(WASHINGTON POST) Emily Badger — There is a very real possibility that we get a political backlash, and not social progress.

Until now, I have assumed that there are two possible mid-term outcomes to our current moment of urban unrest. Either — and this is the optimistic option — we finally have a long-awaited public reckoning with the history and official policies that have systematically harmed black, urban communities, picking back up, a half-century later, the warnings of the 1968 Kerner Report that America was moving toward two separate and unequal societies, one black, one white. Or, I figured, we’d forget about all of this in a matter of weeks and move on.

Jonathan Chait, though, points to a third possibility over at New York Magazine, citing new research from Princeton’s Omar Wasow. Consider, instead of progress, or even the status quo, that we get something worse.

Chait was responding to the many people who’ve argued over the last few weeks that rioting can be a necessary catalyst to positive social change. It gave us, after all, the Kerner Commission, which drafted a remarkably honest assessment of race relations in America (even if we failed to follow much of its guidance). Chait:

But the question is not whether rioting ever yields a productive response, but whether it does so in general. Omar Wasow, an assistant professor at the department of politics at Princeton, has published a timely new paper studying this very question. And his answer is clear: Riots on the whole provoke a hostile right-wing response. They generate attention, all right, but the wrong kind.

Source: The worst possible scenario to come out of Baltimore and Ferguson – The Washington Post