White Girl Bleed a Lot (26 page)

But never mind that. The paper’s willingness to minimize the racial violence seemed similar to how a social worker characterized dozens of violent episodes in Philadelphia, some involving more than one thousand black people, as “kids blowing off some steam.”

A couple years earlier in Laurelhurst Park there was a homosexual rape following a carjacking. A Latino man got lost near Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. When he stopped to turn around, a man jumped in his car and forced him at gun point to drive to the park where two other assailants met them. “He was dragged from the vehicle, beaten and assaulted by all three men and sodomized repeatedly.” Two of the three attackers were identified as black.
¹¹

In June 2012 a group of 150 black people—described by the newspapers as drunken teenagers—assaulted several people in the same park, robbing at least one boy. The TV broadcast may have shied away from describing the attackers, but an online article reported that Sergeant Simpson said the boy’s “attackers were 5-10 black teenagers who were randomly attacking white teens in the park.” The next night there was another attack. This time three men “said they were attacked by a group of 20-30 black teenagers.”
¹²

Still, some people seem surprised. “I go running through Laurelhurst Park pretty much every day of the week and have never felt unsafe. So news from the Portland Police about mobs of drunken teens wandering through the park assaulting people is,
um, strange and surprising,” said Sarah Mirk on the
Portland Mercury
site Blogtown.
¹³

Captain Amerigo, one of the commenters to Mirk’s posting, could have been speaking for a curiously large number of Portland people, when he/she put it all in perspective for the
Portland Mercury
. Sure the assailants were black, “but, for you to say that the Right-wing is without fault in this matter, honey please. You a fool, and you know you a fool. BOTH parties are guilty in such matters, and you know it. You fool.”

Got it?

If so, the people of Portland have a program for you. After a series of violent events among Portland’s black people in 2011, gang coordinator John Canda issued a plea for volunteers.

“I need 100 strong men who are not afraid to stand with me in the streets of Portland to speak with youth who are robbing, stealing, selling drugs and gang banging who are shooting up our neighborhoods and killing each other,” Canda wrote. “This needs to end now!”

“This is the first piece here,” said Robert Richardson, director of programs at Emmanuel Community Services, who led the first shift of the night. “We have to engage. We cannot sit back idly.
¹⁴

Let me know how that works out for ya’.

S
top me if you’ve heard this one before. In Cleveland, hundreds of black people disrupted a community gathering with fights, hostility, and all that stuff. Lots of people were arrested, and there was lots of racist talk. Blah, blah, blah.

People freak out when they hear talk about race. Put the word
riot
in there and that just about guarantees full sensory overload leading to shut down.

Folks who use Twitter are not so squeamish. Racial talk is rampant on Twitter, as is talk about riots. Many are so raw and racist that my friends asked me to stop re-tweeting them.

There has been lots of talk about how Twitter is used to organize “flash mobs.” Or to stay away. But few newspapers or blogs have actually reproduced some of the Tweets before, during, and after the race riot. But that is what Unamused Park, the online
encyclopedia of race relations, did at the Coventry Streets Arts Fair in Cleveland Heights, Ohio on June 25, 2011.

If you want to capture your own Twitter streams, start a Twitter account (it’s free) and download TweetDeck (at tweetdeck.com). Add a column based on your select word or phrase:
riot
or
Imma start a riot
. Sometimes the talk is about getting new music or a party. Sometimes the talk is about real live riots with real live violence. Check it out.

Without further ado, from Unamused Park:

“NIGGAS,” she says, “black ass NIGGAS.”
Could
be a coincidence. Interestingly enough, her message was promptly retweeted by three other people: @_SammiJay, @Bj_Mariee, and @apryl_alone, who all happen to be African-American, as well.

At 7:51 pm, @Look_ItsTreMilz promised the following, which was re-tweeted by uniquebre17:

“Everybody” is going to be there — except their “black [asses].” Yes, once again, both happen to be African-American. Actually, from now on, everyone mentioned is African-American unless I specifically state otherwise.

At 10:09 pm, @My_FreshAss issued the following stern directive, re-tweeted by IAm_Dnell and CheeksONTresure (all of whom, if you’ve been paying attention, are implicitly African-American):

Fascinating: “Coventry,” he noted, is going to be “full of FIGHTS, RIOTS, BLACK PEOPLE, DRUGS,” and that implies a “POLICE” presence, so “YALL BETTA ACT CIVILIZED!!!” But did they heed his warning?

