WHAT IS A RACE RIOT?
Defining race riots is a two-step process. First, we must come to an understanding of what constitutes a riot and then, among those events that qualify, decide which are fundamentally racial in character. One can easily imagine an event that would qualify as a race riot: hundreds of people in a pitched battle on the streets of a large city, where one racial group hurls rocks, bottles, and epithets at the other, and then receives an in-kind response. Such prototypical visions of race riots are straightforward. The edges of the concept, however, are more difficult to establish. One tricky issue is the number of people involved. Rioting is undoubtedly a collective phenomenon—a single person cannot riot. But how many people are necessary before we can call the event a riot ? Indeed social scientists have often faced this issue, and lacking a reason to use a particular threshold, have instead decided to call the events in question collective violence or civil disorders — and, in fact, many
