November 27, 2014
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There is a long and storied history of behaviors being
depicted through the prism of people's skin color. During Hurricane
Katrina, as people of all races desperately searched for provisions,
the media reported that white people “found” food, while black people “looted.”
A
similar phenomenon can be seen in the response to protests sparked by
the murder of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown and a grand jury’s
recent decision not to indict his killer, Ferguson police officer Darren
Wilson. In discussing riots that occurred in the aftermath of both
events, the media and conservative pundits have displayed far too great a
willingness to chalk up the destruction to black pathology without
looking at longstanding policies that support and maintain white
supremacy in the U.S. What’s more, they also completely overlook the
fact that white people riot, too—just for really stupid reasons.
Inspired by a list compiled by political blogger
@red3blog in a series of tweets, here’s a more in-depth look at the 11 most ridiculous reasons white people have rioted.
11) Denver 1998: Denver Broncos Win Super Bowl.
In
response to their home team, the Denver Broncos, winning the Super Bowl
for the second consecutive year in a row, 10,000 fans apparently
decided the most appropriate response was to go on a rampage that
included fighting in the street, randomly setting bonfires, overturning
cars and general acts of vandalism. Andrew Hudson, a spokesman for the
mayor’s office, later called the mob destruction “a really ugly scene by
a lot of obnoxious people who were drunk.” Video of the swelling crowd
behaving badly can be viewed
here, with reporters repeatedly referring to the rioters, who caused the city millions of dollars in damages, as “rowdy.”
10) San Francisco 2012. San Francisco Giants Win World Series.
You
might guess that with three World Series wins over the last five years,
riot-ready San Francisco Giants fans might decide to sit one of those
wins out, but so far, that hasn’t happened. While this particular photo
dates to the 2012 riots following the Giants’ triumph over the Detroit
Tigers, the city has erupted in post-World Series violence twice more in
recent history: in 2010, after the Giants beat the Texas Rangers, and
again this year, after the team defeated the Kansas City Royals. The
2014 riots ended with
two non-fatal shootings and a stabbing among the violence that marred the night. A
picture tweeted after
this year’s mayhem shows the remnants of a smashed police car, with a
note that “officers had bottles thrown at them by out of control fans.”
9) Vancouver 2011. Vancouver Canucks Lose the Stanley Cup.
A few of the
most interesting details about
the riots that followed the Vancouver Canucks’ loss to the Boston
Bruins for the Stanley Cup in 2011: Rioters chanted “Let’s go riot!
Let's go!”; cars and trucks were overturned and set ablaze; theatergoers
who’d gone to see the Broadway play "Wicked" found themselves stuck in
the theater, which was located in the riot zone, until the whole mess
ended. Jim Chu, chief of the Vancouver police department, blamed the
chaos on "criminals and anarchists" disguised as hockey fans. In any
case, local news cameras caught aerial views of rioters in the act, like
this video of the crowd
turning over a truck (at the :40 mark) for reasons apparent only to them.
8) Lexington, Kentucky, 2012. University of Kentucky Wildcats Win.
If
you have any doubt that white people are particularly committed to
rioting for any sports related reasons, consider the case of the
University of Kentucky in 2012. Riots broke out after the school
defeated in-state rivals Louisville in the Final Four, with
more than 30 arrests made and
a staggering 50-some fires reported. Astonishingly, just two nights
later, after the team defeated the University of Kansas to become NCAA
champs, fans again rioted, setting just as many fires, but this time
adding gun violence to boot, leaving one man non-fatally shot (and not
by the police).
7) Boston 2004. Red Sox Win Games...Three Different Times.
If
you make a reference to “that time white people in Boston rioted over
baseball,” you’ll have to get more specific and name a year, since it
happened in 2004, 2007 and 2013. The deadliest riot, in 2004, left
21-year-old student Victoria Snelgrove dead, the accidental victim of a
projectile fired by the police. Snelgrove, despite being among the
60,000-80,000 estimated rioters, was never labeled a “thug” or a
“demon,” and the Boston police department issued a statement saying it
accepted “full responsibility” for the student’s death. (The city was
subsequently court-ordered to pay Snelgrove’s family $5.1 million.)
Media coverage of the rioting accused
fans of taking the celebration “too far,” and described them as
“causing mischief,” even as images of flames engulfing a car flickered
in the background. Riots also followed a 2007 Red Sox win, as well as
another triumph in 2013, a night which ended with cars
smashed and
overturned.
6) West Virginia 2014. West Virginia University Mountaineers Win.
Although
the West Virginia University Mountaineers pulled an upset with their
2012 win over Baylor University, it did not reflect the 400-year-long
struggle for equality and justice of one oppressed minority group
against a racist and white supremacist power structure, but white people
found a reason to riot anyway. According to
ESPN,
rioters “pushed over street lights and threw rocks, beer bottles and
other items at public safety personnel and their vehicles,” and of
course, set plenty of fires. In fact, the school has become famous for
recklessly burning stuff after games (even though it's now a
felonious offense), which I’d love to see any students from an historically black college try to get away with.
