June 21, 2007

Not related. Do you hear me? Not related!

From Fox News:

Police, Officials Insist Attacks on Drivers Not Related to Juneteenth Celebrations

Police and organizers of Juneteenth events in two cities are insisting that attacks against drivers — one of which left an Austin, Texas, man dead — have nothing to do with the crowds attending the celebrations.

On Tuesday, 40-year-old Austin resident David Rivas Morales was beaten to death in an attack near a Juneteenth celebration after the driver of the car he was riding in struck and injured a little girl.

In Milwaukee, police responded in riot gear to disperse the crowd at that city's celebration on Tuesday after a man was pulled from a car and beaten and an officer was injured trying to break up a fight.

"It doesn't seem to be a hate crime. It really seems to be a spontaneous act resulting from that collision with that child," said Austin Police Department Commander Harold Piatt. "We don't know if there were any words exchanged between the driver and the men to start with that escalated this to the assault."

"You just had a group of individuals that decided that they wanted to do something entirely different," said McArthur Weddle, president of Milwaukee's Juneteenth Day. "It's just sad that you have a few fools that got out of hand."

Video from a local news chopper, however, showed dozens of people immediately moving from the event to an attack on a car that left a 33-year-old man beaten.

[More]

To decode this lengthy article, which doesn't mention the words "black" or "African-American," you need to know that "Juneteenth" is a black pride celebration of June 19th, 1865 when the victorious Union Army declared Emancipation in Texas.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think they are right. This had nothing to do with the kind of people who were in the crowd. After all, if Mr. Morales had been caught in a crowd full of Japanese people, he would have been torn limb from limb just the same.

Nope, I can't spot anything about this crowd that would have made them more deadly than any other. Move along now....

Anonymous said...

The local papers are much more honest about the facts.

Anonymous said...

A mob is a hate crime waiting to happen. If the mob were racially diverse, one could claim the crime was not race related. But when a mob of one race attacks someone of another race that is the kind of hate crime that at the very least is a racially suspect hate crime.

Anonymous said...

I seen both of the news segments on this via the internet and noted that the entire crowd was black, but couldn't make out what the assailant was.


Lemme see, if a car driven by a black man hit a little white girl during a Renfest, and a crowd of whites descended on this man and beat him up (for being drunk, or whatever), does anyone else besides me think that it would be excoriated in the media as a hate crime, replete with Reverends and CNN? Yup, I thought so.


There is suppressed anger amongst blacks against the rampant increase in hispanics in this nation folks, and there will be tension between these two groups. But thats OK, as our overclass is safe behind their gates.

Anonymous said...

The police and organizers are amatures. To see real PC kool-aid drinkers, one should have been in Toronto last summer when 17 muslims were arrested for planning to blow up the CN Tower and behead the Prime Minister.

RCMP assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell:

"The suspects represent a broad strata of Canadian society. Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed.”


Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair:

"It appears that a number of these young men were motivated by an ideology based on politics, hatred and terrorism, and not on faith.”

"I would remind you that there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to muslim or muslim community"
[at the press conference]

I expect this crap from university professors and politicians, but I was quite shaken to hear it coming from the police.

Anonymous said...

There needs to be a betting website where one can place wagers on whether a murder or serious assualt will occur at events like these. I would clean up, as I predicted some degree of violence the moment I heard of this "Juneteeth" celebration.

Here in western New England "Puerto Rican Day" or whatever it was called was regularly marred by stabbings and other instances of gang violence. (The day may in fact have been discontinued due to the pervasive gang violence).

Anonymous said...

Racial violence against out-groups is no joke. It always seems to escalate into fairly horrific violence.

The Newsom-Christian rape-murders come to mind, as do the rape-murders of House of Freaks guitarist Brian Harvey and his wife and daughters. Black on White violence can be just as horrific as the targeted violence in South Central against Blacks by Hispanics (14 year old boys and girls shot, elderly grandmas, etc) or the other way around in Milwaukee and Austin.

BUT ... lest Anglos think preen in moral superiority, the same could be true in Jim Crow America, within living memory.

There was an exhibition of the photographs taken to commemorate lynchings, in the South, and also Midwest and Northeast, from the 1870's into the 1950's. This included commercial postcards. Little girls would pictured poking the burnt bodies of lynched Black men. Not in places like Selma only but Rochester NY, or Indianapolis, or Gary. And again, commercial souvenirs were produced of the events.

The standard story about the end of White Lynch mobs is that the moral persuasion of Dr. King and the media and entertainment made it unacceptable for Whites to engage in it (or other overt signs of racism). This is probably true in part.

The other explanation is that rising income levels among Whites and the ability to live in segregated neighborhoods to a far greater degree (with autos available to everyone, so Blacks are not across the railroad tracks but thirty miles away in the city) left Whites unwilling to engage in the ugly physical brutality and with no more reasons (it's easier to avoid conflict by moving). Wealth and mobility led to the death of the Klan, not moral preaching.

