Nothing is Over

On Rioting in the Contemporary American Novel

A Shop Ablaze During Minnesota Protests, 2020, Photograph, Getty Images

For the past 35 years or so, the Black working class and their accomplices have rioted against the police across different cities with increasing regularity. I want to be clear: I am not talking about protest. I am talking about riots, uprisings, and rebellions where property is looted, fires burn, rocks are thrown, and tear gas is deployed. In 2020, by the police’s count, there were riots in dozens of American cities. Occasionally, the contemporary riot will be large groups of black-clad anarchists (many of whom are white, though not all) and other radical activists running wild in the streets. These street battles happened prior to Ferguson too. There was LA in ’92, Seattle in ’99, Cincinnati in ’01, Oakland in ’09, Ferguson in ’14, Baltimore in ’15, and the nationwide explosion in 2020. Most recently in Los Angeles, Waymos burned across from the 101 freeway as rubber bullets flew at rebels armed with nothing but Mexican flags, goggles, broken pieces of the sidewalk, and face shields. Rioting is a common way for those who are dispossessed, exploited, or oppressed to express their frustrations with the current governing order. These riots tend to feature young Black men and other men of color.

In addition to the absence of Black masculinity and Black working class life in literature, also absent in so much literature is the riot. Riots defined my young masculinity, as they did for a lot of young Black men. Much writing concerned with racial injustice either ignores the riot or depicts it inaccurately. So while I’m deeply sympathetic to some critiques about the lack of depiction of working class perspectives (especially Black ones) in mainstream publishing, I am set thoroughly against the reactionary literary movement that pops up every so often on my Substack feed. And yet, none of the edgy, anti-woke literary writers that complain about the left seem to want to touch the riot. In fact, this reactionary tendency often groups the riot in with “woke” liberals who talk and write bestsellers about abolition even though the makeup of the riot does not match those gaining celebrity or getting nonprofit money for their racial justice politics. The reality is that many working class people, especially young Black working class men, just hate the police. But anti-woke writers seem to fail to acknowledge this. It’s strange to consider that writing about witnessing a burning cop car, tear-gassed crowds, or looted Walmarts is probably edgier than most writing that those bemoaning “leftist literature” are creating. Riots themselves can be incredibly dangerous and violent, which should excite those who exalt masculinity and violence in the work of literary giants. Though when Black working class men grow violent in response to the violence of the American police state, it is perhaps less sexy to write about.

So why don’t male novelists of any background want to touch the riot? Why don’t those who proclaim we need more working class literature write about riots? My own youth was shaped by riots; I remember watching the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions on television. And at 19 years old, I was arrested at a riot that occurred during Donald Trump’s first inauguration. Friends of mine have faced prison time and felonies for their alleged participation in these events.

What does contemporary literature have to say about riots? Namely, why does it have so little to say about riots? Past literature gave us accounts of the strike. Steinbeck’s novel In Dubious Battle, for example, does an exciting play-by-play of a picker’s strike in the fictionalized Torgas Valley. The strike has wavered as the main form of class struggle in the United States as history turned, and circulation struggles have become the norm in many ways. Circulation struggles are defined by the poet and political theorist Joshua Clover as struggles that occur in the point of circulation rather than the point of production, like public squares, freeways, ports, business districts, or airports, as opposed to factories.

The question becomes: Where is the riot novel?

Whether or not you agree with riots, novelists concerned with race and class struggle should probably write more about them, as they are ways that people express their distaste with the current ruling order. There’s been more writing on contemporary riots from nonfiction writers such as Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting, Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot., States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America’s Punishment System by Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict by Phil A. Neel, or the beautiful n+1 essay “Magic Actions” by Tobi Haslett. This is just a small taste of the rather extensive literature on anti-police riots. They all treat riots as a serious form of global class struggle similar to the historical strike. In modern literature, though, this kind of analysis is absent. I decided to focus on five novels that do, in various forms, tackle the riot. All except one was written in the 21st century. Only one is by a white writer. Another is a graphic novel. Two feature a riot in the city of Philadelphia. Only one of them is written by a Black woman. All of them I would consider to be literary except perhaps The Hate U Give, which is more YA-coded but tries to grapple with the riot as a form. The novels all approach the complexities of the modern riot differently, some perhaps more clumsily than others. I’m concerned primarily with location, violence, looting, and the role of the Black activist and Black artistic subjectivity in the midst of the riot. I’ll explore white participation as well. Most critically, I’m working on whether the novels take the riot seriously as a form of struggle.

