White Girl Bleed a Lot (40 page)
Read White Girl Bleed a Lot Online
Authors: Colin Flaherty
Tags: #Political Science, #Civil Rights, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #Media Studies
In 2011 a group of twenty to forty black people attacked a weird bicycle-like contraption that carries alcoholic drinks. Here comes the big take down:
Flaherty says “a group of black people attacked a mobile alcoholic beverage cart in Minneapolis,†but there’s no such thing as “mobile alcoholic beverage carts†in Minneapolis.
The thing attacked was a bunch of people on one of those stupid group bicycles with a beer keg.
That’s it? A crowd of black people terrorize a group of people out for a good time on some crazy thing I had never heard of—but describe correctly nonetheless—and all
Salon
can say is that somehow I violated its guidelines for describing goofy alcoholic beverage carts? And they can’t even get that right?
Harumff! I stand by my story.
I wrote about twenty black people who beat up a white woman at a park.
Salon
commented:
He also seems to intentionally elide the stated motive for the attack, which wasn’t anti-white animus but a missing pair of sunglasses.
Note the word “seems.†(A word I never use.) Something happened and I confirmed it. Or I did not write it. There is no seems. I did not say the attack was anti-white. I describe the attackers as a mob of black people as part of a pattern of dozens of such attacks in Minneapolis. I don’t do the mob mind-reading trick, so I do not speak to motivation. But I do keep my eyes open and watch what happens. It is called reporting.
Even folks like Bill O’Reilly will not report on racial violence because they say they cannot tell if it is racially motivated. Unless the rioters are carrying signs, issuing press releases, and creating videos with racist slogans, there is no story.
That brings us to the essence of this book: There are so many episodes of black mob violence, so astronomically out of proportion, so often celebrated in popular black culture, that we no longer have to do the mob mind-reading trick. Something
is happening, something peculiar to black people. And no one wants to talk about it, because people don’t know how. Here’s how: No generalizations. No stereotypes. And also, no apologies. I also don’t do causes or solutions. It’s above my pay grade.
I’ve been writing about race for a while, including an investigative article that got a black man out of prison after I showed he was unjustly convicted of trying to kill his white girlfriend. NPR, the
Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union-Tribune
, and
Court TV
all reported how I made it happen. It was a big deal. I also wrote newspaper columns for the first black Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
If you keep your eyes open you will see stories from everywhere and anywhere, even
Salon
readers. Check out these comments about your humble correspondent in the
Salon
story from one of its readers, Esteban Moberley:
I haven’t read the book, nor do I have any desire to. Right wing screed books are a dime a dozen.
However, I live in Champaign, Illinois-home of the University of Illinois. For the past several years, we have had an onslaught of groups of young black men assaulting white men at random. They ambushed and beat students on the campus and people in their own yards. These victims were not typically robbed, just ambushed and beaten senseless.
They beat up our weather man in one incident:
http://www.news-gazette.com/image/2010-09-28/20100928-215656-pic-402239283jpg.html
It is important to note that none of the offenders that were caught were sentenced for hate crimes, and in one case a man received probation and was then arrested again for another racially motivated beating.
Perhaps this sort of thing doesn’t happen everywhere, all the time, but it does actually happen, and I can’t believe my liberal college town of 100,000 is the only place this sort of thing is happening.
I had not heard about these crimes. But once I started looking into it, I found a whole nest of racial violence, the news of which barely escaped that small college town of Champagne, Illinois. The thugs even gave the crime a name: Polar Bear Hunting. It’s also called the Knockout Game, see
chapter 2
.
Thank you, Mr. Moberley.
Others posted their own personal experiences with racial violence. Some apologized for noticing the race of their attackers.
Salon
readers then took it to another level. After the denial, then excuses, several readers said we deserved more racial violence. One reader conceded there was an “element of truth there.†But, “if they don’t want hordes of angry poor people rising up to slay them, perhaps they should stop promoting such unfair economic policies?â€
Another said:
Obviously 50 years of food stamps and integrated schools hasn’t miraculously fixed the psychic damage black people incurred through hundreds of years where white people treated them worse than dogs, damage that reverberates through the generations as soundly as white Americans’ privilege continues through their bloodlines.
My favorite was the poster who knew the real reason for the epidemic of racial violence was because a:
country of racist thugs, initially stealing land from natives and other countries by whatever lethal means required, then gaining economic dominance over the rest of the world using any means necessary, no matter how brutal. Internally, racism was used to subjugate non-whites, and provided an effective “affirmative action†program for the ruling whites, especially the hillbillies and rednecks.
Here’s another fun thing about reporting: if you pay attention, every once in a while you catch a liberal telling the truth.
DELEWARE
A
fter looking at more than five hundred cases of black mob violence in more than ninety cities all over the country in the last three years, I have found that racial violence is far more widespread than I had ever imagined.
As is the denial of it.
But you do have to know how to find it.
So let’s look at one case in more detail: How the press ignored it; how the police denied it; and how we figured out what really happened on August 5, 2012, when eight hundred black people were fighting, firing guns, destroying property, and “confronting†Delaware State Police at 2 a.m. Contrary to what a reporter for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
told one of my readers, you cannot just assume the crowd is black. No matter what part of town the riot takes place. In this case, the violence and mayhem took place in an office park complex in a usually quiet section of a suburb of Wilmington, Delaware. The local paper did not give us much to go on:
When troopers arrived, they could hear the gunfire and were confronted by a large crowd of between 500 to 800 patrons who were attending a back-to-college party being held there in a warehouse facility.
