Here’s a quote from Dreams From My Father that feels very appropriate when thinking about the Little India riot:
“I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless, how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair.
“I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.”