Location is a good way to start thinking about riots. Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle features the iconic ’92 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Similarly, the YA novel The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is based in the fictional Californian city of Garden Heights, which I think is supposed to be LA, but could be somewhere else. Paul Beatty’s book features the fictionalized neighborhood of Hillsdale. The importance of a West Coast setting carries into Angie Thomas’ novel, which tells of a family with quasi-Black nationalist as well as gang-affiliated politics (the main character Starr has memorized the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party). The West Coast setting with the long affiliation of California radical politics feels intentional despite the fact that riots have happened all over the country.

Beatty’s story tells the long history of the riot. The fictional community that his protagonist Gunnar resides in, Hillsdale, has experienced many riots with one character celebrating how the neighborhood’s Black and brown residents fought back against “an armada of drunken sailors in the zoot suit riots in the summer of ’43,” as well as “blowing up four police cars and poisoning six police dogs with cyanide laced chitterlings and chorizo in the watts riot of ’65.” Immediately as Beatty writes about the riot, he depicts a surreal and satirical vision that differs from all of the visions of the riot depicted, though feels right in line with Ben Passmore’s. I believe that in many ways this has to do with Beatty’s broader historical vision that riots are something Black working class people have always done to revolt against a system oppressing them. However, Beatty also describes the helplessness and lack of direction present in today’s revolts in this beautiful bit of language: “The niggers and spics had decided to secede from the union, armed with rifles, slingsthots, bottles, camcorders, songs of freedom. Problem was, no one knew where Fort Sumter was.”

The lack of a political trajectory despite numerous grievances against society is a common problem highlighted by many who study contemporary riots. That “no one knew where Fort Sumter was” speaks to how often the riot exists in an aimless chase. But there’s a certain poetry to the way that Beatty writes about this. And he was catching it way back in ’96.

In contrast, the riot depicted in Angie Thomas’ book is not a riot of the ’90s. It is thoroughly rooted in the post-Ferguson BLM era resplendent with activists and white allies. This differs from Beatty’s novel, which satirizes the beating of Reginald Denny, a type of violence that is largely absent from the narratives of the other books I will discuss. Instead of the white truck driver being beaten badly, he is beaten up with Wonder Bread as Gunnar yells, “Oooga booga.” There’s another surreal moment of a Korean woman burning down her own store in a Black neighborhood, then finding the police to turn herself in. No one in the neighborhood wants to burn her store down, so she does so herself. Critically, the Korean character reminds the neighborhood to remember Latasha Harlins, a Black girl killed by Korean shop owners that led partially to the attacks on Korean stores during the ’92 uprising. Similar to how he satirizes the beating of Reginald Denny, Beatty parodies moments of real violence between Korean store owners and Black proletarians. Eventually, Gunnar attempts with some friends to steal a safe. He is stopped by his father, a police vehicle repairman, and whupped, though his friends escape with the loot. The presence of his father in the riot foretells the viral 2015 video in Baltimore of the Black mother scolding her child for desiring to take part in it. These tensions drawn out in the video and here in the novel speak to a Black politics of respectability that bemoans the riot when it occurs. These intra-family dynamics return in other novels.

All the novels other than Beatty’s emerge from the contemporary era of riots. Beatty’s pronouncements on the riot speak to a particular kind of Black surrealism mixed with satire that can be understood as a precursor to the Atlanta episode “The Most Atlanta” where the character Darius returning an air fryer to Target in the midst of a riot is chased by a white woman on an aid mobility scooter trying to prevent looting. This character was based on a real white woman who was captured in a viral video trying to stop looting in Minneapolis. I read Passmore’s Eisner award-winning Sports is Hell in the same tradition of Black satirical surreality.

