White Girl Bleed A Lot

by Colin Flaherty

  Beatings before and after this.

  Texas has also seen some black-on-gay violence: From a Dallas police report in 2011:

  On March 13, 2012, at about 2:00 a.m. two citizens were walking near the corner of Audelia Road and Forest Lane. A dark colored 4 door vehicle (possibly a Buick) with tinted windows and 24 inch rims approached the two individuals and suspects from within the vehicle began to shout slurs that were disparaging and derogatory toward sexual orientation.

  There were believed to be 5 black male suspects in their 20’s inside the vehicle. Some of the suspects exited the vehicle, and two of them were brandishing baseball bats. The suspects attacked the two victims causing multiple injuries requiring medical treatment.

  In Waco, four hundred black people filled the streets of downtown following a July 4, 2012, fireworks show, throwing fireworks and destroying property. When police arrived, they threw explosive devices and rocks at the officers.

  “Officers’ attempts to move the crowd were not successful and when they moved into the area, the people became hostile,” says KCEN-TV.

  The crowd then started throwing rocks at officers and police cars. One officer received a minor injury when he was struck. Large fireworks that explode with a large flame were also thrown at officers by people in the crowd were attempting to use them as hand grenades.

  An armored vehicle was used to try to clear the streets. When it was brought in, members of the group started throwing bricks and large pieces of concrete.

  Police were forced to use chemical munitions to clear the crowd.5

  In July 2012 three Dallas police officers responded to a 911 call reporting a kidnapping in progress. When police arrived, the suspects ran, splitting up. So did the three cops. Soon things were not going so well for one of the policemen. After three fights and jumping three fences, he was tired and getting beat up.6

  He pulled his gun and after the suspect advanced on him, he shot him and killed him.

  They found crack cocaine in the house. And the guy who died had a rap sheet full of drugs, violence, guns, and stealing cars.

  Apparently none of the hundreds of angry black people who gathered in an emotional, chaotic, and angry scene after the shooting knew that. Or they did not care. The dead man’s mom said she knew he was selling marijuana, but insisted the shooting was not justified.7

  Other family members told the crowd the dead man had been running and the police shot him in the back. That turned out not to be true, though no one would know that for another week.8

  The Dallas News reported that Freddy Smith, who said he belongs to the Black Panthers, screamed at the officers. “I see a lot of white folks and no black folks,” he said of the SWAT unit.9

  Local television reported several members of the crowd had guns. Police broke up fights and fired pepper spray into the crowd.

  There were no arrests, but there were lots of police officers in riot gear. They almost outnumbered the crowd. I didn’t see anyone getting invited to racial sensitivity training. Maybe those folks who brag on Texas taking care of their business differently have a point.

  So how ’bout them Cowboys?

  19

  NEW JERSEY

  Carnivals, casinos, riots: let’s have a real good time.

  This of course does not count the entire city of Camden all the time.

  The liberal reporter freak-out factor in this next story is off the charts. Blacks and Hispanics around the country are in the middle of a nasty race war.

  OK, Poindexter: If you want to point out that black is a race and Hispanic an ethnic group, good for you. That does not change the nature of the violence. The conflict is most widely reported in the prisons where inmates are segregated, or segregate themselves.1

  You may have noticed that I try to shed a lot of the labels the press love to pin on criminals: gang members, flash robbers, teenagers, whatever. For some reason, sticking a label on something helps us dismiss it. Most of these labels do not illuminate, they obfuscate, so I won’t do it for this next case either, no matter how much the local paper wants us to believe that mobs of black people beating up Hispanic day laborers is gang related.

  Out in Englewood, New Jersey, it took a while, but the black mob violence against individual Hispanics got so bad that even the local paper could not ignore it anymore: “Englewood street gang targeting Hispanic laborers for assaults, robberies,” said the Star-Ledger of nearby Newark.2

  A police spokesman told the Star-Ledger “several similar incidents have taken place in the downtown area recently. In each case, a group of young black males have targeted Hispanic laborers, and police believed the group, which may be a local street gang, may be targeting them to initiate new members.”3

  There’s that mind-reading thing again. If mind reading were admissible in court, these miscreants would have been off the streets long ago. As of now, that only exists in a Tom Cruise movie, so I will try not to do it here either. In the meantime, if the police and papers would tell us how many of these attacks have taken place—how many dozens of times—that would be more helpful. And if you just stick to the facts, here is what the Star-Ledger police spokesman is left with:

  These groups are often extremely brutal in their attacks and purposely target Hispanic residents they perceive as laborers who are illegal aliens that they think won’t report the robberies to the police for fear of deportation.4

  If you notice some mind reading snuck into that explanation, you get extra credit.

  Several locals insisted race had nothing to do with it. One commenter who identifies herself as “proudnewarkbaby” flew to the defense of racial truth:

  Not much of a thing with race as it is they make easy victims. They tend to be TOO HUMBLE and subservient. In urban America that’s seen as a weak quality so they become targets.

  Rest easy, we have an explanation.

