When  I quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “A riot is the language of the  unheard”, people would tell me: “But that’s a crime! It’s barbaric,  unlawful. It’s not right!” I would tell them: But languages are not  always beautiful. What you heard, dear friend, is a desperate plea for  help. It is the gutteral sound of a black man being choked. It is the  sound of the underprivileged millions crying out in unison under the  systemic oppression of the privileged. It is the sound of the poor, the  discarded, the outlawed, the vulnerable clawing at each other for scraps  at the dinner table, while the utterly oblivious bourgeoisie sits in  the comfort of their own homes and judges. These people are without a  voice, without a home, and without a future. These people have to make  themselves be heard somehow, and what better way to do this than to set  things on fire? Fire is destructive. It burns, it razes, it consumes. It  burns down the facade of prosperity, of peace, quiet, and harmony  within the United States. It razes the naive belief that class struggle  no longer exists. It consumes the game of make-believe that ‘everything  is still fine’ that the middle class seems so eager to play every  morning when they wake up and feed themselves to the Machine. A riot may  not be a beautiful utterance, but it is a language nonetheless.
No,  I do not condone violence nor bloodshed nor wanton destruction of  people’s livelihoods. Rioting was never right nor moral nor justified.  But it is a cry for help. It is when a true leader must acknowledge the  grievances of rioters, and pledge to make amends to end the riots.  Threatening to shoot at his own people is not a good way to end riots.  It is an undeniable fact that these riots are happening right at this  very moment. Hear their pleas, understand their cause, act on their  behalf. Any refusal to do so will rip this already fractured society  apart and irrevocably bring about bloody, bloody revolutions. Perhaps,  that would be a more favorable outcome?