IT’S BLACK
Out of control Philly fans benefit from
PHILADELPHIA — I’ve been in a Philadelphia school board meeting where four people were arrested. There were no fires set, no cars toppled and no property destroyed, yet four non-violent education activists were dragged out in handcuffs and charged with disorderly conduct for speaking up for better wages for teachers and more resources for kids.
Meanwhile, thousands of crazed football fans utterly destroyed parts of the city Sunday night, and those same Philly police officers who were so tough in School Reform Commission meetings arrested the same number of people. Four.
Yes, we know you are not all maniacs, you hyper-sensitive Philadelphia fans. But this isn’t about you. It’s about the systems of power and societal norms that once again have us scratching our heads.
The optics hanging over the reactions (or lack of one) by officials when it comes to the way they handle passionate public expressions are troubling, particularly when you consider the racial aspect of it all staring us square in the face. In 2018, we are left with the reality that if you speak out peacefully in support of poor, black kids in schools too poor to afford toilet paper, you don’t get a fraction of the courtesy that cops afforded packs of hardpartying, mostly white Eagles fans Sunday night and early Monday morning.
This is not new. There is a long line of disproportionate police responses to protests and riots across history, across the country. Sunday night only reaffirmed that perceived bias.
In 1985, the Pennsylvania State Police dropped a bomb — a bomb! — on black activists bunkered in a West Philadelphia neighborhood, killing 11 people, five children, and destroying 61 homes. Meanwhile, Philly cops stood down and let some Eagles fans launch an assault and scale the iron gates of City Hall with a keg in tow Sunday night.
In the fall, the city held a non-violent protest for jailed rapper Meek Mill that went off without incident. But could you imagine if a group of those protesters broke off and stormed City Hall with a barrel of booze that night?
In 2015, Josh Williams attempted to set a fire amid the Ferguson protests in response to the police killing of Michael Brown, and he was sentenced to eight years in prison. Was anyone arrested for starting a bonfire in the middle of a city street Sunday? Will they get locked up for eight years because of it? Not likely. Why? Look at the pictures. Watch the videos from Sunday night. They are being celebrated across the country for sheer entertainment value. They are a joke today, cannon fodder for pointing out how dumb some sports fans act. Take a closer look, though. In all of the wildest scenes celebrated on social media, the pole climbers, the awning jumpers, the car flippers, the fire setters, the people who pulled down all those street lights in Center City were mostly white. Philly fans will tell you the worst among them, the ones who punch police horses, are the minority.
And they’re right. Because Philly is mostly not white.
These “idiots,” as Mayor Jim Kenney called them, are not representative of the region. But this isn’t about that. It’s about how some are permitted to go completely