White Girl Bleed a Lot (28 page)

The attackers stripped off McClellan’s belt and started whipping his back.

“They said, ‘This is for what your people did to our people.’ They were like whipping me with my belt, my studded belt,” Shane recounts.

“They’re like, ‘Aw, white boy, what are you doing? You can’t hang out this late. What are you doing around here?’ They’re like, ‘White boy has no belonging - being out here at 2 a.m.’

“They targeted me for being white, and they made it very clear that’s why they were assaulting me,” Shane said.

The victim’s father said the attack was nothing short of hours of torture.

“Put a gun to the back of his head and told him if he said anything they were going to blow his head off while they sat there and burned him with cigarettes on the back of the neck,” he says.
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Both of the perpetrators were arrested, convicted, and sentenced. One to seven years, the other, five years and nine months. One was black, the other Asian. They said they were sorry.

No discussion of racial violence and lawlessness in Seattle is complete without a mention of the biggest and nastiest bit of racial business in the history of that town. An event that echoes today: The Seattle Mardi Gras Riot of 2001 where for three and half hours, tens of thousands of people watched helplessly, and police stood by quietly, as a race riot broke out.

It even has its own Wikipedia page:

There were reports of widespread brawling, vandalism, and weapons being brandished. Damage to local businesses exceeded $100,000.

Much of the violence was perpetrated by black men against white revelers, and about 70 people were reported injured. Several women were sexually assaulted. One person, Kris Kime, died of injuries sustained during an attempt to assist a woman being brutalized.
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The
Seattle News Weekly
said the unsayable:_

For the millions who saw the photos or video, those images burned into the retina: gangs of feral youth beating, kicking, and pummeling male and female victims.

In almost all of the violent images of that night on TV and in the daily newspapers, the attackers were black and the victims were white. Thanks to our local media, this is the idea of the 2001 Mardi Gras riots that most people carry with them. The poster victim of Fat Tuesday, Kris Kime, was also white, and police now say the suspects in his murder are black. The fallout from all this is that many people assume the attacks were racially motivated.
⁹

Whatever the “fallout,” the one person convicted of murder that night, Jerell Thomas, served eight years before getting out on a technicality. Within a few months, he was back in for assaulting his girlfriend.

Today, people make videos of the site, which includes a memorial plaque. For all the visible violence in Seattle, city officials are adamant that their town is safer. Just look at the statistics, they plead.

That is what happened to Nihan Thai in January 2012. He became a statistic when he was assaulted and robbed. Earlier this year, he talked to KING5, a local TV news station about the crime. He was walking home from the light rail station, (there’s that bus thing again):

I was literally ten steps away from the house. And I felt a hit on my right face and another hit on the back of my neck and on my lower back, and so as I was falling forward I felt hands grabbing my jacket and my bag,” said Thai.

Two months later, not far from where Thai was attacked, another man was grabbed from behind, robbed and beaten. His name was Danny Vega, and he died.
¹⁰

Thai, like Vega, is Asian and openly gay. Before he died, Vega told police he’d been “attacked by three African-American males, all around 18 years of age.” It was the tenth such attack in that area in two months, all near the corner of Martin Luther King Way and Othello Street.
¹¹

After the attack, Thai went door to door to find out how widespread the problem was. He was conducting his own crime survey.

Thai knocked on 49 doors. 32 people were home. How many of them had been victims of a crime since moving to the neighborhood? All but three.

Many victims told Thai they’d never reported the crimes to police.

“It happens to them so often that after 2 or 3 times they stopped reporting because they didn’t see any progress,” said Thai.

Thai’s survey was clearly unscientific, but it does raise the question--is crime going unreported in the south end?
¹²

Thai learned that many in his neighborhood were victims, but most were not statistics. No arrests. No reports. It never happened.

America’s First Green Crime Wave.

I
t is amazing how many of the more than five hundred examples of racial violence in this book are connected to public transit. I’ve alluded to some earlier, but here is a list of some attacks across the country, a good cross-section of what is happening in America’s public transit systems.

In Atlanta, “hordes” of black people invaded MARTA trains, beat the occupants, and scrammed. No arrests. No suspects.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution
, which of course avoided reporting anything that could identify the race of the suspects, reported that:

The teens boarded the train, headed to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, at the Garnett station a little after midnight seemingly intent on instilling fear. They succeeded.

