'Don't Make the Black Kids Angry': The hoax of black victimization and those who enable it.

by Colin Flaherty

  A black NPR reporter explained the connection between white privilege and violence to Tracy Halvorsen earlier this year during Black History Month. In an article called Baltimore, You Are Breaking My Heart, Halvorsen described the relentless crime and violence in her gentrified Baltimore neighborhood. How she had to borrow her neighbor’s pit bull to walk around the block. How her neighbors were victims. [892]

  How public officials accepted that as normal.

  Halvorsen included all the requisite denials that race had anything to do with the patterns of crime and hyper-violence in Baltimore.

  Activists in Baltimore corrected her quickly and in large numbers: Race had everything to do with it, they said. Her white privilege gave her an unrealistic expectation of safety in her neighborhood. Her white race blinded her to the real causes of black crime.

  “I think the problem here is that many white and/or upper/middle-class residents of Baltimore – and, of course, the Maryland suburbanites who work or play in Baltimore – show no sense of the structural problems plaguing the city and the roots of violence,” said a commentator known as Shereen at a local blog that focuses on journalism and music operated by NPR reporter Lawrence Lanahan.[893]

  Lanahan says it’s time to give some tough love to the white people in Baltimore who do not like crime.

  “It’s tough to talk about white privilege in the face of crimes like the ones Halvorsen cites, with innocent victims killed and badly injured and stunned families left to grieve,” Lanahan said. “There’s also a lot that goes on, from individual decisions to local, state, and federal policy, that ensures – whether intentionally or not – that all the social ills stay where they ‘belong’ in the neighborhoods that people like Halvorsen and, frankly, I won’t live in.”

  White neighborhoods “get more resources” than black neighborhoods, Lanahan said. That racial disparity causes violence, he said.

  Or as President Obama called it in a recent speech to the Black Caucus: The “justice gap.”[894]

  This is the kind of atmosphere that David Ruenzel helped to create with his early and oft-cited work on white privilege for the Southern Poverty Law Center. The kind mentioned in his obituaries. The kind that blinded him to the dangers of being a white person in a black neighborhood in Oakland.

  Other visitors to the Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve where Ruenzel was murdered describe the trail as idyllic. An oasis. A hidden gem.

  But commentators to the Oakland news site that reported Ruenzel’s death were a bit more explicit: “That parking lot is a well known site for smash and grabs,” said one of several. Others pointed out graffiti and other crimes.

  Another commentator, as if he were channeling the dead writer, chided anyone who suggested however slightly that white people are at risk of violent crime from black people in Oakland: “I've never read more atrocious comments. The white fear/hate is pretty scary.”

  This is the world the Southern Poverty Law Center hath wrought: Comments about killing are scarier than killing itself.

  Psychologist Marlin Newburn says the comments are not based on fear. Or hate. Just a feeling that something is very, very wrong with astronomical levels of black mob violence and black criminality.

  And something is even worse among those who would deny it — or explain it away.

  Like Ruenzel.

  “Some liberals, most of which are ego-soaked, look for ways to support their self-perceived importance so they champion imaginary causes for that purpose,” Newburn said. “They are adult-children who feel free to construct fantasies about their greatness. Their narcissism in part functions to blind them to inconvenient realities. So to compensate, they idealize the targets of their misdirected and pathological "caring."

  The enablers are just as guilty as the predators. More Newburn:

  “They perpetuate misery by defending the indefensible such as widespread black predation and other crimes. It causes too much cognitive dissonance and confusion, and it doesn't comport with their imagined status as a great liberator and defender of their chosen imagined, downtrodden group.

  Today, Newburn is an adjunct professor of psychology at Lake Superior State University. But for the last 30 years, he toiled in Michigan courts and prisons as a forensic/clinical psychologist. That’s a long time watching white liberals trying to ignore, deny and condone black mob violence and black criminality.

  “Reality will only disrupt their fantasies as all-knowing and all-protecting avengers. Maturity is sometimes defined as when a person ends illusions in their thinking, and accepts reality, no matter how distasteful. I apply that same definition to the grounded, peaceful, law-abiding, sane, and stable.”

  “Over the years I've examined and found a trait of sociopath in most liberals. They have this sadistic gratification in creating or fomenting social chaos and conflicts, then, presenting themselves as "above it all", they arrive to fix the problem they themselves caused or perpetuated. Think of it as mental illness. A Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, but on a very large scale.

  Ruenzel is hardly the first enabler of black violence to believe he was exempt from it, as urban pioneers are finding throughout the country.

  Newburn calls that “death from willful ignorance.”

  That’s tough talk about a recently deceased husband, father and teacher whose death moved a lot of people to remember him with affection.

  Tougher still for other victims and their families who had nothing to do with this insanity. Or even knew it existed so widely and so deeply. So fatally.

  Searching for the Next Michael Brown.

  It’s open season on cops.[895]

  Families are lining up to make their son the next Michael Brown. Waiting to tell their story of how racist cops killed their child For No Reason What So Ever.

