- (used with a singular verb) the systematic treatment of magnitude, relationships between figures and forms, and relations between quantities expressed symbolically.
- a public outbreak of violence between two racial groups in a community.
In the wake of the Michael Brown death the race-based strife in Ferguson, Missouri that followed, I found myself thinking about race riots in the United States. Having majored in history as an undergraduate, I was aware that there had been several race riots (and other riots for that matter) in our nation’s history. Recent events, for some reason, made me want to spend some time learning about race riots as a group.
It didn’t take long for me to see that there is a deep and complex web of race riots, and that I wasn’t going to find a 250 page primer that would satisfy my new curiosity.
Though I believe that they’re all related, each of these riots has it’s own story. Here, I attempt to develop a very basic understanding of each of them, in order to understand the larger whole.