Riots arise where people believe that ordinary political channels will not hear them.
King said it in a 1966 television interview with Mike Wallace and developed it in his 1967 speech 'The Other America': while condemning riots as self-defeating, he argued that the conditions producing them had to be condemned as vigorously. He used the point to press for action on housing, jobs and poverty.
In practice
- A city's inquiry into a riot finds a list of complaints residents had made through official channels for years without reply.
- A workplace in which grievances have no route to management sees sabotage and walkouts instead of complaints.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is blocked channels: when voice fails, people turn to disruption. Another is relative deprivation, in which rising expectations meet unchanged conditions.
- In its favour
- Consistent with the Kerner Commission's 1968 finding that grievances over policing, housing and employment lay behind the riots of 1967, and with research linking protest violence to exclusion from institutional politics.
- Against it
- Riots also occur among groups with ready access to politics, and crowd dynamics, opportunism and single policing incidents often matter as much as long-run grievance. Critics argue the formulation can be used to excuse violence, which King himself rejected.
- Standing
- Compare Tocqueville's paradox and the Piven–Cloward disruption thesis.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works