  The latest example comes from Philadelphia where, in December 2014, police shot Brandon Tate-Brown. The details are familiar enough: The 26-year old Tate-Brown was driving at 3 a.m. without headlights when two officers stopped him. [896]

  If this stop was anything like most others, Tate-Brown convinced himself he was being pulled over for one reason only: Driving While Black.

  Soon after he got out of the car, a struggle began. That’s how reporters describe it so they can leave open the journalistic possibility that instead of Tate-Brown resisting arrest and attacking police, maybe the cops attacked him For No Reason What So Ever.

  Other than they are degenerate racists, of course.

  Whether Tate-Brown attacked the cops or the cops attacked him For No Reason What So Ever, he was soon back in his car, lunging for a gun.

  There they killed him.

  The gun was stolen. The dead man was a hardcore convict with a history of shooting people and doing time in prison. Being in possession of that gun — stolen or not — would have been his ticket back to the penitentiary.

  That did not matter much to the outlaw’s family.

  “From my eyes, he was a good guy,” Tate-Brown’s mother told the local NBC affiliate. “I would like to know why the police have the right to kill instead of disabling. It has to stop.”[897]

  Tate-Brown’s mother last saw him during the Sunday night Philadelphia Eagle football game. The family said he had a jovial spirit despite a difficult past, said the reporter for the NBC affiliate. He had just gotten a job and was getting his life together, they said.

  It is not known whether he learned that jovial spirit in prison, where he recently spent five years for trying to kill someone. He had four prior convictions, two for Attempted Murder and related charges (including Violation of Uniforms Firearms Act), Theft and Receiving Stolen Property.

  The next night, Tate-Brown’s mother was in the street and, with the assistance of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, was telling a crowd that her son would never do anything like starting a fight with a cop.

  No one seemed to care she was not telling the truth.[898]

  About 100 miles down the freeway in Baltimore, just a few
hours before, another cop faced the same situation. This time with a different result.

  A cop at a gas station noticed the strong aroma of sweet, sweet marijuana coming out of a car. So he radioed a patrol car to make the stop.

  The police removed the driver from the car without incident. But in the back seat, 19-year old Donte Jones refused the request to get out of the car while sitting with his hands in his waistband. Police threatened to tase him, so Donte shot him. Three times.

  He ran. They caught him. Alive.

  Xx Later a press conference, police officials described Jones as a repeat offender with weapons violations.[899]

  The cop is still alive.

  The Baltimore Sun, known more for the absence of crime coverage than actual crime stories, actually got at least part of this one right:

  “The shooting comes just hours after hundreds marched city streets to demonstrate in the wake of two high-profile deaths of individuals in police custody. Police commissioner Anthony Batts said the timing of this shooting was not lost on him against the backdrop of the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York.”

  "We've had marches nationwide over the fact that we have lost lives in police custody," Batts told the Baltimore Sun.” I wonder if we'll have those same marches as officers are shot, too.”[900]

  We’ll get back to you on that Commissioner.

  Even before the “hands up don’t shoot” marches with songs about racist police became the latest national rage, black families reflexively and deceptively defended their criminal relatives — regardless.

  Chicago is teeming with examples.

  In March, police saw Raason Hill (or Shaw, depending) conducting what looked like a drug deal. He ran when they tried to stop him.

  Soon he was hopping over a fence and a gun fell out of his waistband: a .40 caliber handgun with laser sighting. Raason picked it up and pointed it at the police. They shot the 20-year old dead.

  Then the riot began. On video. The Chicago Tribune got this part right: “The incident drew a crowd of more than 100 into the street after the shooting, some of whom said they were friends or relatives of the man who was shot. Many were yelling and some fought. One man tore down yellow police tape. At least three were taken away in handcuffs.”[901]

  All agreed Raason was a good boy who never had a gun. Everyone said so. Never did anything wrong. Well, maybe one or two things that but did not matter because he was trying to get his life together.[902]

  Still in Chicago in August, police responded to reports of a running gun battle. They arrived at the scene to find 17-year old DeSean Pittman, holding a gun, standing over the body of a person he had just shot.[903]

  When DeSean pointed the gun at the cops, they shot him dead.

  At a memorial ceremony for DeSean, the crowd heard one story after another of how DeSean was a saint and the police were racist villains. Murderers.

  DeSean’s parents said the police murdered their son For No Reason What So Ever.

  DNA Info picks up the story:[904]

  The group gathered for the vigil allegedly turned against police when a woman pointed at an officer monitoring the group and yelled, "That's the rookie mother------ that killed him," prosecutors said Wednesday.

  The crowd began to chant, "Kill the rookie," as some pelted police with candles and bricks, authorities said. People threw branches, bottles and other debris from the street while yelling "CPDK," which stands for "Chicago Police Department Killer," officials said.

  At some point, a woman drove a Ford Escape into an officer, sending him to the hospital with a fractured leg. Two other officers also were hospitalized after they crashed their squad car heading to the melee, authorities said.

  Police arrested eight people. While some were released without charges, five were charged with felony counts of aggravated assault of a police officer and mob action, according to court records.

