Why Riot-a-Day?

I’m doing this for the forgotten.

For the people whose names never made it into textbooks, whose lives were erased by official reports and polite history. Those who are ignored, who are being removed from museums (if they ever got there), as you read this.

I’m doing this for those who were never shown who we really are. Because the America you learned about in school - the holiday version, the sanitized version - left out the massacres, the strikes, the uprisings, the crackdowns. It left out the blood.

And I’m doing this because I’m tired. So. tired. 

I’m tired of seeing the echoes of our violent past in every news cycle today, and never hearing the press connect the dots, or worse, outright gaslight and lie about it.

I’m tired of hearing “we’ve never been this divided.” We have. We fought wars and waged countless bloodbaths over it. Every time moral panic and righteous indignation collide, Americans kill Americans. We’ve just learned to bury it under new headlines.

I’m tired of hearing “this is not who we are.” It is exactly who we are, and exactly who we have always been. The people we should celebrate as heroes in history weren’t fighting some foreign tyrant, they were fighting to change America itself. Fighting to make this country something better than its ugliest self. That’s the fight we should still be in.

And I’m tired of hearing “it can’t happen here.” It can. It has. Repeatedly. It is happening right now. Another right-wing terrorist shooting. Another state trying to strip people of rights. Another mob being unleashed. Pretending it’s impossible doesn’t protect us. Remembering that it’s real might.

And I'm tired of hearing "we can't change anything" or "protest doesn't work". You'll see that's bullshit in almost every post. Nothing changes until people change it. Through noble collective action or vile atrocity, change is made, not waited for.

This blog isn’t about despair. It’s about reckoning. It’s about remembering the people who fought, the people who were crushed, the people erased by the word riot. It’s about refusing to look away.

Because history doesn’t just live in the past. It keeps coming back. And if we don’t tell the truth about who we’ve been, we’ll never change who we are.

Who I Am (and Who I’m Not)

I’m not a professor or a tenured historian. I’m an amateur historian who studies this kind of violence using what I have at my disposal: my bookshelves, my library card (you do have your library card, right?), my local university stacks, and of course the omnipresent internet. I will make mistakes. I want you to correct them. But if you’re just here to posture or to deny, you can fuck right off.

I promise to correct factual mistakes when they’re pointed out when better evidence is presented. What I will not do is give space to people defending the perpetrators of this violence. They had their say, they had the police, the courts, and the newspapers on their side. This space is for the forgotten, not for their oppressors.

So if you’re still with me, welcome. This is going to be a hard journey. It will be bloody, and it will be uncomfortable. It's supposed to be hard. But it’s worth taking together. Because facing who we have been, who we are,  is the only way to change who we can become.

And about that name: Riot-a-Day. The irony is that it’s almost never really a riot. More often it was a massacre, a coup, a lynching, a crackdown. “Riot” was the word they used to erase the truth, to blame the victims and sanitize the blood. You’ll see that trick over and over again in these stories. That’s why the name matters, it’s a reminder to look past the headline and tell the damned truth.