On America on Fire

This book was received as an ARC by the publisher on NetGalley.

After the widespread upheavals of the past summer—which appear that they will continue this summer after the police shootings of the young Adam Toledo of Chicago and Daunte Wright of Minneapolis, potentially alongside the jury’s decision on the trial of Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd in broad daylight last May—I became increasingly curious about both anti-black racism and police violence. Then, while looking at upcoming books on NetGalley, I found this fascinating work by expert Elizabeth Hinton.

The primary intervention made by Hinton throughout this text is the rebranding of “riots” by African Americans as “rebellions,” against ham-fisted policing, terrible social conditions, and the refusal by white communities—both among political elites and private citizens—to take their concerns seriously. In doing so, Hinton divides her books into two parts:

Part 1 traces the anatomy of a number of rebellions in the immediate aftermath of the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement. Most studies end their examinations of black rebellion with the events following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., instead choosing to view the period that followed as something new. In looking at this period, she gives special attention to small- and medium-sized cities like Cairo, Illinois and York, Pennsylvania, which tend to escape the scrutiny given to cities like Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and more. Ultimately, she argues that a “cycle of violence” was created by authoritarian policing tactics, which pushed black residents to openly rebel (or “riot,” in traditional parlance), which the police would respond to with even heavier measures. The reason that rebellions began to die out in the mid-late 1970s was because black residents came to, at least temporarily, accept the “new normal.” In tracing these rebellions, Hinton does not shy away from grisly details, including those that could ostensibly make those rebelling appear bad. Instead, she is consistent in her analysis and she is undoubtedly right that these rebellions are the fault of the state, which initiated these measures, and white private citizens who, at times, responded with brutality, but more often ignored anti-black racism, claiming that it was something imagined by African Americans.

Part 2 looks at three more recent rebellions: the 1980 Miami “Riots,” which had their origins in Liberty City and Overtown; the 1992 Rodney King “Riots,” which occurred when police officers were acquitted, despite police brutality being filmed; and the 2001 Cincinnati “Riots,” which was started by the police shooting of Timothy Thomas and centered social inequalities in the city, especially the disparity between Over-the-Rhine and wealthier communities. Additionally, Hinton looks at the truce between Los Angeles’s Crips and Bloods, essentially concurrent with the Rodney King rebellion, and argues that the truce failed because state forces—especially the police—did not have faith that the truce would last, and therefore actually escalated their tactics, believing that the truce was engineered out of anti-police sentiment.

While the details of all these rebellions are grisly, Hinton does an excellent job of putting together a cohesive narrative, finding that all these rebellions had essentially the same origins. I was particularly interested in the case of Cairo, Illinois, which felt simultaneously reflective of my upbringing in Illinois, and utterly distant. I think the “distance” must come from a point of privilege. The most interesting chapter to me was the one on the Crips and Bloods, as Hinton’s examination of the successes of both gangs is well-thought, compelling, and utterly fascinating.

The only major weakness that I felt the book had was the amount of material in the first half of the book. Most of the text is in Part 1, and the comparison of multiple rebellions within the same chapter made it difficult to figure out what exactly Hinton was trying to say. At the same time, the book would have benefited from a closer analysis of later rebellions to draw a thread through all of them. However, this critique, by no means, changes the way I see the text, and this is a must-read for all interested in the continuing rebellions of the past year or two.