At 11:01 pm, @JaeCudi joked with @JovTheGreat:

At 11:37 pm, masonry fan @SaleBrixSckTits speculated:

Coventry gone [going to] pull out them pattywagons again on you black fuckers lol

At 11:42 pm, the hypothermic @DaniDhaColdest wondered (as did re-tweeter @JustFollowHere):

At 12:31 am, which I’m going to go ahead and call Saturday night, @LilRedHead_Jada pleaded, along with @DeonteeW-asThere, @_BlowTrees, and @Bobby_SickKicks:

At 8:32 am on Sunday (the day of the “unrest”), @MauriceAmir vowed:

At 9:18 am, the possibly self-hating @quezzy_quell discriminated:

At 10:55 am, the celestial @PaintTheCosmos (real name “Dionna Sherice,” race
technically
unknown) cursed:

At 11:24 am, the educated @HoesTaughtMe (reinforced by the equally learned @ToneJetTaughtMe) ordered:

At 11:27 am, the similarly erudite @_TONYtaughtme (supported by @Drea_CreatedYou) equated:

At 11:41 am, @Pauly_Frm_Phs predicted:

@Weedy_TheOG and @PeeGee_17 concurred.

At 12:06 pm, @iStriptor_Nike prayed:

At 12:22 pm, @Lanky_Ralf begged:

At 1:04 pm, @SincerelyKELLEY asserted:

At 2:57 pm, leahbonnielove lamented:

At 4:55 pm, @McTeddy13_, too, lamented (followed by @I_amFatdaddy):

At 5:14 pm, shortly before the flash mob, Yesjessicaa, who is white (and kinda cute), noted:

Just before 6 pm, the “unruly teenagers,” all of them apparently black, rioted. At 6:26 pm, 81smallz suggested:

This was re-tweeted by
fourteen people
, nearly all of them clearly black.

Alright, I think you get the point. From now on, I’m only going to show you a few interesting tweets. There are plenty more out there, all saying pretty much the same thing.

At 7:45 pm, @Murda_Moosh wrote:

At 12:04 am, which I’m going to go ahead and call Sunday night, @BoY_SaNiTy (race ambiguous) wrote:

At 12:04 am, which I’m going to go ahead and call Sunday night, BoY_SaNiTy (race ambiguous) wrote:

At 6:44 am, teeelash wrote:

At 12:09 pm, BadAssNmd_Ticia wrote:

At 2:04 pm, KraftyWurker, who is apparently a donkey, wrote:

Finally, at 10:08 pm, IndiaAlanna inverted Doctor Strange-love with this tweet:

Park dot com.

As early as 4:09 p.m. on Saturday, June 25, 2011—the day before the “unrest”—Thick_ASS_Jass (who happens to be African-American) complained:

And one more thing, the problem is not just in Cleveland Heights. The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.com reported on meetings about flash mobs from the surrounding communities. The meeting drew people from across Greater Cleveland. Beachwood, Euclid, Wickliffe, and Shaker Heights. They all have experienced flash mobs of black teens.

So do the math. That’s at least five more flash mobs of violent black people. That’s a lot of flash mobs, and I have not been able to find one news story about them. Maybe it’s not news. Maybe someone can explain to me why not. But please do a better job than Brandee_Bleue_438, the person who left a comment on the Plain Dealer story:

My brother and I host a talk radio show in Delaware where this has been a topic of disagreement. At least at first. I am conservative. He is liberal. When I first started talking about widespread racial violence in this country, my brother didn’t like it._But I guarantee, if he could find widespread examples of marauding groups of Asians or whites or Eskimos doing all kinds of damage, that would have been the greatest day of his life. Because it would have destroyed my argument. He would love to do that. But the next time he does, it will be the first.

Still waiting.

Goodbye Cleveland.

And, before I forget, Cleveland is one of the places where the more you look, the more you find. Lots of places like that.

And oh yeah, they cancelled the fair in 2012.

Beat. Stalk. Prey.

C
olumbia, South Carolina, is a pretty nice place. Ever been there?

Eight black people stalking five white people, one at a time, in a nice part of town is not something that happens every day. That’s what I used to think until I heard about Five Points.

But on June 20, 2011 that is what happened. A group of eight black people finally caught Carter Strange. They almost killed him. Emergency brain surgery saved his life. Surveillance video caught the perps. They went to nice schools and their mothers loved them. One of the accused was thirteen years old. One of the other guys was supposed to be babysitting him. And the local version of the District Attorney said race had nothing to do with it.
¹

Just like the big city.

Four of them were “charged under a state’s lynching law.” Eighteen-year-old Carter Strange was “minding his own business, trying to make his curfew when he was brutally attacked and robbed.” He was found unconscious two hours after the beating,
and still suffers brain injuries today.
²