Some observers quickly denounced the riotous protests as senseless violence, criticizing the looting of a Walmart on Tuesday and a host of businesses in the downtown entertainment district on Wednesday. But it is worth noting that the riots in Charlotte are strikingly similar to those that took place in Baltimore in 2015, where the downtown entertainment district was also the site of clashes between protesters and patrons, and in Ferguson in 2014, where retail stores were a frequent target of riots.
Keith Lamont Scott was shot in a predominately African-American neighborhood in Northeast Charlotte. But the protests that followed his death moved from that community into a majority-white area, culminating in the blockading of Highway I-85 on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, nearly all of these sites of protests were in the downtown area’s upscale entertainment districts. (Scroll over the map below to see racial breakdowns by Census tract.)[...]
Louis Hyman, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, argues we cannot understand the protests and sporadic riots and looting that have occurred over the past two days without looking at the intense geographic and economic segregation in which they took place. From Ferguson to Baltimore to Charlotte, rioting, Hyman notes, often breaks out in poor, black neighborhoods—where people feel both oppressed by police and by the predatory lenders and overpriced stores in their communities. Hyman explored this idea in a conversation with CityLab: [...]
In the 1960s, mobile television cameras made police brutality real on the evening news, and gave the civil rights protesters legitimacy. But as the riots wore on through the ‘60s, that legitimacy turned into fear.
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