I talk to Colin by phone Sunday afternoon. His new book is called — White Girl Bleed a Lot — The return of racial violence and how the media ignore it.
Colin: “My brother and I host a talk show in Wilmington, Delaware. We saw all this information coming over the newswire about flash mobs in Philadelphia. It didn’t sound right. I looked at it on Youtube and what I saw on Youtube was totally different from what I was reading about in the newspapers. If you looked at it on Youtube, it was a race riot. There was hundreds and thousands of black people on the streets of Philadelphia beating people up, pulling people out of cars, destroying property, threatening police. All nasty stuff.”
“I said this is not a typical kid’s night out. This is a race riot.”
“It kept happening over and over and over again.”
“I thought the world needed a book where people could read it and not deny this epidemic of racial violence.”
Luke: “Is this epidemic new?”
Colin: “I’m not sure. Some people say no. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther leader and the only guy who beat Barack Obama in an election, says this has been happening for a while in the black community and the only reason people are paying attention to it now is that it is spilling into the white community.”
Luke: “Why do you think the news media has been reluctant to write accurately about this?”
Colin: “Everybody’s afraid to talk about race. Nobody wants to talk about racial violence. Wherever your community paper is, pick it up and you’ll see stories about the Black Caucus and black student groups, many of these stories will be written about by the Association of Black Violence, but to talk about black violence is to risk being drummed out of the public square as a racist.”
“Maybe I’m just a guy who has his eyes open. The book asks more questions than it opens. The book says we’re past the point where we can deny this. Because of Youtube and Twitter, we can’t. We might as well start talking about it.”
“I used to be the ghostwriter for the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.”
“Drudge links to these stories but he just links. He doesn’t say what it is and neither do many of the stories. Drudge might link to a story in Philadelphia but the story won’t say that one thousand black people were running down the streets of Philadelphia creating havoc and this is the 20th time this exact thing has happened in the last six months. They’re running out of words to describe people who do this. They’re unruly youths. They’re drunken teenagers. At some point, we’ll have to come to grips that these are black people in these riots.”
“Psychiatrists will tell us that we’re only as sick as our secrets. This topic is so buried, so secret for so many people, it shows how sick racial attitudes are for so many people.”
“There was an incident on the Fourth of July. That’s what the LA Times calls it. There were some people throwing fireworks at police in Watts. I called around. It sounded like there were ten, twenty, thirty people and they ran away when the cops came. That’s what I got from the story.”
“I emailed a firefighter who was Tweeting from the scene. He said there were 300 cops at this incident and 800 black people involved and those numbers did not get any attention in the Los Angeles Times. Eight hundred people throwing explosive devices at police officers is not a story?”
“When you hear about stuff happening in Las Vegas and smaller mid-West towns, some people say those are black people who were driven out of Los Angeles by the Mexican gangs. On the street level, it is nasty out there [between black and latino gangs in LA].”
Luke: “When did you realize you had a book here?”
Colin: “The minute one of the other talk show hosts said that my reporting on the matter was ‘despicable.’ I thought this was worth a book because it is happening all over the country. It’s too juicy.”
Luke: “My perception of America is that the worst thing you can do for your social standing is to say anything that can be regarded as racist.”
Colin: “This is how I avoid that. I don’t generalize and I don’t stereotype. I also don’t apologize. My book is fact driven. There’s nothing in there you could point to and say is racist.”
