White Girl Bleed a Lot (30 page)

Being a bus driver is one of the most dangerous occupations in America. If the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not water down the numbers by lumping bus drivers together with truck drivers, it might just be the most dangerous.

Every year hundreds of bus drivers are assaulted on the job.

In 2012 outside of Philadelphia, “Officers say three teens, ages 16 and 17, got on the bus at 52nd and Chestnut Streets. While on the bus the teens engaged in what is described as ‘rude and outlandish behavior’.”

As they were exiting the bus “one of the teens allegedly grabbed the bus driver and pulled him off the bus onto the pavement. Police say they beat the driver in the face.”
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In Kansas City, a mob of five black people were eating, drinking, and laughing on the bus. The video does not contain audio so we just might never know what was so funny before they all filed off the bus, with the last person punching the driver right in the face.

In Cleveland in October 2012, a group of black women were taunting a bus driver, threatening him, and threatening his family. The ninety-four-second video shows us how it got physical. One of the women hit the
driver. And it was on: He stopped the bus. “You’re going to hell, now,” he said.
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What came next could have come from a Mike Tyson demonstration video of how to deliver an uppercut. This is a particularly nasty punch because the force has nowhere to go except into the part of the body where it hits. The body can’t really go that far up in the air, so the head absorbs most of the damage. A jab isn’t as bad because it can be more like a push, but there was no jabbing here. The driver unhooked his seat belt, approached his tormentor, dropped his right shoulder with his hand below his waist almost in a cocking motion, then let loose with the uppercut heard and seen ’round the bus driving world.

Then he kicked her off the bus, throwing her jacket off with her. Her friends did not like that, reminding the bus driver he just hit a woman. He told them if she was going to act like a man, he was going to treat her like a man.

Then the other friends attacked him as well.
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Every bus driver in America cheered.

Take the MARTA? Might be faster to walk.

I
n 2008 looking out over his Atlanta court room, Judge Marvin Arrington could not take it anymore: After six years of dealing with murders, rapes, robberies, and home invasions, he suddenly realized 99.9 percent (of the defendants) were black. So he kicked all the white people out of the court room, then scolded the black defendants: “I simply said to the young people, ‘what in the world are you doing with your lives?’” he told Atlanta television reporter JaQuitta Williams.

Some thought the judge’s actions a bit unusual. But a white Atlanta courthouse visitor thought that maybe “people of color talk more freely among themselves.” This is the face of racism today: Not the snarling caricature of Bull Connor on the streets of Selma, but the cloying “blacks are different” sympathy of Nurse Ratchet.

Four years later, there was little sign all that “free talking” did much good. Since that court-clearing episode, Atlanta has been the site of dozens of episodes of black mob violence and lawlessness—crimes that range from comical to fatal, ridiculous to outright dangerous.

Unlike most of the victims of the hundreds of episodes of racial mob violence that have erupted in more than ninety cities over the last three years, Zachary Gamble actually
knew
his four accused killers. Gamble was a retired Marine Sergeant living in an Atlanta suburb after serving two tours of duty in Iraq. In April 2012 he went to his alleged killer’s home for a birthday party. Witnesses say Gamble and his killers were using alcohol and drugs when, early in the morning, Gamble became belligerent and was asked to leave.

He had been telling graphic Iraq war stories.

“At some point, he texted his friend a three-word taunt” that the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
said was too graphic too print, then Gamble and his alleged killers had a confrontation outside in the parking lot. Gamble fell to the ground and was “punched in the face and kicked while he was lying on the ground” by the four-man mob. They left him lying unconscious in the parking lot.
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About forty minutes later, near dawn, a cab driver called 911 after she ran over Gamble’s leg. Two weeks later he was dead, his skull fractured in three places—not from the taxi, but from the beating, police said.

The four await trial.

Some mobs even have their own YouTube account to document and brag about the thug life. Such is the case with Atlanta’s “Pittsburgh Jack City Gang.”