“There was blood everywhere, people were hollering and screaming,” a witness told Channel 2 Action News. “We were intimidated. People were terrified. People were trying to run. But there was nowhere to run.”

Flight attendant Parker Stanea, 28, told officers a diminutive teen, no taller than 5′4″ and wearing a pink shirt, hit him with a soda can over the left eye. Stanea said the youths then pushed him to the ground and stole his wallet, according to an incident report filed by MARTA police.
¹

In St. Louis, race riots in and around public transportation have become an art form. In 2008 there was a series of attacks on the MetroLink stations around the Delmar Loop.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
reported on crime, race, and the MetroLink in 2008. They reported that “A group of teens and 20-somethings assaulted and robbed three teenagers at the Delmar station. Then, about 15 minutes later, the same group is believed to be responsible for attacking and robbing a family that was walking home from MetroLink’s Forest Park station after riding the train from Lambert-St. Louis airport.” The fear was that putting a light rail system in that passes through the inner city might “transport crime to the suburbs.” Interestingly, though, not once in the article is race mentioned.
²

Local news reports said business owners told their customers to start carrying guns. Other business owners said the riots are ruining a thriving business district.

In 2011 there was another attack on the MetroLink.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
again reported:

The charges came after Griffin scuffled with a St. Louis city police officer breaking up a fight among a large group of people near the Delmar Metrolink stop Saturday night. The officer was treated at a hospital for minor injuries and released.

Police said about 100 people, mostly teens, were in the area but scattered as officers arrived to the 6200 block of Delmar Boulevard. The incident has prompted local police and city officials to look into ways to prevent unruly juveniles from disrupting the popular business strip.

Records show Griffin was also booked Sunday in connection with the Sept. 4 shooting death of Eric Marion, 34, of the 4500 block of Kingshighway Boulevard.

Those darn killers can be very unruly when they “scuffle.” Thank goodness they are paying attention to their green footprints in St. Louis by choosing to invest in light rail.

We’ve already talked about Charlotte, North Carolina, and the shootings and mayhem there. Much of the violence seems to happen near the downtown public transit terminal. They figured it out down there in Charlotte:

Regardless of how all the questions get answered, this is clear: The Transportation Center has a problem. It has become a hangout for youths with time on their hands. Just as young people used to gather at Freedom Park and later at Eastland Mall to see friends and socialize, the center is drawing people who aren’t just passing through to catch a bus. Fights and other crowd-related crimes there are nothing new. Transit customers deserve better.
³

In 2011 Bronx prosecutors refused to call a vicious assault complete with racial slurs and cheering onlookers a hate crime. It happened on a subway in the early morning hours. Jason Fordell was coming home from selling his leather accessories at a nightclub and was “viciously assaulted and robbed on a subway train Sunday by four men who he says taunted him for being white.

“Police confirmed they are investigating the assault and robbery of Jason Fordell, 29, but have not labeled it a hate crime.”
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A race riot in Venice, California, in 2011 featured fights and shootings. How many black people were there? The
Los Angeles Times
does not say specifically but called it “hordes” and an eyewitness described it as a “human tidal wave.” And of course no riot would be complete without laughing and taunting. Alexandria Thompson, a member of a neighborhood watch group called Venice311 said “some in the mob ran away backward so they could continue to watch the action. … It was all part of the event for them,” she said. “There’s a kind of free-for-all down here. Everybody is trying to get away with as much as they can.”
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Afterward mobs of people rushed to the bus station to flee the scene by the same way they got there.

How many people do we need before we call it a riot? I don’t know. How many angels fit on the head of a pin? Don’t know that either.

If you do, let me know.

One thing I do not want to have happen is for the people of Boston to think we are ignoring their race riots. On Memorial Day, 2011, groups of more than one thousand black people gathered at Carson Beach for all the usual summer fun: flashing gang signs, beating up cops, random violence, and wanton destruction.

The
Boston Globe
knows the drill. They don’t mention race at all and even blame it on Facebook:

Police said the gang members are part of a group of more than 1,000 youths who have used social media sites like Facebook to plan unruly gatherings on the beach on three of the past four nights. The beach falls under the jurisdiction of the State Police, who have been unable to prevent the violence….

As the crowd broke up, hundreds of the unruly youths boarded the Red Line at JFK/UMass Station. Some went north; some went south.