1
Back to school? I had images of book bags and pencils. No one was arrested and no names were reported. Thus under the reporting standards so popular in places like Riverhead, it never existed. All this happened two weeks after a Presbyterian minister was attacked by a mob of black people in Wilmington.
First stop, the police. I called and emailed: “What happened? Was this a case of black mob violence?â€
No reply. I get that a lot. It is a red flag. But red flags are not proof.
I posted comments asking if anyone knew anything both at the website where the news story was posted and on Craigslist. Sometimes it works. This time, nothing.
I had a radio show coming up and the liberal morning host had been talking trash about my book. He had not read it, but he did not believe there was an epidemic of racial violence in America. He scorned anyone who disagreed. A WND.com reader said it best: People who deny racial violence when confronted with overwhelming evidence of it “are suffering from infantile omnipotence. If it didn’t happen to them, it just didn’t happen.â€
There seems to be a lot of that going around.
One way or another, I wanted to nail this story. If eight hundred Italian or Asian or American Indian or Eskimo people were rioting, shooting guns, destroying property, and confronting police, that would have been a “man bites dog†story. So I contacted the police again with a wave of e-mails and phone calls. Finally I received a reply saying that no one took any notice of the “racial or ethnic background†of the eight hundred people creating all the mayhem.
Fair enough. Was there a police report? “No.â€
No surprise there. As far as police were concerned, eight hundred people on the streets firing guns, destroying property, and fighting never happened.
The newspapers did have an address: 200 Lisa Drive. Google Earth had a picture of the front of the building, but there was no name. I ran that through several data bases and came up with a Pentecostal Church.
Bingo!
I thought.
A church party that got out of hand
. But that was a false alarm. The church had come and gone several years before.
I placed some calls to the high-end commercial real estate firm representing the property, but they went unanswered. After much online searching, I finally hit it on a Facebook page for FamEntertainment, a party company. I found hundreds of photos—replete with gang signs and obscene gestures—and details of that party and others.
2
The dull warehouse at 200 Lisa Drive was transformed into a professionally produced party with lots of lights and cool props promoted by and for black people.
3
The same people had the same kind of party one year before at the same place with the same result: fighting, property damage, shooting, and a big police response.
4
I tried to track down the promoters and many of the party-goers. Nothing.
As to the “back to school†angle, the party company sent buses to several black colleges within fifty miles. They told the partygoers to behave properly or they will get kicked out of the warehouse and not invited back. “No Drama Tonight If you getting saucyy, Make sure you act right,†said @Amazing_Fey.
No one listened.
The police were befuddled. They even made a plea in the local paper, asking anyone with information to call it in. Or call
CrimeStoppers and collect a reward. So my brother and I talked about it on the radio on Friday afternoon, August 17, including FamEntertainment’s plans for another big party at Spot 200 for the following evening. We also talked about a member of the Wilmington City Council who said anyone who opposed Barack Obama was a racist, and a prominent local black minister who said that black mob violence is due to four hundred years of oppression.
5
I found out that by Friday night, anyone subscribing to their Facebook or Twitter stream received the following message: The party was cancelled. But the next Saturday night, August 25, the back to school party was back on. This time in Dover, Delaware, near the campus of Delaware State University, a black college.
As to the reward from CrimeStoppers? I’m still waiting.
If you ever visit Wilmington, Delaware, you will probably hear about Tommy Burke. Or at least see his art work. He makes bird houses modeled on actual homes, and they are something of a local tradition. They are very nice to look at and very lucrative for this self-styled sixty-year-old, liberal hippy.
In the summer of 2012 Tommy was returning home after a libation or two at the local watering hole when he passed through a crowd of forty black people—mostly teenagers—milling around outside of a party. Before he went fifty yards, he was surrounded by five black people from the group. They demanded money and threatened to beat him up. “They said I was just a guy who drank too much and I couldn’t fight back,†Burke said. “I took off my glasses, put my false teeth in my pocket and told them that was not going to happen.â€
Burke surprised the mob, and himself, when he punched one of his robbers. After a few more blows were exchanged, the five teenagers ran back toward the party empty handed. Two women,
probably mothers of the kids from the party, begged Burke not to call the police. “I told them I just got mugged,†Burke said. “Of course I was going to call the police.â€
Police records show that they got the call at 11:58 p.m. Police showed up within five minutes, just after the midnight curfew. Despite the curfew, many people from the party were loitering in and wandering through adjacent neighborhoods. Police called for back-up and within ten minutes a police van was on the scene. Soon, twenty-four curfew violators were on their way to a nearby YMCA—a safe haven where parents could pick up their children without going to jail or getting a record. After a bit of questioning, they were released. No arrests were made. No one was water boarded. Everyone went home.
Chandra Pitts, however, weaves a totally different story: A tale of conspiracy, racism, police brutality, official deception, illegal questioning, KKK-tactics, and lots of other “horrific†and “disgusting†things.
Pitts is the head of One Village Alliance, a social service agency funded by the United Way whose mission is to mentor children in this crime-ridden city of sixty-five thousand. Just a few days before the attack on Burke,
Parenting
magazine named Wilmington the most “dangerous city in America.†And it’s no wonder; just a few hours before the party, four people were shot. One died.
Pitts’ version ended up all over the Web before dawn the following day. She vowed to take the story national. She was determined to make it about race. She was determined to say anything to stir up the people. Here is what she posted on her Facebook page for the world to see: