News Flash: All over America, families get together on Friday night. They eat fried chicken spread out over checkered table cloths. They drink lemonade. They play volleyball. Or Monopoly. Or even Scrabble.
Or a thousand other things without attacking people, fighting police, destroying property, harassing pedestrians, and creating violent mayhem.
That is normal.
Not in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, if the local media is to be believed. There, black mob violence downtown and other places is now a regularly scheduled event. Almost like the running of the bulls.
Let’s take a look at June 2014 when the reporters and editors and business leaders of Winston-Salem pretty much threw in the towel.
The first I heard about the large-scale black mob violence in Winston-Salem was in an editorial in the local paper: The Teens of Summer Are Upon Us.384
That is a lot of mis-information in just one headline. First, we already know the drill about teens. This is an editorial about black mobs. Two, the summer thing is also misleading. As in, this only happens during the summer. That’s not true either.
The editorial writers from the Winston-Salem Journal pressed on: The teens were “celebrating the last day of school.” And this widespread violence happened before, in 2007, but then it went away.
This is what happens when you create an environment where people cannot talk about race or racial violence: Reporters and others get to make silly and stupid and untrue statements unchallenged.
Except in the reader’s comments. And you’d better get to them fast, because they often disappear.
Let’s see if we can piece together the truth of what happened that June night -- and before. And compare the reality with what was reported.
Let’s start with the numbers: 300 black people in downtown. Jumping on cars, destroying property, fighting police, getting pepper sprayed.
Oh yeah: I already told you that part.
But wait, the same paper that just told us that this thing happened once before in 2007, let the truth slip out, almost parenthetically: “This isn’t unprecedented, it just usually doesn’t happen so close to the end of the school year,” the mayor told The Journal.
Try as I might, I cannot find anything in the Winston-Salem media about large-scale black mobs terrorizing the downtown and other parts of the city. Regularly. At the end of summer, as if on schedule.
Reporters may shy away from it, but readers flock to it, wanting to know why the paper has such a hard time telling them what is going on. Said Janice Tuttle at one of the Journal’s stories on the violence: “I witnessed a group like this at Hanes Mall a couple of months ago. It was frightening. They suddenly appeared in a swarm as though some announcement had been made on social media. It was a very violent fight, too.”385
Whoa! This is bigger than we thought. The malls too? Yes, the malls. Anywhere else? Brenda Wagner chimed in about the summer before:
“Wake and I were downtown last year and the police had to break up a very large confrontation, they have had problems with them for several years. We watched and were amazed at how smoothly and easily they separated the teens that were arguing. I don't think they had more than a couple hundred in that group.”
News, news and more news.
One community activist had a solution and an observation: “Don’t drop your kids off downtown,” she said on video to The Journal. “Because obviously, when you get a bunch of kids together there’s no telling what they are going to do.”386
Obviously?
Try as I might, I cannot figure out what is obvious about the inevitability of black mob violence. Others have no problem wrapping their minds around it. Let’s hear from the kids: What happens when you put a bunch of black people together? The Fox affiliate found a few and asked them about the city’s plan to give the “teenagers” something to do as a way to combat violence:
“It’s a good idea but they still going to be fightin’though,” said one. “Middle school? They going to be fightin’ too.”387
Here’s something else that is obvious: Whatever is happening in Winston-Salem happens in hundreds of other cities around the country. And more and more people want to know why their local media have so much invested in ignoring, denying and condoning it.
Because more and more people refuse to accept it as normal.
Lots of people are taking the new normal to the next level. And they are using bogus crime stats to do it.