White Girl Bleed a Lot (19 page)

Not Peoria or Akron but Iowa? That’s impossible. Isn’t it?

S
urely racial lawlessness has no place in an out of the way place like Des Moines, Iowa, home of the Iowa State Fair. Maybe Des Moines is not as out of the way as we think.

The problem started opening night of the 2010 Iowa State Fair. Large groups of black people congregated and started destroying property. By closing time, inside the fairground, these large groups of black people were shouting it was “Beat Whitey Night” and doing what they said they were going to do: beat whitey. It was caught on tape.

There is no question that the beatings and vandalism happened. And nobody questions who did it. But there has been something of an intramural discussion about whether or not the black people were chanting “beat whitey night.”
¹

You can see one of the actual police reports at theSmokingGun.com. The officer wrote that one of the victims “suffered severe injuries to his eyes, cheekbones, and nose.
²

One reporter claimed it never happened:

Capt. Randy Dawson of the Des Moines police department’s Criminal Investigation Division said that Murillo was off-duty working at Mercy Medical Center and filed a report saying he’d talked to “officers” who told him they heard it was “Beat Whitey Night” prior to the first incident of violence. Dawson says he cannot find anyone who will own up to making the claim.
³

Gabriel Stoffa, a reporter for the
Iowa State Daily
, also had it all figured out:

“Teen flash mobs are partly our fault. Kids are lacking in adult efforts to guide positive upbringing … All we can do is keep hoping and provide positive examples.”
⁴

It goes on like that for five hundred words. You could not pay me to read it again.

The great thing about Stoffa’s article is that it reveals his attitude, which is a perfect reflection of attitudes in newsrooms across America: It’s not their fault. It’s ours.

So we are lucky. We caught them telling the truth. In Chicago, Steve Chapman of the
Tribune
told us race had nothing to do with anything, and anyone who thought different was racist. Now we know that Chapman was lying to himself. What he really meant to say is what Stoffa said, that it was our fault. Thanks, Stoffa, but you might want to stay out of Chicago.

Let’s continue this tour of the Midwest. From Des Moines let’s go to Peoria, Illinois: The Test Market Capital of the World.
Peoria was made famous by everyone from Richard Nixon to Bugs Bunny for asking the famous question: “Will it play in Peoria?” because Peoria represented everyone. If the people of Peoria liked something, most people would.

Apparently, this was a long, long time ago, because the people of Peoria today are playing a different game.

Let’s get some details.

It was the Fourth of July. (My these rioters are patriotic.)

The papers tell one story. The video tells another.

The paper talks about a dumpster full of live fireworks catching fire, exploding at random. Firemen are called. A crowd of thousands in the housing project block the access to the fire, and throw lit industrial fireworks at the police and firemen. They also threw bottles. It sure sounds like they were rioting, but curiously the paper called it a near-riot.

One officer drove through a locked, gated portion of the wrought-iron fence that surrounds Taft to provide additional access to distressed officers. Doug Burgess, the Peoria police public information officer, said as many as 200 pepper balls were fired before the crowd came under control.

“Every officer that responded said pretty much the same thing—that it was chaotic and like a riot,” Burgess said. “Every officer received bruises and burn marks.”

Revelers there have traditionally held private firework displays on the Fourth and previously made targets of police and passersby, though not to the same extent as Monday.
⁵

I say rioters. You say revelers. Let’s call the whole thing off.

The dictionary says revelry is “gay or festive activity, a convivial occasion.” I guess the papers use a much looser definition. The papers also said it was traditional. That’s just the way things are in Peoria, right?

The video tells another story. This riot was in a Peoria
housing project and all the people lining the streets as the fire trucks attempted get to the blaze were black. There were no arrests. The police fired two hundred pepper balls into the crowd before it dispersed. Playing in Peoria is certainly getting “convivial.” Look it up.

A few days later, twenty black women were throwing rocks at houses and attacked a man in Peoria. Burgess, the police public information officer, said the episodes were not race riots because the people doing the rioting did not say it was. Or something like that. At least it’s several steps up from the outright denial that characterized official reaction just a few weeks earlier when Peoria community group president Paul Wilkinson put his town on the race-riot map with this blog post heard round the world:

Tonight, around 11 p.m., a group of at least 60-70 African American youth marched down one of the side streets (W. Thrush) to the 4 lane main drag (Sheridan). They were yelling threats to white residents. Things such as ‘we need to kill all the white people around here.’

