Saturday's riot by white college students at Keene State College's annual Pumpkinfest is a priceless example of white privilege and white racism as a type of social practice and habit.
It was high comedy. Twitter had great fun with mocking and calling out the fuckery foolishness of the white pumpkin rioters.
It was also deadly serious. Fires were set, cars destroyed, bottles and other dangerous objects were thrown at random people, and the police were attacked by the white students at Keene's pumpkin festival.
In a stark and clear manner, white privilege and white supremacy color how the obnoxious and violent behavior of the white rioters at Pumpkinfest is described by the media.
Black folks who are protesting with righteous rage and anger in response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson have been called "thugs", "animals", and cited by the Right-wing media as examples of the "bad culture" and "cultural pathologies" supposedly common to the African-American community.
Privileged white college students who riot at a pumpkin festival are "spirited partiers", "unruly", or "rowdy".
Right-wing propaganda sites such as the Drudge Report pander black beast rapist negrophobia to their racist audience with grotesque images of "black crime" and "black criminality" as a standard theme. By contrast, the violent behavior of white college students is met with relative silence save for a description of the events in Keene, New Hampshire as "extreme partying".
And of course, the race of the rioting students is not mentioned by Drudge and/or the mainstream news media because Whiteness has no stigma or connection to criminality and violence as seen through the White Gaze.
The racial innocence of Whiteness is one of America's greatest lies as white folks, here demonstrated by acts such as racial genocide against First Nations peoples and racial pogroms against blacks, are the most violent and destructive group of people in the history of the United States.
White college students riot over pumpkins, but are mute and show no equivalent expenditure of upsetness or energy over the murder of Michael Brown and the many other black and brown people killed by the police and white identified vigilantes every 28 hours in the United States.
Hmm...I wonder why?
22 comments:
Why wasn't anybody shot? Oh, yeah.........
They are just excitable but otherwise good kids. Geez. Allow America's white youth to work out their energy with some slapdash fun.
The police aren't supposed to shoot white people. That would be wrong.
Unfortunately I'm not surprised. I cross the street every time I see a gang of white boys with pumpkins. Invariably they're pushing and shoving each other, drinking bad domestic beer and yelling "Dude" incessantly and peeing on cars. I have no idea what they have in those pumpkins but I don't hang around long enough to find out if you know what I mean!
Earlier this fall I went apple picking with a white friend and I had the same sense of dread. Hordes of white people skulking around in row after row of apples. Where the hell do they all come from and why don't they get apples from the store like the rest of us? Some of them were swilling apple "cider" and eating apples off the ground like animals. Children unattended, running loose also peeing on things. Lots of peeing.
The same friend invited me to go with a group of white folks on a hayride in November. Oh hell no!
Nothing new here: white kids riot all the time with no negative stank to implicate them collectively afters. Its quite often what white college kids just do, a negative externality we all bear. Think on it: NCAA tourneys, drinking holidays, house parties. I had joked back when the Ferguson protests began after the Brown slaying that some Masters social science student could make a mighty fine thesis just observing their propensity to tear stuff up each and every St. Patrick's Day (Google "St. Patrick's Day riot" and see what I mean). Remember the Huntington Beach Surfer Riot last year? Of course you don't. Its one of those cultural things we tend to collectively overlook here in the States, like missing black women and Middle East collateral damage tallies.
To be clear: we all get belligerent and break stuff from time to time, sometimes justly, oft times not; the mob mentality is not more prevalent in one group relative to another. But those folks calling blacks animals who can't behave due to the frustrated actions of a few rioting over abject systemic injustices, like the Brown slaying, should make sure their kids aren't jumping up and down on a smoldering car at a pumpkin festival with a 40 in his hand shouting about how Daddy never tossed the ball around enough. Yeah, yeah, the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon... now go on and fix your face.
if you want some insight into pathological white supremacy read some of the comments on the Pumpkin Riot stories. Apparently, it is Obama's fault, the white kids were out of control but don't have the "bad culture" of the negroes in Ferguson because they didn't rob or break into the high end antique stores nearby, and were just good kids who got rowdy...not like the bad negroes who can't help it. I kid you not.
Of course. You didn't get the memo?
What would The Great Pumpkin say? Or Pumpkinhead? Hmm...
This tweet (see pic) by Nestlé Snipes (@ChocnessMonsta) says it all:
"Actually...I do get it. Thanks @CNN #pumpkinfest #Ferguson"
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0UCxG3IQAA1K6e.jpg
Listen to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYb24DCXP3w
Warning: It contains abundant profanity.
"Blacks rioting" is just another racist stereotype. And its of the legacy variety.
This is one clear example of how media supports white supremacy through its different treatment of social events. Whites rioting is either benign or explainable: "oh its just young people acting out" after a football game or festival. It happens.
The rare instance of blacks "rioting," and they are rare versus the number of white riots -- but you'd never know that based on media reporting, are presented as unexplainable. For example Ferguson is not reported as a response to incredible injustice, but the natural and inexplicable violent response of a violent people who refuse to "wait for all the facts." its white kids and good clean fun getting out of hand, vs. rampaging wild ni**gers destroying their own communities.
Sadly, this is reality and reality is not an easy pill to swallow.
LOL
I was thinking along these lines earlier this spring when Iowa State U. once again had a riot at the VEISHA festival. These crowds were virtually 100 percent white. The light pole you see falling in the video hit a guy on the head and seriously injured him. The university president finally has cancelled the festival for good. This was significant to me as I had two brothers who went to Iowa State and we used to go up to VEISHA. There was a parade in the morning and then lots of cool, interesting exhibits and programs by the different departments and colleges. This was in the 60s and early 70s. There were protests and some unruliness, but nothing like this mindless hooliganism.
Something else that had me thinking about this was the Philadelphia gay-bashing of a couple months ago. Again, a bunch of drunken, privileged, suburban white people acting like hooligans. If black people had done this, there would have been screaming, panicky news reports about "the knockout game." Instead, this barely got any mainstream media attention at all, and the consensus is that none of these people will spend a day in jail.
I don't understand why white people are so violent.
Well stated. I so loathe the media.
I was really disappointed by NPR's coverage of this. I know I shouldn't have been surprised, but still.
Did they fall into that same trap, i.e. the dominant race media frame?
A pumpkin festival and white folks wilding out like idiots. Shaking my head. Are they animals too?
Talk about white privilege indeed.
It just youthful hijinks *sarcasm*
YES. And they should have known better. I was not expecting it because I'd already been sensitized via twitter, blogs, memes, etc. and I figured someone on their code-switch team could have given them a heads up if they hadn't come across it on their own. I was expecting better from them, and maybe a comparison to the coverage of Ferguson to boot. But no.
The written version online doesn't have the introductory short, but I think he said something like, "Things got a little out of hand." The comments on the story on NPR, otoh, are pretty great. 'Send these "animals" and "thugs" back to Europe.'
Have you seen this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAVCsaHT2ag
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