Race riot

A race riot or racial riot is a riot in which race is a key factor.

Race riots are often explained as caused by White racism regardless of who is rioting. If non-Whites are rioting it is often explained as due to grievances and police brutality due to White racism. The politically correct mass media has often been accused of anti-White bias in the reporting of riots and for more generally contributing to anti-White rioting by blaming minority problems on Whites.

Another view is that race riots are almost inevitable in societies with high ethnic heterogeneity due to unavoidable ethnic conflicts and therefore will become increasingly more common as mass immigration increases heterogeneity.

According to the 1968 Kerner Commission report, the race riots in the United States in the 1960s usually took place in the context of underlying perceived grievances of a minority racial group (in this case, African-Americans). Often there was an inciting incident in which a member of the minority racial group was injured or killed, and that incident was widely perceived in the Black community to be unjust. The 1967 Newark riots, explored in depth in the documentary film Revolution '67, were sparked by one such event: the beating and rumored death of cab driver John Smith by police. Rumors and gossip played a large role in these riots, because there was a lack of reliable information available to community members. The riots were sensationalized by the mass media.

While race rioting may have some "ideological" targets, such as the police or members of other races who are perceived as unjust, rioting is often accompanied by looting, random vandalism, and other forms of criminality as law enforcement breaks down.