They were physically intimidating anyone calling for help from the police. They were surrounding cars. Cars on the main drag had to slam on their brakes to either avoid the youth blocking not only all four lanes, but a large section of the side street as well. Fights were breaking out among them.

They were rushing residents who looked out their doors, going on to porches, yelling threats to people calling the police for help.

Cars were doing U-turns on the streets just to avoid the mob, mostly male. One youth stated his grandfather was white and several assaulted him on the spot. One police officer answered the call. The youth split into two large groups, one heading north, the other south.

They were also yelling racial threats to the police officer but he was outnumbered. Another police car did not show up
until after the youth finally dispersed and the patty wagon (van) also eventually showed up.

This is the fifth large mob action in about a month with smaller groups of 10-12 are out threatening children and adults a few evenings a week or later into the night.
⁶

Peoria resident Kenny Sheridan told the
Journal Star
he saw the large group of black people “hollering and stopping traffic … running wildly around yards and porches. … He did not hear anyone yell that they wanted to kill white people.”
⁷

Journal Star
columnist Phil Luciano said Wilkinson was a blogger, not a real journalist, so his account of facts could not be trusted. City Council member Barbara Van Auken said Wilkinson turned the incident into a national embarrassment.

But did it really happen? Luciano was not convinced, in part because Wilkinson did not go take a video at night during the riot.

YouTube is full of video of race riots from across the country. That has not stopped the denials. But Luciano did remind his readers that, “police didn’t find any evidence of any wrongdoing. And no arrests occurred.”
⁸

In October the doubts disappeared. In two acts of racial violence in less than a week, fifty black people surrounded two cars, shouted racial epithets, and made threats. No one was injured or arrested.

A few days later, thirty to forty black people surrounded a car driven by a twenty-one-year-old white woman. They broke her window and one man pointed a gun at her. No arrests were made. No photos were taken. No one called it a race riot.

In the meantime, city officials were mulling over “what should be considered appropriate behavior for teenagers and young adults,” the
Journal Star
reported.
⁹

While leaders were wondering about appropriate behavior for kids, others wonder about appropriate behavior for people who
are supposed to gather news, then report it without fear or favor.

In the meantime, at least nine race riots took place in less than one year … in Peoria.

Peoria? Des Moines? Milwaukee? Who knew? It’s those darn teens.

This is what it sounds like when liberals cry.

A
fter the first edition of this book came out, the dam broke. People in Knoxville, Charlottesville, Denver, Dallas, and all over the country started asking, “Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?”

No I had not. Guess I should get out more often. I had thought Minnesota was kind of quiet. Wrong. Totally wrong. Turns out Minneapolis has the strangest combination of black violence and official acquiescence in the country. Minneapolis has had more than twenty episodes of violent racial behavior in the first half of 2012 alone.

But let’s start with the biggest.

In Minneapolis, in 2011, more than eight hundred black people marauded through downtown, fighting, breaking, yelling. (
Salon
magazine got mad at me for not supplying a better count.
Hey, the guy with the clipboard who hands out numbers at these kinds of affairs was on vacation that week. Sorry.)

A few days later, a gang of black women beat a white woman and her fifteen-year-old and four-year-old daughters after she confronted them about harassing her children over some sunglasses.
¹

A few weeks later, a group of black people attacked some kind of mobile alcoholic beverage cart in Minneapolis—stealing, threatening, all the usual. The newspapers dutifully reported the crime, and dutifully ignored the race of the attackers, except for the University of Minnesota student newspaper, the
Minnesota Daily
. The first edition of this news report said the attackers were black. That was missing from the updated edition of the student paper.
²

And anyone who noticed the attackers’ race was a racist, people at the paper said later. I know a newspaper editor in Chicago who would love to hire these kids.

In St. Paul in February 2011, fifty black people descended on a convenience store in “a so-called mob theft or mob robbery. They stormed in together, their numbers overwhelming and just started stealing” and the video pictures tell the story.
³

So much for the “long hot summer” theory.

People in St. Paul consider their city to be safer than Minneapolis. Don’t know why.

When Lil Wayne and Drake are rumored to be partying at the largest mall in America, you know that can only mean one thing: riots.

A few days before Christmas in 2011, two hundred black people were fighting, smashing, grabbing, beating, stealing, and
having a good time doing it—if the audio on the dozens of videos are any indication.