  Down the road in Newark, a few weeks before, Papa Khaly Ndiaye was living the American dream. This thirty-year-old immigrant from Senegal had been in America for twelve years and was recently married.

  Starting at the bottom of a restaurant chain, he had landed his dream job: Manager at the International House of Pancakes in Newark.

  He was on the night shift when, a few hours after midnight on a Saturday morning, twenty black people in two groups arrived after a night at the local clubs. Words were exchanged, so were threats. Someone made a phone call and soon help was on the way.

  Fighting started. Ndiaye tried to get the combatants out of his restaurant. He stepped into a bullet and died.

  Local officials blamed IHOP for not having a security guard on duty. Newark Police Director Samuel DeMaio said, “Having an officer there on the night of this incident certainly could have deterred this from happening.”5

  As far as suspects, none of the twenty people involved in the altercation knows anything. Probably not even the name of the gentle, hardworking man who died during this episode of black mob violence.

  Also near Newark, an entire fairground of firemen could not deter racial violence. In the summer of 2011 the headline in the Star-Ledger innocently reported “Flash mob appears at firefighter’s carnival in Union County, causing fights to break out.” By now, maybe you know the drill. One hundred fifty black people gathered en masse, chaos followed.

  “Some fights broke out and several people were arrested after screaming obscenities at police,” said the local paper.6

  They didn’t report much about what happened in this small New York suburb, but we do know that it took police officers from two other cities and the county police to settle it. To get the rest of the story, you have to piece it together from the readers’ comments: “Any description of what was the scene really like, from a locals view point has been removed because of racist language.”7

  Then the paper chimed in. Apparently no one was allowed to mention the race of the perpetrators: “We removed a number of comments here that were off-topic. We also removed comments that used racist language.
Responses to those comments were also removed.”8

  Control the words, control the thoughts. That’s how George Orwell described totalitarianism. Note to aspiring journalists: You probably want to leave that George Orwell thing off your resume and clip sheets.

  In Atlantic City on July 4, 2011, hundreds of black people were milling around Bally’s Casino on the boardwalk near midnight. Soon there were fights and pandemonium, “people running for their lives as a man shoots onto the Boardwalk just hours after Atlantic City’s Fourth of July celebration ended.” And of course the whole thing was caught on video, including the shooting.9

  While we wait for that, let’s head over to Portland, Oregon.

  20

  PORTLAND

  Oregon, that is. Gets pretty nasty up there. Nastier than locals

  expect. So let’s give them their own chapter.

  Oregon? Really? Yes, really. Isn’t that where people go to escape racial conflict? Yes, again. But that does not much matter to the people involved in more than a dozen recent examples of black mob violence and lawlessness in Portland.

  They are easy to find. What is harder to find is anyone who seems to care.

  Let’s start with the venerable, up-scale department store Nordstrom. In April 2012 a group of ten to fifteen hoodie-wearing black people stole clothing and raced out of the store. It was caught on the surveillance video.

  SCAN ME!

  VIDEO: “Shopping” at Nordstrom

  So far, it looks like just one more of the hundreds of episodes of racial lawlessness that have taken place in more than ninety cities over the last three years.

  And it is. But the local reaction gives it a unique Portland flavor.

  “As an employee of a Portland area Nordstrom’s I have to wonder why you think that we care?” said a poster who called himself Jason Handleman. “Things like this make work interesting and I hold no ill-will toward anyone in this group. Our security personnel spend more time concerned with employees than clientele, and honestly most employees, at my store, would not help them if they were in an altercation.1

  It is not clear whether this person actually works for my favorite department store. Probably not. Even so, Jason became a folk hero for encouraging the lawless activity. Another Portland resident who calls himself Leander chimed in:

  Rich white high school students wait, and grow up to flash mob our economy and legally manipulate our congress with unregulated lobbying. They are taught by their rich white parents that they are helping grow the economy through deregulation and small government.

  Funny, The Oregonian does not report on the rich old white guys who flash mob and are hijacking our economy and schools. It’s well reported in many respected and less corporate newspapers: Guardian, BBC, Aljazeera, Le Monde, and Democracy Now.

  And Crazed Sex Poodle wanted more:

  I am actually sort of hoping that it happens more, it seems like a trend worth encouraging. Giant corporations like Nordstrom and Chevron steal every day, taking back is something worth fostering.2

  Nordstrom is located in the Lloyd Center Mall, the site of two violent episodes over the last two years. Nordstrom was an anchor tenant at the gleaming shopping center in downtown Indianapolis that locals invested so much hope in. Not anymore. No media personality or political figure would admit there’s any connection between an epidemic of black mob violence in Indy and the departure of Nordstrom.

  But it keeps happening at Lloyd Center, so let’s see what happens there.

  In April 2011 two black men were arrested for murder after shooting into a gang of black teenagers who had just left the mall, leaving one dead. The year before twenty black men harassed the customer of a shoe store in the mall before shots rang out. No one was hit.

  “The past two weeks have seen four shootings tied to the African American gangs, the most recent an alleged attempted murder in an athletic shoe store at the mall Wednesday evening,” said The Oregonian, in a rare admission of the race of the alleged criminals.3

  The Nordstrom theft was one of at least four “flash robs” in 2012.

