Posts Tagged ‘Colin Flaherty’

Are Race Riots News?

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

When I first saw a book with the title, “White Girl Bleed A Lot” by Colin Flaherty, I instantly knew what it was about, even though I had not seen the book reviewed anywhere, and knew nothing about the author.

That phrase was spoken by a member of a mob of young blacks who attacked whites at random at a Fourth of July celebration in Milwaukee last year. What I was appalled to learn, in the course of my research, was that such race riots have occurred in other cities across the United States in recent years—and that the national mainstream media usually ignore these riots.

Where the violence is too widespread and too widely known locally to be ignored, both the local media and public officials often describe what happened as unspecified “young people” attacking unspecified victims for unspecified reasons. But videos of the attacks often reveal both the racial nature of these attacks and the racial hostility expressed by the attackers.

Are race riots not news?

Ignoring racial violence only guarantees that it will get worse. The Chicago Tribune has publicly rationalized its filtering out of any racial identification of attackers and their victims, even though the media do not hesitate to mention race when decrying statistical disparities in arrest or imprisonment rates.

Reading Colin Flaherty’s book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of this problem is even greater than I had discovered from my own research. He documents both the race riots and the media and political evasions in dozens of cities across America.

Flaherty’s previous writings have won him praise and awards, but this book has been met largely with silence or abuse. However much ignoring the ugly realities that his book reveals may serve the interests of the media or politicians, a cover-up is a huge disservice to everyone else—whether black, white or whatever.

The dangers to the nation as a whole are an even bigger problem. The truth has a way of eventually coming out, in spite of media silence and politicians’ spin. If the truth becomes widely known, and a white backlash follows, turning one-way race riots into two-way race riots, then a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge can spiral out of control, as has already happened in too many other countries around the world.

Most blacks and most whites in the United States today get along with each other. But what is chilling is how often in history racial or ethnic groups that co-existed peacefully for generations—often as neighbors—have suddenly turned on each other with lethal violence.

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The Rise of Black-on-White Violence

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

The media and the usual race-mongers made sure that all of America knew about George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on February 26. The local police initially did not arrest Zimmerman because it was an obvious case of self-defense.

There was no such outcry, however, when a month later on March 26 a 50-year-old white man was attacked and beaten with a hammer by two black teens, in Midway, Florida, just six miles from Sanford. The Orlando Sentinel published a description of the attackers, but neglected to mention their race. One of them had just finished a seventeen month prison sentence.

On May 9, the Star-Ledger of Newark, NJ published an article, “Group of 10 or 15 ‘thugs’ rob and beat 5 people following Prudential Center concert, cops say.” There was no reference to their race in the article and when I emailed the reporter for clarification, I received no response.

This kind of double standard is rampant in the reporting of black-on-white attacks and Colin Flaherty, a radio host on WDEL, Wilmington, Delaware, and a writer who has won more than forty awards for his work, has recently published “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America” that chronicles a trend that is receiving little media attention and one which local police authorities tend to avoid discussing.

The book is not a racist screed. It is the reporting of events.

It is also an appalling record of violence against whites that must be addressed or political correctness will doom any chance of dealing with it. In the introduction to his book, Flaherty writes, “Almost as astonishing as the widespread racial violence is the willingness of people in authority to deny it. Ignore it. Explain it away. Even condone and lie about it.”

The book is a chronicle of black-on-white violence in recent years. “In Chicago,” Flaherty notes, “after weeks of racial violence where the newspapers refused to mention the crime was almost exclusively black gangs on individual whites, the Superintendent of Police said he knew what was causing the violence: Sarah Palin.”

“A member of Congress from Chicago, Bobby Rush, said black violence in Chicago was routine and the only reason anyone was paying any attention to the race riots in downtown Chicago was because it was black on white violence.”

“The riots on the streets of South Philly had ‘no racial component’ and were ‘nothing much’ said the Mayor, until events forced him to acknowledge the obvious: black people were taking racial violence to a new level.”

Flaherty says “The deniers fall somewhere in between two points; (on) one hand, they say the racial violence is not happening. On the other, they say it is, but everyone already knows it—and it is happening for a good reason. Sometimes they say both.”

“As I started to unravel the threads of these attacks,” writes Flaherty, “it became clear right away that this was happening all over the country for at least a year or two. And that newspapers were underreporting it—when they reported it at all.”

As the Memorial Day weekend approaches at the end of the month, Flaherty warns about Black Beach Week in Miami Beach and Black Bike Week in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, along with Speed Week in Charlotte, North Carolina.

For the past decade the events in Florida “have become the center of the universe of the world’s biggest black beach party. The city doesn’t really host the party. People just show up.” The events are distinguished by “Shootings, assaults on police, mountains of trash, (and) violence against people and property on a scale that can only be called anarchistic.”

These are not isolated events. The pattern was repeated in Indianapolis, Indiana, during its annual Black Expo and in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the several day party that precedes the annual Coca Cola 600, a NASCAR event. In 2011, an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 blacks rioted, resulting in one of the city’s largest mass arrests. Charlotte will be the site of the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

In July 2010, in Milwaukee, some ten to twenty white youths were enjoying a Fourth of July fireworks show when they were set upon by a gang of blacks. In Minneapolis in 2011, more than 800 black people “marauded through downtown followed a few days later by an incident when twenty black women beat a white woman after she confronted them about harassing her child.

In city after city throughout America—Akron, Rochester, Atlantic City, Atlanta, St. Louis, Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas, Detroit, Denver, and even the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., Flaherty documents riots and attacks that can no longer be ignored or seen as isolated events.

It is just too easy to pass this off as “black anger.” It is racism, and the Zimmerman-Martin killing is just the tip of the iceberg. Despite decades since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that was passed to redress the wrongs of the past against black Americans, some blacks retain a malignant hatred directed against whites.

“The Return of Race Riots to America” portends that the summer of 2012 could reflect this trend. It is a warning to the leaders in both the black and white communities to condemn it and to the nation’s media to do something other than ignore or exploit it.

The reality is that we are going to be hearing a lot more from Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan who thrive on such violence, and the real tragedy is that millions of law-abiding black citizens will be branded by such behavior.

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