Imagine if Senator Barack Obama, facing a possible presidential convention battle, had warned that if he didn’t get the nomination: “I think you’d have riots.” Then, to be statesmanlike and magnanimous, he added: “I wouldn’t lead it but I think bad things would happen.”
Conservatives would have exploded in justified indignation at this threat of civil violence, which they would inevitably understand as carrying a racial subtext. Even Al Sharpton has never been so shameless as to warn explicitly that if, say, this or that cop isn’t indicted or convicted there would be riots. Instead, the riot threat from Sharpton and other black activists remains merely implicit in the “No Justice, No Peace” agitation.
So what is the difference when Trump overtly threatens riots? His supporters, both in the grass roots and the commentariat, have ignored or brushed off his reckless warning. Is it because white people don’t riot? Actually, they occasionally do, as the intermittent store-smashing during the “No Global” protests of the 2000s showed. To be sure, industrial-strength riots over the last year and a half and over the last four decades were overwhelmingly black. And the professional white anarchists who vandalize Starbucks and McDonald’s outlets during anti-globalization rallies are a very different demographic than Trump’s supporters.