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This chapter traces the urban imagination of immigrant communities through an analysis of urban riots related to Muharram, the Muslim–Indian festival appropriated by both convicts and immigrant settlers that became their common meeting point. The festival, which included Indian, Chinese, and Malay participants, was inaccessible to Europeans and took on an identity of its own in the Straits Settlements, based on associations with place. More importantly, it was combined with the Boria, a form of Muslim–Indian folk drama, which was used to construct both cultural and territorial identities, often quite violently. Far from being a utopian site of an alternative morality, the festival was the site of intense competition between migrant groups, who marginalized the Straits government through their activities. The motive behind the Muharram festival was to disrupt colonial urban space, one of the few arenas available for common cultural negotiations, and to challenge its spatial determinants.

The idea that (upward) mobility rates are too low attracts politicians who can then use it to criticise their opponents. In recent internal party struggles, both New Labour and the ‘Orange Book’ LibDems needed new symbols of legitimation, while the younger generation of Tories could use it against the ‘Old Guard’. But mobility is also part of growing discontent among the ‘squeezed middle’ and the alienated working class. Some politicians’ ‘underclass anxiety’ about the restlessness of those excluded from the good things in life, helped motivate pro-mobility policies. Urban riots, the Scottish Referendum, and UKIP support, while of course not solely about lack of perceived mobility opportunities, all depended on a sense of disenfranchisement, distance from a closed and self-recruited elite, and no prospects for improvement.

In retrospect, 1968 was the year a conservative era dawned. The year was so promising that Helms considered a run for governor. From 1968 until Helms’s election to the Senate in 1972, public anxiety about urban riots, the failing effort in Vietnam, continued liberal influence, and the black power, anti-war, and feminist movements aided his efforts to increase the backlash against Democrats. But a shift toward conservatives was far from certain. Helms feared that the 1968 Republican presidential nominee, Richard Nixon, would run as a moderate out of political expediency. Helms used WRAL to push the debate as far to the right as possible during the election, and afterward he never hesitated to criticize Nixon. Helms’s entrance into the 1972 senatorial election culminated over two decades of mixing his media career with politics. He only reluctantly engaged in retail politics. He was first of all a media insider—a news director, a reluctant entertainment executive, and a conservative television personality. He had refined pious incitement for eleven years on WRAL. Along with his campaign manager and close friend Tom Ellis, Helms used pious incitement in a massive advertising campaign to depict his opponent—Congressman Nick Galifianakis—as an out-of-touch liberal.

This chapter opens with an exchange in a community meeting about the Rodney King riots, which raises questions about the nature of these meetings, the role of police in civil disorder, and the nature of police-community relations. The authors trace the origins of community policing as key liberal reform premised on the maintenance of legitimacy. They outline the “eyes and ears” function civilians are expected to play in meetings and explain how neighborhood disputes can limit the mobilizing potential of community partnerships. The authors also discuss the setting where this study takes place and outline their methods. This chapter ends with an outline of the rest of the book.

This chapter closely examines three of LA’s biggest violent disturbances—the 1943 Government Riot (popularly known as the Zoot Suit Riots), the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and the 1992 Rodney King Uprisings. Each section begins with a brief recounting of the circumstances of the outbreak of each disturbance. Following this, the authors discuss the preconditions of each event: from the social, economic, and political changes to the role of LA police and government in each period. Each section culminates in an analysis of the reports produced by each “riot commission.” The final section highlights what the authors found. Tracing LA’s history of violent disturbances, they show that community governance discourse has time and again been used as part of a larger public confidence-building project.