White Girl Bleed a Lot (25 page)

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

Oregon, that is. Gets pretty nasty up there. Nastier than locals
expect. So let’s give them their own chapter.

O
regon? 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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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This is almost identical to a crime from a few days before at a Chevron station.
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In June a bigger crowd attacked an Albertson’s grocery store, following the same playbook: Theft, destruction, intimidation, and no arrests despite the video.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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