A violent vision of the riot that we’ll see depicted in later texts contrasts with the hilarious, surreal, and often mundane depictions of looting by everyday people in Passmore and Beatty’s work. Passmore’s graphic novel is set in a fictionalized version of Philadelphia where an undetermined victory for the “birds” leads to a city-wide riot and subsequent battle between football fans, fascists, anarchists, police, and Black nationalists. Passmore’s book, published in 2020 prior to the George Floyd rebellion, shares similarities to scenes in Beatty’s work as it satirizes political violence and the riot, also in a similar way to The White Boy Shuffle. The book follows Black anarchist Tea, who seeks to take part in the ongoing mayhem of the sports riot. So the novel portrays a character similar to Gunnar who is an active participant in the riot as opposed to a spectator figure. The satire of looting is clear; a Black man simply tells a scared white liberal that: “We distribuntin all this fly health food we can’t normally cop but the city wildin so everything free tonight.” Although this character is later shot by a group of Neo-Nazi football fans (eerily reminiscent of future vigilante killings by Kyle Rittenhouse), the looting is portrayed as harmless. All the while, a Black activist complains, “This is what happens when there’s no one in charge,” in reaction to the looting. Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle similarly depicts the looting as harmless: “The lack of chaos was amazing. Instead of a horde of one eyed brigands pillaging and setting fires, the looters were very courteous and the plundering was orderly.”

While this is satire, videos of real life looting are easy to find. They are often mundane or even amusing as looters drop the free stuff they’ve stolen. This counters the hyper-violence of the riot that contemporary Black male novelist Gabriel Bump portrays in Everywhere You Don’t Belong, a novel that features a fictionalized Chicago riot. While riots often turn violent when the police respond with overwhelming force, looting is largely a form of disruption that is economic as opposed to violent against state forces.

Instead of humorous depictions of looting, the protagonist in The Hate U Give, Starr, who at the beginning of the novel witnesses her friend’s murder at the hands of police, attempts to stop the looting of McDonald’s and Walgreens after recounting fond memories at those locations. The strangeness of a character placing herself in danger because she’s nostalgic for chain stores might not have been intentionally satirical, but there’s something there about the sanctity of property in the United States. Despite this, the novel makes room for debate about property destruction as DeVante, one of Starr’s friends, expresses how he doesn’t care that McDonald’s burns because his mother was exploited when she worked there. Starr and DeVante also talk about how a pawn shop known for its discriminatory pratices is being burned down. Characters also argue about Starr’s white boyfriend coming to the riot, and how the rioters are apparently not from the neighborhood. The riot scene ultimately ends after Starr and her friends defend her father’s store from the gangster antagonist who intends to burn it down. The theme of organized criminality in the midst of the riot comes back around in Gabriel Bump’s novel. Unsurprisingly for YA fiction, Thomas’ novel is thoroughly politically incoherent, similar to the Black Lives Matter movement it emerged from. For example, despite the main character’s friend being killed by a cop, one of her supporters is Uncle Carlos, a police officer. This incoherence makes sense, however. The Black Lives Matter movement that the book is inspired by had no clear political orientation beyond a shared critique of police violence. In that movement, you could find every expression of politics, often to its detriment, which could be partly why Black Lives Matter now feels like a movement of the past.

Another scene in The Hate U Give grapples with the often tempestuous relationship of the Black activist radical to the riot. The novel generally treats the riot as something that is violent but also exists outside of the social movement the novel extols. In this scene, Thomas depicts Ms. Ofrah, the leader of an activist group Justice for Just Us. Thomas clearly depicts Ms. Ofrah as the legitimate movement activist, similar to BLM founders Patrice Cullors or Alicia Garza. She supports Starr, helping her find her voice to speak out against police violence. Incidentally, BLM as an organization has in the past few years come under attack for its usage of funds and for being opportunitistic, in criticisms from many families of Black men killed by police. But the rioters? Well, they are less legitimate. For instance, in the midst of a riot, the office of Ms. Ofrah’s nonprofit is burned down. She remarks that “you can destroy a brick and mortar but you can’t destroy a movement.” Ms. Ofrah and perhaps Thomas don’t believe that the rioters are themselves a part of the movement. While a character like Ms. Ofrah is portrayed positively in the novel, Passmore parodies Black activists in his graphic novel.

At one point, the anarchist protagonist Tea encounters Tyson, a self identified “Black revolutionary” with loyal white liberals followers. Tyson bemoans the riot’s violence, and the need for leadership, and tries to stop Tea’s friend Kweku from throwing a brick at the riot cops. As the sports riot begins to take over the city, Tea tells Tyson that “we don’t do in charge.” As these Black characters argue, the white liberals say, “My partner and I would like if you had a united voice,” which speaks to the hilarity of the idea that riots are either wholesale supported or denounced by Black people. Tyson is constantly making speeches for the movement but seems out of his depth when actual violence or conflict emerges. He is also followed around by white liberals who ultimately betray him once he and Tea are captured by racist sports fans. Interestingly, the Black activist character in Passmore’s graphic novel is the only Black person concerned with what white people are doing while the other Black characters are too busy trying to loot, fight, and survive in the midst of the riot. The takeaway is that the Black Lives Matter organization and contemporary rioters are not the same groups of people. That’s refreshing to read in a graphic novel, since that complexity is often lost in this era where Black people are understood as a monolith.

