The press was all over the unrest in Los Angeles about a month ago. But since then, the impatient gaze of the industry turned toward Iran, beautiful budgets, trials of the century, and Elon v. Donald. Still, the cycle of urban margins catching fire needs attention—not just as spectacle, but as the result of fixed systems and broken promises.

The recurring tableau of public rage in urban America has been reduced to visual shorthand—burning cars, shattered glass, tossed stones, fleeing reporters, looting desperados, and the theater of rubber bullets, tear gas, and battle gear. The corporate media narrative rarely strays from this script, obedient to its reflexive calculus: Unrest equals lawlessness and unmoored anger.

Regardless of editorial intent, such mainstream coverage—especially in conservative media—attempts to pathologize public rage, diagnosing it as deviance or irrationality rather than consequence. In doing so, the narrative dismisses the very legitimacy of grievance among those already made to feel they do not count because they do not carry the full weight of citizenship. In supremacy logic, “noncitizen” is often polite talk for racialized otherness.

Peace without justice is an anesthetic, and anesthetics wear off.

This reduction of protest to pathology has consequences. It gives cover to expanded exercises of state power, such as, normalizing greater surveillance capacities, lowering thresholds for suspicion and probable cause, suppressing dissent and academic freedom—all upheld by populist rhetoric and sycophantic media amplification.

We’ve seen this spectacle before. In Baltimore in 2015, protests following the death of Freddie Gray were reduced to a looped image of a burning CVS pharmacy, as if fire alone explained a century or more of exclusion. The substance of the protest—calls for justice, dignity, and police accountability—was overwhelmed by sensational visuals. In Ferguson the year before, armored police vehicles rolled through suburban streets, rifles trained on unarmed civilians, creating scenes indistinguishable from war footage. The tableau was complete: disorder, danger, deviance.

In 2019, nearly 700 undocumented workers were arrested in Mississippi in a high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid conducted on the first day of school—leaving children stranded and traumatized. No white-collar managers were arrested. The arrests were real, but the performance was unmistakable.

Normally locked in the vaults of academia, scholarship occasionally does help in offering names to describe what we all know and recognize through lived experience. For example, scholarship on “advanced marginalization,” as Loïc Wacquant words it, documents the corrosive effects of persistent exclusion of marginalized communities and their political, social, and economic exclusion. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s research argues that state institutions produce and maintain zones of “organized abandonment”—communities........

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