To our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, "race riot" meant white people took to beating and killing black people, though, sometimes, depending on location and availability of black people, white people would beat and kill Mexican or Chinese people.

It was kind of like lynching and sometimes included lynching. White people, enraged because of some slight committed (or believed to have been committed) by black people, would swarm a black neighborhood, burning and killing. Google Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921 or Pierce City, Missouri, 1901.

Now, of course, it is most generally blacks that riot, usually after the killing of a black person by police. They seldom go into white neighborhoods, though, and they have never succeeded in driving every white resident from a town, as did the white residents of Pierce City.

We are indeed dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants, and Americans of all colors are now so degraded in stature that looting the beer coolers of a 7-Eleven has replaced wholesale slaughter of another race.

The race riot in America used to be kind of a "teachable moment" as bad writers say. It taught the blacks to stay in their place, by God, and was rough-and-ready proof of Anglo-Saxon supremacy.

If the race riot is at all a "teachable moment" now, it is only used as such by few dreary folks out on the weird, hairy-brained far right, who remind us that blacks are, after all, just children, stuffed full of welfare goodies, stoned witless on crack and as allergic to work as Stepin Fetchit.

No one even says, "race riot" anymore, most commentators choosing to say "riot." This shows that not only is the commentator colorblind, but also that white people were not harmed in any organized way.

Rich people tend not to be harmed in riots, unless they foolishly take the wrong exit driving home from a restaurant and end up in a black neighborhood just hours after a police shooting.

Struggling entrepreneurs are often harmed when their stores are looted or burned in riots and many of those struggling entrepreneurs are Asian-American. White Americans have largely given up on selling CDs, clothing, beer and cigarettes in poor black neighborhoods.

Rioting is a tradition in America, every bit as strong through the generations as the urge to join the Marine Corps, buy your own home or root for the hometown team. The segregated nature of rioting is likewise traditional: poor white against poor black, poor black against struggling Asian.

There has never been an American tradition of blacks, whites and people of other colors rioting against the people who own the stock market, all of the 7-Elevens, and most of the elected officials, though some labor union confrontations came damn close. The rich people never forgave the unions for that merest whiff of revolution.

The lesson is clear. For the people in charge, race riots are better than class riots. War in Iraq is better than class war. Anything is better than poor black and poor white going after someone other than each other.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's book of Pulitzer Prize-nominated column, "Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America," is available for Kindle and Nook.