White thugs terrorize Philadelphia suburb in wake of Villanova basketball championship win
Hooligans!
The response from Villanova fans to their NCAA win is something we’ve seen many times before: thousands of people taking over city streets, setting fires, tossing debris and being a general pain in the butt. Just imagine if those fans were mostly Black though.
First off, I don’t have hard feelings about the fact that my alma mater, the Michigan Wolverines, lost against Philadelphia’s Villanova University in the NCAA National Championship men’s basketball game on Monday.
The only real squabbles I have are with whomever created that wack-ass, tone deaf-ass sign mocking the Flint water crisis – too far, fam.
We weren’t really supposed to get as far as we did. And given the monster of dominance that is the Villanova Wildcats team, a unicorn would have had to shat out four leaf clovers connected by a rainbow directly on center court for us to have won that game.
What’s interesting is the response from Villanova fans to the win – something we’ve seen many times before: thousands of people taking over city streets, setting fires, tossing debris and being a general pain in the ass to city employees and anyone who planned to drive somewhere that evening.
Villanova fans flock to streets to celebrate national championship https://t.co/DYvXJtTJLF pic.twitter.com/iB5W2A1Opb
— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 3, 2018
-Does Villanova player Donte DiVincenzo get a pass for dropping n-word tweet?-
For starters, something is inherently wrong with you if you get that gassed up about a sports win. I look at all these pasty white dudes with dad bods in thong sandals climbing poles and assume that they have a relatively foreign relationship with the fairer sex.
But that’s not why we’re here. Last night’s celebrations remind me of the ongoing contrast between the gathering of white souls to disrupt urban life and the gathering of Black souls to do the same. The biggest difference, of course, is that Black folks don’t typically gather to celebrate balls going through nets or across goal lines. We’re gathering to fight for the lives and the rights of our people.
The Black Lives Matter movement was birthed as a result of the murder Trayvon Martin by walking shitbag George Zimmerman (and said shitbag’s acquittal) and the police shooting murder of Mike Brown in 2014. As such, there have likely been more nationwide demonstrations of civil disobedience involving Black folks this decade than since the Civil Rights movement.
Because white people are too cloaked in their privilege like a Snuggie to need to rise up against anything, they rely on sports events to get them riled up, and the media would generally have us believe that this isn’t a big deal. Because when the men burning and breaking shit resemble the graduate student instructor you had for that one cultural anthropology class you always fell asleep in, it’s cool. What are a few rubber bullets and riot masks among friends?
Riot cops used tear gas on revelers in Columbus after Ohio State’s national title win http://t.co/ioVeHuUpd7 pic.twitter.com/wXVoHTodPV
— NBC News (@NBCNews) January 13, 2015
Black demonstrations are often referred to by the media in harsher language, with loaded words including “thugs” and “riots.” When white folks celebrate sports wins or losses, it’s “fan revelry.”
White #Villanova fans have started a fire in the middle of campus. #NCAAChampionship
Interesting what ISN’T there:
– riot gear
– SWAT teams
– tear gas
– snipers
– military assault vehicles
– any police whatsoever pic.twitter.com/cyVUeUufnb— Sam Whiteout (@samwhiteout) April 3, 2018
It’s as if we’ve forgotten that lighting fires in the middle of a major metropolis isn’t normal behavior. If I were to step on the sidewalk in front of my Chicago home and light a firecracker in view of a police officer, my Black ass would at the very least get a citation. If your tax dollars have to go toward greasing utility poles so idiots don’t climb them, some shit is off.
Truth is, so many of us – the media, the local government, even some Black folks – are programmed to perceive of demonstrations for things like killing unarmed children or not having foundational human rights as “troublemaking.” No one gives a damn when we sit on our thumbs and take it…but inconvenience a few people from time to time? Savage thugs, we are!
Uprising has been the language of the oppressed for centuries, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. But yeah, go ahead and just laugh off the “revelers.” You know, they’re just playin’ and all.
Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.
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