Urban rioting represents an ethnically-based form of social protest that has a long history and has managed to survive well into modern times. Urban rioting may be used as a barometer of the state of ethnic relations. Most episodes of rioting or urban violence in modern times have created the need for official inquiry. Over time these official reports represent the official discourse through which the dominant ideology worked out the rift between ethnicity and social stability. As such, an examination of these official reports will provide evidence of dominant ideological shifts brought about through urban violence. The disturbances in West London in 1958 involved a group of young White males attacking members of a recently arrived West Indian community. The official discourse incorporated a “multiculturalist settlement” which became the foundation of British race relations policy for the next three decades. However, by the end of the 1970’s it was clear that multiculturalism had failed as a social policy. The disturbance in Brixton in 1981 saved multiculturalism as a viable ideology. Rioting in Brixton by young Black youth was the result of discriminatory police practices that allowed police officers to aggressively stop and frisk, which they invoked freely against Black youth. The official inquiry viewed the incident as a demand for inclusion in social citizenship rights by those who had been marginalized. The result was an intensification of the multiculturalist settlement. In the early 1990’s, Whites in poor communities rioted not because they were over-policed, but were under-policed, abandoned by dominant society yet viewed as “self-excluded” by welfare dependency and other pathologies. The effects of a globalized capitalist world in which industry constantly searches for cheaper labor exacerbated community fragmentations and social tensions in poor White communities, ultimately causing them to fall apart from within. The absence of an official inquiry into this and similarly violent episodes illustrates how poor Whites slipped into the status of non-citizens. Thus, the dominant ideology turned from multiculturalism to community cohesion as the answer to societal ills. In the end, however, community cohesion has failed as a social policy and ethnic communities have become even more polarized. Notes, references