  A day or so after the memorial turned riot, pictures of DeSean emerged: There’s DeSean holding a gun. And another gun. There’s DeSean taking a selfie, showing off his previous bullet wounds. There’s DeSean posing with his proud father, gauze and tape covering his torso from a recent hospital stay for another violent encounter. There’s DeSean’s family, flashing gang signs.

  There’s DeSean on a train, beating a passenger.

  There’s DeSean’s father on Facebook, proudly displaying many of these pictures of his son, the thug.[905]

  “I feel they executed my son,” DeSean’s dad told vice.com. [906]

  In another Chicago neighborhood two hours before DeSean pointed a gun at police, so did Roshad McIntosh. He met the same end. His mother and friends said the same thing. “Chicago police gunned my son down for no reason. They said he had his hands up, telling them not to shoot. They killed him anyway,” DeSean’s mother said to the Chicago Tribune.

  That was a lie too. Though that did not stop anyone from repeating it hundreds of times on Facebook and Twitter and in the streets.

  Let’s finish with a video from Chicago: In December 2012, Jamal Moore was one of five black people in a car refusing police orders to stop. Moments before, five black people matching their description and car had robbed a Chicago trucking company. With a gun.

  So the chase was on. But not for long. The car crashed and everyone got away, except for Jamal: He started beating one of the cops who caught him. And when he was finished with him, he headed for the cop’s partner.

  He ignored her pleas to stop and she shot him dead.

  Soon Jamal’s family was on the street, telling people their son, cousin, brother, whatever, was a good person who was shot For No Reason What So Ever.

  That is when the riot started: The crowd attacked police with bottles and bricks and whatever.

  One bystander, on video, reminded his fellow rioters of one fact that is now often heard even today: “They can’t do shit if we start a riot right now,” he said. “They can’t shoot all of us.”[907]

  The Worst One Almost Got Away

  Black mob terrorizes single white mom.

  Officials shrug.

  So I finished the book. This book.

  But I thought I would take one more look through my files: The thousands of stories and links and videos and 911 calls and emails and Tweets and Facebook posts that I archive. All about racial violence.

  Within five minutes, after reviewing just a fraction of the material, I came across this episode of black mob violence that might just be worst of all.

  And I missed it first time around.

  Here’s the story from Middletown, Ohio, Spring 2014.

  But it really starts in November 2013. That is when Jennifer Chitwood and her two small children returned home on Thanksgiving Day to find a group of black people burglarizing her house. Stealing her flat screen TV. She called the police and they arrested one person.

  The thieves and their friends did not like that. They called her a “cop-caller.” You know, the same kind of witness intimidation that the District Attorney in Philadelphia says is “epidemic.”

  Local law enforcement greeted this news with a shrug after the “neighborhood teenagers” began the threats, harassment, vandalism, violence, and ultimately the arson that would burn her home down.

  Finally it happened: In May of 2013, dozens of black people were in her front yard, back yard, banging on her door, firing pellet guns, throwing lit flares, yelling death threats, trying to break in.

  The 911 operator greeted her emergency call the same way police and prosecutors greeted her plea for help from this black mob violence and witness intimidation: With a curious indifference.[908]

  The local reporters did not see anything urgent about it either: “Jennifer Chitwood said she left with her family a few hours before the fire because of a disturbance at her home,” said the Local 12 News. Disturbance? Listen to the 911 calls and decide for yourself if that is a disturbance – or a full-blown life-threatening emergency.[909]

  Two hours late
r, her house was a smoldering ruin. Police arrested two suspects and quickly dropped charges against one. And that was it. No bigger story anywhere until about a week later when some clown started dropping flyers into the neighborhood saying he was going to start a “white neighborhood watch.”

  Now that was national news. “Ohio town investigates racist fliers imploring ‘White Guard’ to stand against black criminals,” said the Daily News in New York.[910]

  In August 2014, a “teenager” pled guilty to a misdemeanor in connection with the arson. The local paper described it as “An ongoing dispute between a group of neighborhood juveniles and Jennifer Chitwood, who lived in the home that was burned down, is thought to be the motive for the arson.”[911]

  Ongoing dispute?

  The only dispute was whether Jennifer Chitwood should stand by and allow this large group of black people to steal her stuff, threaten her family, burn her home and end her life. All of which happened over a period of six months while police, prosecutors and press did nothing but shrug, shrug and shrug.

  Finally, an Explanation from Wilmington, Delaware.

  Wilmington, Delaware has a big problem: Large groups of black people are going crazy.

  And this collective “mental illness” is causing record levels of crime and gun violence in this Chocolate town of 70,000.

  Which Newsweek now calls Murder City USA. [912]

  That is the official diagnosis of the city council which, by unanimous agreement in December 2013, asked the Centers for Disease Control to investigate a wave of psychological mayhem that has turned this historic and once-charming city into an unrecognizably violent husk of its former self.

  Chief diagnostician of this crisis in public health is city councilmember Hanifa G.N. Shabazz:[913]