White Girl Bleed a Lot (37 page)

World Star Hip Hop is a great place to find these. Here’s one more from 2012. Not sure of the location. A coach hits a referee, and other refs immediately declare the game a forfeit. The players jump up and down, celebrating their victory.

Meanwhile, other coaches and adults connected to the losing team made a bee line for the ref. As they surround him, one jumps in and punches him in the head. Lots of turmoil, Lots of parents
on the video gathering their children for a hasty exit.
⁴

The ref escaped. But after the fracas, at least two members of the mob are seen on the video high-fiving each other with even more glee than the grade school children who had just won.

In 2012 Wilmington, Delaware, saw one of the worst cases of violence at a sporting event. Three black men assassinated a coach and neighborhood leader while about to address a crowd at a soccer match. With his accomplices at his side, Otis Phillips “waited until Curry had grabbed the microphone before he sauntered up, tapped him on the back, and opened fire point blank six times.” Apparently Curry had witnessed a murder four years earlier and Phillips was trying to silence the witness. No one will ever never know how much havoc these three gangsters intended on wreaking on the rest of the crowd. Before anyone found out, several spectators pulled out their guns and returned fire, killing one of the assassins and driving off the other two. They were soon captured.

Police found shells from fourteen different guns, but curiously, of the hundreds of people at the field that day, not one of them got a look at the Good Samaritan gunners. Let’s just say the chances were slim they had gun permits.

In 2011 in Dallas, a crowd of black people flash robbed a convenience store, as I mentioned in
chapter 16
. Before the robbery, though, the mob was at a local high school football game. When the game ended witness Gwen Calloway saw a “mob of kids coming.” They were chasing some other kids. “They attacked one in front of Love’s and threw him on Calloway’s car, cracking the windshield.”
⁵

If there are any Jesuits out there, perhaps you could help me wrestle with this philosophical question: was this a sports beat down or just a regular old mob of black people beating someone up?

Until smarter people than me figure it out, I will assume it was a spillover from the football game and call it a sports beat down.

And oh yeah, it was dangerous at the game. The people were out of control, and some folks got hurt. “DISD officials said safety at the facility is the district’s top priority… but Calloway, she wants more security at future games, and plans to take her concerns to the district’s next board meeting.
⁶

In Detroit we already talked about the frequency and intensity of racial violence and shootings and beatings at football games. So much so, that a newspaper columnist wrote about it when he attended a game that did not break out in violence.

Most games in Detroit are not held at night. But every once in a while some brave school administrator decides to try it again: When that happens, more often than not, they are reminded why they had to cancel night games in the first place: Black mob violence.

In September 2012 Wayne State University in Detroit hosted a football game between two local rivals. The game had to be stopped when hundreds of black people started fighting in several places throughout the stadium.

The video says it all.
⁷

Racial violence is part of the landscape. Expected. Unremarkable.
Not worth talking about and often serving as entertainment. That was the case in Orlando in March 2012 at a high school all-star basketball game.

Players, fans, friends and family had a big scrap in a cafeteria. As they fought and tossed chairs and threats and haymakers, others in the dining area went about their business, drinking orange juice, and shouting “World Star.”
⁸

Some like to point at sporting events as favorite places for white racial violence. They are usually talking about the celebrations that follow sports’ championships. That is weak.

This chapter starts out strange but ends up truly bizarre.
And a quote for the Journalism Hall of Fame.

I
don’t know why in July 2012, 750 black people were fighting and rioting on the streets of Riverhead, a small hamlet near the Hamptons.

I don’t even know who counted them.

Maybe they were upset at the light sentence recently handed down to the man who broke into rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs’ nearby home. Or maybe they were exercising their right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” That’s from the US Constitution for those of you who weren’t paying attention.

Or maybe that is just how they roll in Riverhead.

