The Riot Act

The limits Twitter puts on discourse with its 140-character limit are well known, but I still think that Yes, You're Racist failed to transcend them in a tweet from yesterday.

Oh, really?  So when Penn State students rioted in defense of Joe Paterno a few years ago, they were just expressing themselves in "the language of the unheard"?  It's a safe bet they saw themselves that way, but they were mistaken, to put it mildly.  To say nothing of the rioting that commonly, almost routinely, follows athletic events in the US and elsewhere.  And then there's the long tradition of white racists rioting against black people, of which a nice well-informed liberal like Yes You're Racist can hardly be unaware.  Sometimes, yes, a riot can be the work of desperate people who have no other way of expressing their fury at being held down.  That was what Martin Luther King Jr. meant when he said this. But even then it rarely hurts the oppressors, as YYR must also know.