5 Feet of Fury

Jim Goad: What If Those Bikers Had Been, Like, Another Color?

Jim Goad writes:

Only in America can the media take a deadly shootout among white and Hispanic bikers and somehow make it all about black people. (…)

That’s right—even by a low estimate, cops killed four presumably white gang members. And yet no whites rioted. To my knowledge, the last group of reckless arsonists who tried to burn Waco down was the ATF in 1993.

This time around, police swiftly quashed the violence and promptly arrested 172 bikers and biker associates who’d been at the restaurant during the shootout, charging them all with criminal conspiracy and setting each individual’s bail at a steep $1 million. In short, police showed a much more aggressive response to this incident—which couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes—than they did to prolonged rioting in Ferguson and Baltimore. But if you were merely to note this fact, you would be deviating from The Script and told to shut your filthy bigoted piehole.