5)
Pennsylvania 2011. Penn State Fires Coach Joe Paterno for Looking the
Other Way While His Assistant Coach Sexually Molested Children.
After
it was widely discovered that Penn State football coach Joe Paterno
hadn't reported his assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, to police, after
learning he was likely molesting young boys, the school fired the coach.
After learning of the university's decision, thousands of students
rioted, brawling with police and ripping down lamposts. They also
overturned news vans, which crowded the campus as the scandal unfolded.
Jerry Sandusky was later found guilty of 45 of the 48 charges related to
molesting young boys, many of them from underserved communities and
participants in the Second Mile, a "charitable organization" Sandusky
himself founded.
4) Knoxville, Tennessee, 2010. Lane Kiffin Decides He Doesn't Want to Coach for the University of Tennessee Anymore.
Lane
Kiffin probably expected that announcing he was quitting as head coach
of the University of Tennessee Volunteers to instead coach the
University of Southern California Trojans—after just one year on the
job— would frustrate many of the school’s football fans. He may not have
expected it would result in them calling for his head and totally
wrecking shop. Reports state that Kiffin was basically chased from
campus, while students and other football hooligans
burned things,
ran amok in the streets, and again,
burned things (sometimes,
apparently, while drunkenly singing “Rocky Top, Tennessee”). In the
end, Kiffin turned out to be a huge bust at USC and was fired, meaning
he'd actually done Tennesse a favor.
3) Huntington Beach, California, 1986 and 2013. Surfing Competitions Take Place.
Every
year, Huntington Beach hosts the U.S. Open of Surfing. Every few years,
it also hosts a riot or two. The Huntington Beach Op Pro surf riots
date back to 1986 when,
according to (
possibly apocryphal)
lore, the chaos started with a few guys “trying to take off the bathing
suits of two young women.” Whatever the origins of the
craziness—footage of which you can check out
here, along with photos
here— it
ended with hundreds of rioters setting police cars on fire, hurling
bottles and throwing punches. The scene repeated itself in 2013, when a
crowd
described as “young,
tan [and] overwhelmingly white” went on a similar free-for-all of
random destruction. While these two riots are separated by a quarter
century, don’t be misled: Huntington Beach has a history of random group
violence that suggests something deeper and more pathological at work
in the white community. Check out
this video footage from 1993 (from a 4th of July riot) or this
lengthy list of Huntington Beach crowd violence compiled by Southern California station NBC 4.
2) Chicago 1979. Too Much Disco Music.
Chicago
DJ Steve Dahl was a key voice in the “Disco Sucks” movement, the
backlash against disco music that advocated for the superiority of the
more white-identified genre of rock and roll. (The movement might also
be considered the progenitor of
rockism,
which remains with us today.) Disco Demolition Night started as a
publicity stunt where fans were invited to bring old disco records to a
double header between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers.
Between games, the plan was to have Dahl explode a pile of the records
on the field. The problem was, nearly double the capacity of Comiskey
Park showed up, and a few thousand fans who'd been refused admittance
instead found ways to sneak in. As the two teams began to square off,
out-of-control fans threw disco records and random objects from the
stands onto the field. Between games, when the explosion finally did
happen, thousands of attendees stormed the field, setting bonfires,
stealing bases and tearing up the green. It took cops in riot gear to
get everyone back to their seats, and ultimately, the second game was
cancelled and the White Sox forfeited. As pictures from the night
attest, the crowd was overwhelmingly white, although there was one
person of color in attendance:
late actor Michael Clark Duncan,
a 21-year-old unknown at the time, who “slid into third base, had a
silver belt buckle stolen, and went home with a bat from the dugout.”
1) Keene, New Hampshire, 2014. Pumpkin Festival Takes Place. No Really... a Pumpkin Festival.
The
much-mocked Keene State College riots this year are not just evidence
that white people can and will riot without the slightest provocation,
they are a troubling look at the very different ways our society views
behaviors based on skin color. In October, Keene State held its annual
Pumpkin Festival, a seemingly innocuous annual gathering that somehow
devolved into drunken (white) students turning over cars, throwing
bottles at the cops, stealing street signs, starting fires, shouting
obscenities at the police, and somehow, surviving without a single
person being so much as tased. Ironically, despite early unrest,
peaceful protests in Ferguson had been ongoing for weeks, but
conservative media, for some reason, labeled those activists criminals.
Twitter couldn’t help noticing the
difference, resulting in tweets that wondered "Why are they tearing up
their own community?" and suggesting “White people in New Hampshire
really need to do some self-reflection and regulate their animal
impulses in the wake of
#keenepumpkinfest.”
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