IF that explanation is partially correct, then the lesson is that a multiracial society had better be damn rich and geographically dispersed to avoid mob violence.

But you certainly can't look at the wealth of lynching photos and not see that Whites within living memory could and did engage in mob violence every bit as awful as the parent story. And I don't see wealth and mobility coming to other groups besides Anglos and Asians anytime soon.

togo said...

The era of deadly mob violence by whites against blacks ended before the era of post-WW2 affluence. The best explanation is the evolution towards almost universal public condemnation of such activity by the elites of both North and South. It was in 1946 that the FBI became involved in a lynching investigation for the first time. I don't think anything resembling the "classic" lynch mob incident of the popular imagination occurred after that date. The Emmett Till killing, for example, was carried out secretly by a small group of men in the dark of night.

Why did the elites suddenly take a hard stand against lynching? Probably because the US was now in the spotlight as a Superpower on the world stage defending democracy against Communism.

Anonymous said...

"Racial violence against out-groups is no joke. It always seems to escalate into fairly horrific violence."

Thomas Sowell, has written much about this, but has focused only on rich minorities in a given area. Chua? did an okay job in talking about it in "World on Fire", too.

Reading them put me in the fight-or-flight mode; I put down "World on Fire" and every part of my being screamed to move away from all "others"... Now!

Anonymous said...

Wily --

I still like the Auto more than elite opinion. Please explain why elite opinion in the NYT mattered to people in Marion Illinois or Birmingham Alabama. Particularly in 1946, when the Cold War was not yet cold and the military was cut drastically.

The auto explains a lot. Instead of having to engage in brutal, physical violence (men being lynched will fight back hard) it was simply easier to move out to a nice safe suburb. Commutes were easy, safe and unfettered by anyone else.

My problem with elites as the opinion makers suddenly making everyone in America toe the line is that elites from the 1920's onward condemned lynching and nothing happened. Billie Holliday sang about Strange Fruit, Eleanor Roosevelt condemned it, so too various Hollywood types, nothing happened ...

Until everyone got a lot richer post-War and moved out to the suburbs with their very own car.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous, you should read Freakonomics on the history of lynching. They died down a LONG time before the civil rights era. Levitt's theory is that once you've scared people sufficiently with the early lynchings, you don't really have to do many more as long as people believe you will.

The Inductivist has data here

Anonymous said...

Wasn't the lynching of suspected white criminals by mobs of other whites fairly common? The last several posts have piqued my curiousty on the subject of lynch mobs,whatever the mobs motivation was.

Anonymous said...

My grandfather was a bootlegger who bought his hooch from the Capone gang and sold it throughout Illinois and Indiana.

He told me that black gangs were every bit, if not more, ruthless than white gangs... and this was in the 1930s.

I am skeptical of the vision of the past being offered by the respondents to this post. Do you think that the overwhelming criminality and predeliction to violence among blacks did not exist during the Jim Crow era? Do you think that it is only a contemporary occurrence?

I am not defending lynching. I am saying that a form of PC existed by in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, just as it exists today. My grandfather actually had to defend himself against black gangsters. My uncles actually had to compete with black men for menial jobs. Back in those days, the upper class also looked down its nose at men like my grandfather and my uncles. Class snobbery existed then, too.

Could it be that you are all a little one sided in your rendition of the past? Could it be that, just like today, whites really had something to fear from black violence?

Anonymous said...

In the Texas case, if it had been the driver who was killed, I think the legendary Texas defence "he needed killing" would have applied; and the same in any case when a driver runs down a pedestrian, particularly a child. Probably there is even less chance of justice when the victim run down is Black. I understand that the Crown Heights riots of a few years ago where triggered when a White immigrant motorcade killed a Black American child and no official action was taken against the driver.

As for the history of lynching, it's as American as the Right to Bear Arms. The original mr Lynch was a Patriot during the American revolution, and the first victims were people he suspected of being British loyalists.

Anonymous asked "Wasn't the lynching of suspected white criminals by mobs of other whites fairly common? ". Just a bit. Perhaps Steve could put his movie critics hat on and recommend the thousand best westerns featuring a lynching of suspected rustlers etc.

AS for lynching of Black Americans by White mobs, it hasn't gone away, unless you insist on death by hanging from a tree in the definition. Towards the end of the last century there were two widely-reported cases from New York City, in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach, of Black Americans eing killed by Italian-American mobs just for being in "their" neighbourhoods. If that isn't lynching, what is?

Anonymous said...

This "Juneteenth" riot is nothing new. When blacsk get together, there always seem to be "disturbances" or "incidents." All unrelated and randomly occuring events that come out of the blue.

When I lived in Philadelphia some years ago, we had the "Greek Weekend" riot and the Mardi Gras riot on South Street. During the Greek Weekend" riot, I was told in no uncertain terms to get off the street by "youths." When one of them showed me the handgun in his waistband, I didn't need any further convincing.

Anonymous said...