I was unsure how exactly to write about Gabriel Bump’s depiction of the riot in his novel Everywhere You Don’t Belong. The narrative is the most confusing of these books. Similar to the work of Ben Passmore, and The Hate U Give, Bump engages fairly explicitly with Black power politics and it’s afterlives. The main character is named for Claude McKay, the Black communist novelist who I share a deep fondness for. In the lead up to the riot, people in the crowd yell out, “They killed Fred Hampton,” accusingly at the police. Despite this, the book probably has the least kind take on the contemporary riot. Unlike The Hate U Give and Sports is Hell, the Black activist figure is largely absent in Bump’s book. Instead the riot is led and started largely by the Redbelters, a street gang headed by Columbus after a young Black boy is killed. This clear critique of gang culture is also present in The Hate U Give, as I mentioned earlier.

In Bump’s novel, Columbus is not an activist figure but possesses his own grand illusions about being a revolutionary. In one scene, the riot is depicted as cops versus gang members, with “civilians” stuck in the middle. The association of the rioter with organized criminal enterprises rather than as a self-directed working class revolt against the police is relatively unique to this text. While criminal groups are definitely present in riots, the attribution of the riot solely to these groups in Bump’s novel is more akin to an inaccurate right wing fantasy than reality. Furthermore, Bump compares the rioters to the cops as he describes how “anger and bloodlust turned them animatronic.” This narrative of riots as purely violent, even taking the form of home invasions, is a creation of Bump’s imagination. Home invasions are not a feature of riots in the United States. Instead riots tend to focus on looting big box stores and luxury stores in downtown areas, or small local stores or strip malls in the case of the neighborhood riot. They are often mundane as Passmore depicts in his work. Bump’s protagonist is also the only character of the novels I read who actively chooses not to take part in the riot. While at some points, Bump’s protagonist Claude wonders if he should join the rioters, the novel’s clearest message comes from Claude’s uncle, who remarks that Claude should “ . . . stay out of it. There’s enough trouble waiting for you. Don’t go looking for it.”

Bump and Thomas’ work focus much more on violence than the economic disruption caused by the riot. For instance, early on in The Hate U Give, Starr and her family hide from random gun shots as the riot begins. Then, in Bump’s book, Claude sees a burning man, then burning houses and burning lawns. It is unclear whether the extreme violence of the book, including Black teenagers throwing molotov cocktails before being gunned down by polie on live television, is meant to be analogous to reality or perhaps a warning. Bump’s choice to ignore the looting of stores in downtown Chicago that occurred in 2020 and led to the raising of the Bridges to protect Michigan Avenue, as he opts instead to write about fears of home invasions or potential executions, feels like an intentional political choice. This choice delegitimizes the reality of riots as a circulation-based struggle chosen by some Black working class people. But then perhaps it comes out of ignorance. I do not mean to say that riots are somehow nonviolent, but that today’s riots are decidedly less violent than riots of the past.

In the United Statues and in the 21st century, riots have not seen the level of violence Bump depicts, with police shooting live ammunition into crowds and casualty numbers of 26. Even the novel itself speaks to the lack of real violence in the American riot as the protagonist’s uncle says something along the lines of “this is nothing compared to when King died.” This line particularly resonated for me as my own father said something similar to me in 2020 during the George Floyd uprisings. And it’s true; despite the violence and even deaths in the contemporary riot, these pale in comparison to the shootouts with the National Guard that occurred in Detroit in ’67. Bump’s novel depicts a riot in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago that occurs sometime in the midst of Obama’s term as state senator, during Bush’s presidency. The time and location roots the riot in a pre-Obama presidency despite the fact that Bump’s book was published in early 2021. So to be generous to Bump, perhaps his riot is an amalgamation of the ‘92 riot, which was much bloodier than our contemporary rebellions, and the post-Ferguson BLM-type riot.

