The George Floyd riots are detracting from the real issue at hand

The argument

This argument, made from within the camp that sees the George Floyd crisis as a crisis of civil liberties, holds that the riots — as distinct from the peaceful protests — are detracting from the real issue at hand: state violence against citizens. The real issue, on this view, is precise and urgent. A man was killed by a police officer in public view over a suspected counterfeit twenty-dollar bill; the question his death poses concerns the state's power over the individual — police brutality, impunity, and the liberties of citizens against their government. That is an issue capable of uniting Americans across political lines, because almost no one defends what the footage shows. But where protest tips into rioting and looting, the public conversation changes its subject. Media coverage pivots from the killing to burning buildings; politicians respond to disorder rather than to brutality; and the moral clarity of the grievance is muddied by images that allow opponents to recast a movement against state violence as a problem of law and order requiring more state force — curfews, militarised streets, expanded police powers. The riots thus hand the cause's adversaries their counter-argument, and visit their costs on the very neighbourhoods the movement seeks justice for. Proponents stress that this is a criticism made in sympathy with the cause, not against it: the point is that the cause is too important to lose to its own excesses. Every news cycle spent on looting is a news cycle not spent on Derek Chauvin's knee and the system that placed it there. From this standpoint, discipline is strategy. Because the riots are detracting from the real issue at hand — the state's violence against its citizens — this argument holds, they undermine the very cause the moment demands be heard.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue the causal claim is asserted rather than established, and that the record of 2020 runs against it. Attention to police violence rose sharply and durably that summer: polling on whether police treat black Americans unfairly moved substantially and stayed moved, prosecutions followed, and the killing became one of the most covered domestic stories of the decade. The sustained coverage the argument treats as having been diverted was in significant part produced by the scale and intensity of the events themselves. The same objection has been made in every comparable episode, including about the civil-rights demonstrations of the 1960s, and historians of that period generally find that disruptive protest raised the salience of the underlying grievance even as it cost sympathy in some quarters. The empirical literature on how violent and nonviolent protest affect public opinion has produced findings in both directions; the argument presents one side of an open question as settled. It also assumes a fixed quantity of public attention divided between the killing and the disorder. Coverage does not work that way — the story that dominated 2020 was both at once — and the realistic alternative to disruptive protest is usually not disciplined protest with identical reach, but protest with far less of it. An argument that the movement should have been quieter has to show that the quieter version would have been heard. The category itself was contested at the time. The great majority of demonstrations that summer were peaceful, by the count of the researchers who catalogued them, while coverage over-represented the exceptions — which means 'the riots' is doing unexamined work in a claim about what coverage focused on. And there is a question about where the argument places the burden. The conversation about disorder could equally be ended by the conduct that generated the grievance; choosing the protesters as the variable to adjust is a decision about framing rather than a finding about strategy.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Common ground, but the premise assumes the grievance's uniting potential is diminished rather than raised by disruption: attention to police treatment of black Americans rose sharply and durably through 2020, and the coverage said to have been diverted was in large part generated by the scale of the events. [Rejecting P2] The pivot in coverage is asserted rather than shown, and research on how disruptive protest affects public opinion has produced findings in both directions. The premise also assumes a fixed quantity of attention divided between the killing and the disorder, when the realistic alternative is often not disciplined protest of equal reach but protest with far less. [Rejecting P3] Which events counted as riots was contested at the time — the great majority of demonstrations were peaceful by the count of researchers who catalogued them, with coverage over-representing the exceptions — so the category is doing unexamined work in a claim about what coverage focused on.