This is quite hilarious.

If you read the articles, you would think that any crowd of any American people are naturally violent and that this would occur even in, say, Spokane Washington. However, when you read both articles carefully, you notice that both incidences occured at Junteenth celibrations, which is essentially an african-american celebration. If you look carefully at the accompanying photos, you notice a proponderance of African-American participants. Neither story make reference to this.

Gee. aren't these guessing games fun?

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, the Los Angeles Halloween festivities/riot come to mind.

Anonymous said...

Levitt's theory is that once you've scared people sufficiently with the early lynchings, you don't really have to do many more as long as people believe you will. - tggp

The last several posts have piqued my curiousty on the subject of lynch mobs,whatever the mobs motivation was. - anon.

Instead of having to engage in brutal, physical violence (men being lynched will fight back hard) it was simply easier to move out to a nice safe suburb. - anon.

Interesting observations, and there's probably some truth to all of them. I would add that Jim Crowe-era violence against blacks was seldom of the random kind like happened on Juneteenth. It seems to have, for the most part, been calculated to target rabble rousers.

I recall it once being pointed out that more blacks die in a single year due to gang violence than have ever been lynched.

Southerners seem to have innately understood the need to keep blacks in line. Without that ability we see what has happened - crime in neighborhoods with lots of blacks skyrockets; black homes fall into disrepair, making them undesirable neighbors; and black politicians turn the government into a massive kleptocracy, using it to favor their own and to redistribute white wealth to fellow blacks. What's more we see the endless movement of people further and further away from the cities, in an effort to flee all of this.

Anonymous said...

Hmmm...two thoughts slither out of my brain like hungry cicadas searching for breakfast: A) The whole "hate crimes" movement is based on absurdity,so police spokesman must make absurd statements to cover their assess. When blacks commit horrific crimes against whites/others the cops become,in effect,"spokesmen" for the black thugs! "Ya see,Leon was trying to ROB the white guy.The fact that the guys head was split open and bones broken,that was merely PART of the ROBBERY. Race was not even on his mind..."He is parsing like Bill Clinton! B)The idiotic lengths the media will go to hide the racial aspects of crime,(Unless-Hallelujah!!its WHITE criminals)--a recent story in the Sun-Times on dog-fighting was prety amusing. Thru the whole article the guy referred to this problem going on in "urban" places! NO mention of race. Yup.dog-fighting is a huge problem in the Upper East Side of Manhattan,I guess its those competitive brokers!

Anonymous said...

A sharp reader did not even need to know about the Jueteenth celebration. As soon as the media reported that the Austin Texas beating/murder had occurred at the Booker T. Washington Apartments, it was obvious that blacks were involved.

No commercial building would name itself the Brooker T. Washington Apartments so it was obvious that that the beating took place in a HUD housing projects and that the project was filled with blacks

Rodney Perkins said...

The "mob" was 3 or 4 people.

http://canadaeast.com/ce2/docroot/article.php?articleID=16705

Anonymous said...

Lynching - by which I mean the public, mob-directed, locally condoned murder of blacks by whites - may have gone away partly because of affluence, but mostly it was social disapproval. To claim that:

My problem with elites as the opinion makers suddenly making everyone in America toe the line is that elites from the 1920's onward condemned lynching and nothing happened. Billie Holliday sang about Strange Fruit, Eleanor Roosevelt condemned it, so too various Hollywood types, nothing happened ...

ignores reality. Elites do not dictate public opinion overnight. They take a stand, and, using their influence in the media, government and (in earlier times) churches, gradually shift public opinion. For example, the elites were solidly in favor of at least toleration, if not outright acceptance, of homosexuals, from the early 70's onward. It has taken 30 years for the public to catch up.

I believe that what happened with lynching was that it was so strongly condemned by national (and, eventually, local) elites that the idea tricked down to the masses. It didn't hurt that lyching was associated with poor whites. It wasn't Delta planters standing around the corpses grinning and pointing and holding up ill-spelled signs. As people became more affluent - I agree that affluence definitely contributed - people were less likely to want to associate themselves with a gang of toothless buffoons in overalls.

There is also the fact that, as societies grow richer, they typically become less violent and, for want of a better phrase, kinder and gentler. Compassion is a luxury. The Western world of today is FAR, FAR less violent than it was 150 years ago, particularly with regard to matters of public order and law enforcement.

While I agree that affluence helped whites to isolate themselves from blacks (although, once again, elite opinion was a larger factor), I think this contributed more to the decline in white racism than to the end of lynching per se. Said decline is not merely cosmetic, either. I believe that people, in general, really are less racist than they used to be. That's also a luxury, of course.

Anonymous said...

To give you an idea of how the event was covered by the 11.30pm news on Univision (the Spanish language channel)...the individuals who supposedly carried out the beating were described as being "de raza negra" - which means, literally, "of the black race". I should point out that in Latin America, individuals can and are often described by their nationality, race, or physical characteristics and not have it necessarily be pejorative.