  In April a mob of twenty black people chased a white couple into a convenience store. The local papers described the ensuing assault and robbery as a “fight.” The mob left when the clerk said “that’s it! I’m going to defend myself” and sprayed them with “pepper spray.”4

  This is almost identical to a crime from a few days before at a Chevron station.5

  In June a bigger crowd attacked an Albertson’s grocery store, following the same playbook: Theft, destruction, intimidation, and no arrests despite the video.6

  The National Retail Federation polled retailers nationwide in 2011 to figure out the impact of flash mob robberies on stores. The report says that “10 percent of the 106 companies polled reported being victimized by multiple offender criminals who used flash mob tactics in the past 12 months. Half of these companies have experienced two to five incidents in the same period.”7

  Even so, local defenders abound: “Come on folks, they are not Thugs, they are students of YOUR Public Education System,” said Rich of the Albertson’s mob in the comments section of The Oregonian.

  Portland also has seen its share of public racial violence on the city’s MAX public transit system. In January 2012 a fourteen-year-old white girl was beaten by three black women while about a dozen other black people took videos, shouted racial epithets, and encouraged the assault. Four people were arrested, including a mother of two of the assailants. The mother was convicted of giving police false information while trying to hide her daughters.8

  SCAN ME!

  VIDEO: Fourteen-Year-Old Girl Beat Down

  Despite the video evidence, the district attorney declined to file hate-crime charges.

  A local TV station went to a community college to do a news story featuring a class discussing hate crimes. At least one of the students said the decision was fine with her because all involved were “little kids being bratty little kids” and besides, she did not see what happened before the video was taken. The white girl may have provoked it, said the student.

  In June 2012 four black people were arrested for assaulting a police officer at a MAX station. The Oregonian, true to form, did not mention the race of the perpetrators.9

  The largest—and to some the most troubling—attack happened in March 2012. The Oregonian, reporting on a police shooting in Laurelhurst Park, tried to assure its readers the park was otherwise safe by saying that it is “better known for its seasonal tree colors than for violent crime.” Fern Wilgus, Laurelhurst Neighborhood Association’s public safety chairwoman, said “the tennis court area has attracted sporadic fights and robberies over the years.”10

  But never mind that. The paper’s willingness to minimize the racial violence seemed similar to how a social worker characterized dozens of violent episodes in Philadelphia, some involving more than one thousand black people, as “kids blowing off some steam.”

  A couple years earlier in Laurelhurst Park there was a homosexual rape following a carjacking. A Latino man got lost near Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. When he stopped to turn around, a man jumped in his car and forced him at gun point to drive to the park where two other assailants met them. “He was dragged from the vehicle, beaten and assaulted by all three men and sodomized repeatedly.” Two of the three attackers were identified as black.11

  In June 2012 a group of 150 black people—described by the newspapers as drunken teenagers—assaulted several people in the same park, robbing at least one boy. The TV broadcast may have shied away from describing the attackers, but an online article reported that Sergeant Simpson said the boy’s “attackers were 5-10 black teenagers who were randomly attacking white teens in the park.” The next night there was another attack. This time three men “said they were attacked by a group of 20-30 black teenagers.”12

  Still, some people seem surprised. “I go running through Laurelhurst Park pretty much every day of the week and have never felt unsafe
. So news from the Portland Police about mobs of drunken teens wandering through the park assaulting people is, um, strange and surprising,” said Sarah Mirk on the Portland Mercury site Blogtown.13

  Captain Amerigo, one of the commenters to Mirk’s posting, could have been speaking for a curiously large number of Portland people, when he/she put it all in perspective for the Portland Mercury. Sure the assailants were black, “but, for you to say that the Right-wing is without fault in this matter, honey please. You a fool, and you know you a fool. BOTH parties are guilty in such matters, and you know it. You fool.”

  Got it?

  If so, the people of Portland have a program for you. After a series of violent events among Portland’s black people in 2011, gang coordinator John Canda issued a plea for volunteers.

  “I need 100 strong men who are not afraid to stand with me in the streets of Portland to speak with youth who are robbing, stealing, selling drugs and gang banging who are shooting up our neighborhoods and killing each other,” Canda wrote. “This needs to end now!”

  “This is the first piece here,” said Robert Richardson, director of programs at Emmanuel Community Services, who led the first shift of the night. “We have to engage. We cannot sit back idly.14

  Let me know how that works out for ya’.

  21

  CLEVELAND TWEETS

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. In Cleveland, hundreds of black people disrupted a community gathering with fights, hostility, and all that stuff. Lots of people were arrested, and there was lots of racist talk. Blah, blah, blah.

  IMMA’ START A RIOT.

  People freak out when they hear talk about race. Put the word riot in there and that just about guarantees full sensory overload leading to shut down.

  Folks who use Twitter are not so squeamish. Racial talk is rampant on Twitter, as is talk about riots. Many are so raw and racist that my friends asked me to stop re-tweeting them.