?,” “Why Don’t American Cities Burn Very Often?,” and Why Don’t American Cities Burn?,93 Michael Katz addresses the central paradox straight on. Income inequality in the United States, he notes, swung sharply upward after 1973:
The proportion of African American men out of the regular labor force soared. Among twenty-six to thirty-year-old black men, labor force non participation leaped from around 9 percent in 1940 to 30 percent in 2000…. The number incarcerated skyrocketed, jumping 82 percent during the 1990s; 49 percent of prisoners compared to 13 percent of the overall population were black. On any given day one of three twenty to twenty-nine-year-old black men was either in jail or on probation, parole or both. Nor did allegations of police violence disappear as, for instance, in reactions to the 1997 brutalizing of Abner Louima while in the custody of New York City police.94
One study, he notes, found that “the spatial concentration of the poor rose dramatically in many U.S. metropolitan areas. The number of poor people living in high-poverty areas doubled; the chance that a poor black child resided in a high poverty neighborhood increased from roughly one-in-four to one-in-three; and the physical size of the blighted sections of many central cities increased even more dramatically.”95 Yet riots erupted only in France.
Katz also explains this puzzle by focusing on boundary changes, which he argues, à la Tilly, “strongly affect the likelihood, intensity, scale and form of collective violence.”96 Since Katz is principally interested in why American cities no longer burn, he focuses on boundary deactivation, specifically three far-reaching changes to the structure of race relations in the United States that have deactivated racial boundaries and made riots less likely and less frequent. Katz labels them the ecology of power, the management of marginalization, and the incorporation and control of immigrants.97
Boundaries accentuate and cement inequality, Katz observes, by accelerating the accumulation of advantages and resources. When such boundaries are challenged, as they were when blacks migrated north to American cities, violence is often the result: “Between 1950 and 1970 the black population of many cities skyrocketed: in Newark from 17 to 54 percent, in Chicago from 14 to 34 percent, and in Detroit from 16 percent to 44 percent…. To preserve existing boundaries whites often turned to violence—a response documented with painful detail by many historians. The point for this discussion is that civil violence erupted at the height of urban boundary challenges, when huge numbers of African Americans had moved in and whites had not yet moved out.”98
The first change identified by Katz was to the ecology of power in American cities. In the late 1960s, white flight left many cities under