A dozen members of the mob are seen on video beating up Brandon White when he was leaving a convenience store. Three of the gang knocked him down, punched and kicked him, and
even slammed him with a tire, all while an onlooker caught it on video while repeating “no faggots in Jack City.”
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White told CNN he did not report the crime until the video went viral “because he did not want to draw attention to himself. He could not even bring himself to watch the video at first, he was so humiliated and embarrassed.” The video was released on YouTube and WorldHipHop.com, and was posted on The Smoking Gun.

“I was very violated,” said White. “Who’s to say they won’t come after me again … Who’s to say they won’t kill me?”
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The group of thugs even brag about “stealing necklaces, display gang signs, and refer to themselves as ‘goons.’ One man describes himself as a ‘wild dog,’ while another says, ‘I’m the Tasmanian Devil.’”
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Two of the men have been arrested and await trial.

One of Atlanta’s biggest race riots occurred in June 2010 at Screen on the Green in Piedmont Park, an outdoor movie festival. But you might not have known about it due to a lack of news coverage. That summer night, a crowd of ten thousand people was trying to watch
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
when the violence began.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
(AJC) said “groups of marauding teens took over the event.” Atlanta city councilman told the AJC the trouble was “caused by a small group of young kids looking to cause trouble.” Witnesses at other websites had a less sanitized version of events. They described a chaotic, violent,
and dangerous scene with several groups of black people—hundreds of men and women—making their way through the crowd, beating, taunting, laughing, robbing, and destroying property.
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“They started climbing all over my Jeep,” said one attendee, “and I turn around and my buddy is getting punched in the face and has blood pouring out of his nose. … We were definitely victims of a hate crime.”
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“I was there,” said a poster to the Topics.com Atlanta forum. “There were hundreds of black teens, apparently there to fight. Yelling obscenities, threatening each other, both sexes.”
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Despite dozens of witnesses reporting more than one hundred assaults, the following day police said they had a record of only one complaint. Most of the victims said there were no police to be seen there.

Several people report they were victims of anti-gay slurs and violence:

Jesse Rhodes, who is openly gay, said what happened … was an insult to the people of Midtown, including its gay residents. He lives at Post and walked to the park with a group of gay friends. While the fights and rowdy behavior broke out around them as they tried to watch “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” he and his gay friends felt very vulnerable, he said.

“We felt like sitting ducks,” he said. “They were definitely targeting gay people. One of my good friends, who is gay and works at Swinging Richards, got jumped by five people and beat up,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes added that when he was walking out of the park he was called “faggot” and other obscenities and said women at the event were also called lesbians.

“I was called a faggot. There were a couple of fights in front of Blake’s [the gay bar on 10th Street] — it was all pretty pathetic,” he said. “I was verbally discriminated against based on my sexual preference.”
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Another gay victim of violence that night posted his observations on a YouTube channel that is now private:

What happened last night (June 3) at Screen on the Green was not simply “fights” between unruly teens as the local TV stations would like their audiences to believe. These savages went apeshit and hunted down gays and lesbians to attack!

They specifically began targeting members of the LGBT community around Blake’s and along 10th St. The local news media is acting as if this were a simple scuffle and that’s totally unacceptable.

Gay people were not the only ones targeted though. All kinds of people, black, white, gay and straight were being randomly punched in the face and people were getting their windows smashed with rocks. It was like a riot in a third world country.

Despite the attempt from police, public officials, and some media outlets to downplay the racial violence, many witnesses came forward to report what they saw:

“Let’s face it. Every person causing a disturbance both on the green during the movie that I saw was black,” said another witness who posted at the Creative Loafing Forum. “Every person kicking cars, breaking windows and running in the middle of the street like a rabid animal was black. Every person who was hanging on the white guy in the jeeps car assaulting him and his passengers was black. It’s not a stereotype. It’s math. 100%.”
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