The role of the white person in the riot is particularly interesting. Apart from the Reginald Denny parody, the white rioter is absent from Beatty’s work. Even more interesting is white participation in the riot, a narrative that is all together absent from these novels, though Passmore’s features some scared white liberals. I hadn’t mentioned it much because the riot only arrives at the end of the novel for a page or two. But it is important to talk about how Emma Copley Eisenberg’s novel Housemates treats the riot. The novel is set in West Philadelphia, my current place of residence. Largely, I think her characters occupy the position of the good white ally at the riot. To be clear, this novel is not grappling with or satirizing racial issues in America. It takes a mostly hands-off approach to writing about gentrification in West Philly, perhaps because it is uncomfortable for the author to confront and grapple with. It’s ultimately a good story about queers artists. However, the novel does feature the 2020 uprising.

Eisenberg writes about the riot as “one day in June” where “tan military tanks meant for warfare roll past the footlocker at 52^nd and Market.” Eisenberg doesn’t contextualize why those military tanks were rolling down the streets of a historically Black neighborhood. Could it have something to do with the fact that Black people were looting neighborhood stores and fighting the police? Is it uncomfortable for a white progressive writer to write about this? One of the book’s characters, Leah, brings water to a march and is then tear-gassed while the main character, Bernie, takes a photo of the demonstration. Both are “good white people” or “allies” during the riot, supporters and observers respectively and as opposed to the “bad white people” taking part as looters or fighters. Noel Ignatiev introduced the idea of the “race traitor.” I wonder where that novel is? I had friends who would be understood by some as “bad whites” or “white anarchists.” They were arrested at the Philly riots, questioned and held in jail for days for showing up with water to flush tear gas from their eyes. I think this is perhaps the difficult part about being a progressive white writer today: You aren’t supposed to write about things that are coded as Black, so writing about riots is not appropriate in the liberal literary world. I don’t fault Eisenberg much but I do wonder what a novel written by a white American about the riot would look like, because that subjectivity is distinctive from Black subjectivity in a riot. The only other qualm I have with Eisenberg’s book is that there are allusions throughout to the radical politics in West Philadelphia. In fact, Eisenberg references an anarchist coffee shop, though as a West Philly resident I am unclear where this is. But there is no mention or exploration of how those politics interact with the riot. Do the anarchists in West Philly stay home or do they participate in the riot? The government certainly blamed a lot of rioting on anarchists and outside agitators, especially as “bad white people” making the situation worse for Black people. Trump demonized certain cities as “anarchist jurisdictions,” I’m curious why this was left out but then again, the novel is not really about riots or class struggle so perhaps in my curiosity I am too harsh. But the question remains. Where is the novel about a white rioter who took part in the nightly sieges of the Federal Building in Portland?

Proletarian literature was a movement in the 1930s, from the working class who wrote about the working class. They depicted strikes, the main form of class struggle back then, which were sometimes illegal, always violent, and often involved destruction of factory property. While the proletarian novel is often overly propagandistic, literature sorely needs a return to social realism and stories of the proletariat. Satire may be an avenue for this, as the novels that took the riots the most seriously, historically and politically, were Ben Passmore’s graphic novel and Beatty’s seminal The White Boy Shuffle. I am unfortunately less impressed with the other three offerings. Critically, only Passmore’s book is truly about the riot. Though, as a sidenote, his wonderful new book about the Black armed resistance across United States history, Black Arms to Hold You Up, arrives tomorrow, and also deals with some of the themes in this essay. Angie Thomas’ book is a close second, though it is more about the Black Lives Matter movement than the riots themselves. I struggled to find books that grappled with riots, which has largely to do with the fact that most Black literature is uninterested in Black proletarian life as I’ve argued elsewhere. And a big way that the 21^st century American proletariat interacts with the world when they feel oppressed is through the riot. While there have been riots in American classics such as the climax in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, riots are extraordinarily rare and often stunted in their depictions, especially in popular literary fiction from the examples of Housemates and Everywhere You Don’t Belong. In The White Boy Shuffle, Gunnar Kauffman remarks that, “The day of the L.A. Riots was the day I learned it meant nothing to be a poet.” While I do not think witnessing a rebellion renders writing useless, I do think that witnessing historic and economic forces collide in a class struggle can make our writing seem rather small. Despite this, the goal of any good artist should be to write and bear witness to the social realities and struggles of the time. Riots, like them or not, are a part of that. As the late Marxist poet Joshua Clover recounted in his work “Poem (Sep 26, 2023),” “nothing is over, that is the only certainty.” His words ring true more than ever.

Luke McGowan-Arnold is a writer from Rockford, Illinois, based in Philadelphia. He writes about American subject formation, subcultures (on and off the internet), Black people, and popular social movements.