WI wider race riots 1992 or Dan Childers personal Butterfly effect

Below is an interesting thread.

PS Butterfly Effect should interest anyone thats interested in alternate history and the ideas behind it. Now if we could get Hollywood(or even the history channel) do pay more attention to alternate history. Ashton Kutcher as a young James Dean that survies the autocrash and goes into politics ? Maybe not.




From: Jordan Abel (jmabel@purdue.edu)
Subject: Re: WI wider race riots 1992
This is the only article in this thread
View: Original Format
Newsgroups: soc.history.what-if
Date: 2004-02-04 05:20:06 PST


I'm replying to this with an alternate topic because people seem to be
skipping over it as it is, and not having the discussion it seems to be
indicating trying to start

Dan Childers wrote:
> A possible butterfly event I was personally
> involved in:
>
> Saturday, May 2 1992. The Rodney King riots have
> been raging in Los Angeles since April 29. Much of
> the media is predicting that the riots will spread
> to other US cities. IIRC, a few reporters are just
> starting to wonder why this hasn't happened yet.
>
> I am going into Baltimore to pick up my friend Ray.
> Ray is black, and lives in a black neighborhood.
> I am white. I am a bit nervous about this trip, but
> I'm not going to break a promise just because CNN
> is predicting mob violence. (Normally I was
> unconcerned with driving through these neighborhoods,
> but May 2 1992 was not normal times.)
>
> OTL: nothing happens. At one point, in one of the
> black neighborhoods I'm driving through, a young
> black man,in gang colors, holding a stick jumps
> out in front of my car; I swerve around him; he
> hits my car with the stick as I drive by. Nothing
> else happens. I pick up Ray, we go hang out with
> our friends, everything is cool.
>
> ATL: I sneeze at the wrong time, and hit the guy
> with the stick.
>
> Do I get dragged from my car and beaten? (I think
> this is fairly likely--there were several other
> young black men in gang colors watching nearby.)
> Does this trigger a race riot in Baltimore? If so,
> do the riots spread?
 
Whether there would've been a Baltimore race riot had Dan Childers been attacked and beaten by these black guys post-LA would've depended on the extent of media coverage on this incident, altho given the racially-charged times, such disturbances could well have eventuated. Anybody reckon the LA 92 riots could've spiralled to the same extent as the Burn Baby Burn riots of the 60s ? Don't mean to start no flamewars here, but there is AFAIK a significant perception of the American media that there's a double standard in reports on hate crimes- only incidents featuring black or minority victims of racist violence get national attention- a la Rodney King 1992, James Byrd jnr 1998 in Jasper, Texas, Amadou Diallo in NY 1994 and other victims of police brutality/shootings- whereas the other way around of blacks indiscriminately embarking on killing sprees against white ppl gets totally unreported. So,
 
Not sure about a full riot, but maybe

I don't picture whites rioting en masse engaging in looting and burning down public property in retaliation for the hypothetical beating of Dan Childers. I don't see whites picking fights with black policemen or security guards either.

I could picture irate whites in some neighborhoods grabbing nearby black individuals (or groups of two or three) and beating them up. news of those beatings could provoke fullscale riots in the black areas.
 
Michael E Johnson said:
> Do I get dragged from my car and beaten?

How would they drag you out of the car? Just lock the doors and keep drving. Don't stop. Unless the attackers are stupid, they
ll get out of the way...
 
raharris, you sayin' that irate whites today wouldn't embark on similar racially-charged rampages against minority neighbourhoods and property as occurred during the WWI and WWII race riots ? But I do agree with the scenario of bigoted whites seizing and beating individual or small groups of blacks whom they found in 'their' neighbourhoods, which has happened as singular events unrelated to any black-on-white racial incident/s, as occurred in Dec 1986 at Howard Beach, NY, when 3 African-American young men whose car had broken down in this predominantly Italian-American neighbourhood were attacked by a mob of 20 odd local toughs who objected to blacks in 'their' neighbourhood' as potential criminals: IIRC 1 black guy was beaten badly, and another was run over by a passing car as he tried to escape the mob. Another interesting POD: WI there'd been a spread of racial disturbances in the aftermath of the Howard Beach incident ?
 
Melvin Loh said:
raharris, you sayin' that irate whites today wouldn't embark on similar racially-charged rampages against minority neighbourhoods and property as occurred during the WWI and WWII race riots ?

Exactly, white people today are more physically timid than those of earlier generations. Fewer of them have grown up in tough neighborhoods themselves. They would be too scared to fight black people on even terms or
against larger numbers of blacks in neighborhoods they've always been scared to drive through. A generation or two ago, white people were so used to calling the shots on a daily basis that they would have the guts to pick a fight with a much larger black man. That's because they figured white crowds and the police were so stacked against blacks, and blacks as a group were so intimidated, that the whites and not blacks would get the back-up. Now, whites don't have the same advantage in interpersonal violence. In prisons, the situation is quite the opposite, with black men being dominant and raping white men more than vice versa. By the way, don't think for a second that I'm not nostalgic for the old-style white on black race riot, I'm just discussiing how things have changed.

With the invention of the suburbs, whites started just leaving the cities rather than fighting pitched battles to hold onto urban areas. White flight has been costly to tax bases, but the silver lining to it has been that blacks are much less often subject to physical harassment by random white citizens than they were in earlier generations.

The exception to this rule of more timid white people, is of course the police. Even then, their riot response is often more to contain the surge of hostile crowds rather than get in the middle of the neighborhood. And besides,they're alot better armed and armored than your average citizen.

Howard Beach is exactly what I had in mind as white reactions, picking on only the easiest targets.
 
Top