Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Published by Tom Doherty Associates/Tor.com on January 21, 2020

When nine African Americans who gathered for Bible study in a Charleston church were gunned down by a white supremacist, the shooting solidified a long-standing understanding that black lives only matter to some. That massacre, the Rodney King beating, and police shootings of unarmed African Americans around the nation are recurring images in Riot Baby. Black Lives Matter is a dominant theme, but the story indicts not just white violence against blacks but institutional racism that Tochi Onyebuchi imagines will soon be embedded in supposedly race-neutral algorithms. In the novel’s near future society, algorithms determine who gets out on parole, who gets shot or arrested by mechanized police. The algorithms are just a way to mask the race-conscious desire to control blacks, to assure their subjugation.

Ella Jackson has a Thing. She can balance a ball of light in her palm. She can make a rat’s head explode. She can make toilet paper fly off a bodega’s shelf. She can wrap a blanket around her Mama’s neck and lift her until her legs dangle in the air, all without touching the blanket or her Mama. Something is eating Ella from the inside, something that makes her leave home. Only years later does she realize the good that her Mama does, working in a hospital, standing next to trauma surgeons and wiping up the stomach acid that spills from open wounds.

Ella hates South Central, hates that Rodney King can be beaten like all her neighbors are beaten and nothing ever happens to the cops who beat them. Until she moves to New Haven, she protects her brother Kevin, but when Kev goes to prison, he protects Ella by telling her to visit in person, not as a ghost. He doesn’t want anyone to see what she can do. On bad days, though, he wishes she would burn Rikers to the ground.

Kev was born in South Central during the 1992 riots. He decides to live in Watts when he is paroled from his sentence. The parole board sets him up in a community that it controls, puts a monitoring chip in his thumb, and assigns him to a job. Kev chose Watts because it is as far from the East Coast and the trouble that sent him to prison as he can get. Ella is less sanguine about his choice.

After listening to the news in prison — more riots, rising hate crimes, “Nazis in the street killing black folk” — Kev expects to find a post-apocalyptic world. Instead he finds “refugee-type kids walking barefoot with pieces of glass in the bottoms of their feet, not even flinching because living through the End of the World enough times does that to you.” Through Ella, he soon learns that he is seeing change at its advent.

Riot Baby is largely Kev’s story, but the central moral question belongs to Ella, who wonders whether she should use her Thing to punish. A pastor tells her, “We don’t get where we’re going by matching hate for hate,” but Ella considers the reality that slaves were freed at gunpoint. Civil rights legislation followed protest that wasn’t always nonviolent. If she has a chance to be “the locust and the frogs and the rivers of blood,” what should she do? The pastor’s take is appealing, but anger motivates. From that perspective, the Rodney King riots were useful, maybe even a necessary cleansing. If people aren’t angry about living in a society that devalues them, and if they don’t show that anger, their value might never be recognized.

Riot Baby is not a comforting novel. Onyebuchi nevertheless tells a powerful story that invites serious thought about racial oppression and violence. It is possible that a future utopia might follow a dystopia founded on anger. Readers can differ as to whether a utopian outcome of revolution is either likely or worth the pain, but readers who are both rational and compassionate cannot argue with the need for change that Riot Baby dramatizes.

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