Six weeks before, a local attorney broke the local code of silence to reveal other examples of mob violence in a town the newspapers are desperate to portray as bucolic and upscale:

This past month, we read about a murder at Route 58 shopping center and at least two riots: a brawl in that same shopping center, and another melee across the street from Town
Hall, where the alleged perpetrator apparently threatened bystanders with an assault weapon.
¹

The local newspaper barely reported on the July rumble. And the police are not saying much. But we do know that the local police received multiple calls and had to request assistance from five neighboring police agencies to break up “numerous fights over the course of two hours.”
²

Neighbors said there was a graduation party that ended at 11:00 p.m., but the crowds of hundreds of people kept loitering in the street acting disorderly and blocking traffic until well after midnight. They were asked by the police to leave, but they refused to do so. “A neighbor named Hazel said people gather on the street corners from time to time, but ‘it’s never been like that.’”
³

No one got hurt. No one got arrested. None of the “teens” involved in the “party” were quoted in several news accounts. In the hours following the riot the tweets and retweets completed the picture:

Some residents of Riverhead were unhappy that the culprits were identified by race on the message boards.

“Why does race always have to play a part in any discussion in this newspaper?” Missi Brit asked the
Riverhead News-Review
. “If you had your info correct. The article said youths, meaning black, white, and Latino youths.”

That response drew scorn from neighbors who witnessed the melee. “I saw what happened last night,” said Resident User. “It was not the ‘diverse’ crowd you suggest.”
⁴

All the posters on Twitter were black as well.

Riverhead local news reported a similar brawl in the same neighborhood in 2011. It happened after the Fourth of July fireworks. Hundreds of people fighting and disturbing the peace. Two women were stabbed. Two women were arrested. Both black.
⁵

Police had trouble breaking it up, but at least they didn’t have to call for help.

In September 2011 in nearby Southampton, police had to use pepper spray to break up a similar riot involving three hundred black people—the largest such disturbance in the history of this village of four hundred people.

As for the man who broken into Diddy’s home, he was sentenced to time served and is required to stay away for five years from Riverhead.

Two days after I posted the original story on WND.com, the editor of the Riverhead newsletter jumped all over it. Despite the news accounts from other reporters, despite the calls I made to police and city council members, she said none of it happened. She admitted that “the party grew to unanticipated proportions,” but she claims there “was no lawlessness. There was no mob.” And here is how she knew:

“I know this even though I wasn’t there — because there were no arrests. If there had been lawlessness and violence, there would have been arrests.”
⁶

At times like this, times of monumental … uh, innocence, a reasonable man has only one response. To quote the
Godfather
:

Michael
: My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.

Kay Adams
: Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don’t have men killed.

Michael
: Oh. Who’s being naive, Kay?

In the meantime, someone notify the Journalist Hall of Fame. This quote is a keeper.

Revenge for Trayvon. And other racial violence that made the news.

W
e do not need to rehash L’Affaire de Trayvon here. But the shooting of the Skittle-toting teenager provoked a backlash of black mob violence around the country that is much less well known. Let’s start in Gainesville, Florida, home of the Gators.

At a downtown restaurant near Bo Diddley Community Plaza, just hours after a local demonstration calling for justice for Travyon, a fifty-year-old felon snatched a purse. The woman’s boyfriend took off running, caught him, and wrestled him to the ground. “Police say that is when the incident turned racial,” says a local NBC television news reporter.

“Some members of the crowd shouted ‘Trayvon!’ and at least three members of the crowd
began stomping on the hands” of the Good Samaritan trying to force him to let go of the suspect.” said a police spokeswoman.
¹

The purse snatcher was desperate and down on his luck and had just gotten out of prison, we learned. As you can see in the video link above, a bystander explained the rest: “Right now there is a lot of racial tension going on because of that. And then when you have a guy just getting out of prison and he just happens to be black, all that does is intensify the tension.”

Good Lord, I do not have the slightest idea what that means. But I do know how to count. If a mob of twenty-five people is standing around while three people from the mob beat someone up, the papers always report that the crime involved just three people.

While the other twenty-two who did not help, who did not dial 911, who encouraged the violence are
not
a part of the story.

My count? Twenty-five.