I detest summer in Cincinnati.
It personally brings financial uncertainty, and socially and culturally summer brings the uncertainty of the very sanctity of life.
Whenever I hear sirens — and living on a boisterous corner of Woodburn Avenue for the past 13 years I hear plenty of sirens — I think: Cincinnati police must be taxed and overworked.
Especially this summer.
Used to be emergency vehicles were headed mainly toward Evanston, a destination that made sense to me.
We knew — especially pre-eye-in-the-sky corner cameras — that Five Points was a hot spot and Evanston generally had and still has its crime problems, so cop cars perpetually heading that way didn’t surprise me.
But now all our urban neighborhoods have their fair share of sirens, and summer in Cincinnati brings a stirring, screaming chorus of them.
Our sirens are an urban “Ride of the Valkyries.”
Foreboding, exciting, grating, ominous.
After the sirens die down come the facts.
So whenever I hear about certain public skirmishes from listening to and not watching the news peripherally, I can just about tell when those skirmishes are “black.”
This is a gift many blacks have but that we do not like to publicly speak about. It’s a lot like having the gift of seeing the dead; we know we will not be taken seriously, so we only talk among ourselves about holding our breath at the news of certain crimes until the perpetrators are revealed to be white (whew!) or black (damn!).
I call mine the Ghetto Imagination Matrix; I can just tell when it’s black folks at the creamy center of some ignorant public behavior.
When it was reported that fireworks were shot at police trying to break up an unruly crowd late on Fourth of July on Fountain Square, I said aloud: Black. Teenagers.
Some of the ensuing details do not embarrass me as a black woman.
They break my heart as a human being.
A video posted on a site called thegatewaypundit.com beneath the race-bating, muckraking banner headline: “HORROR! Black Youths Mock and Laugh at Unconscious and Bloody Victim After July 4th Beatdown” says it all, and I would be livid about its obvious attempts to scare good white people if it weren’t spot-on accurate.
In the video, a clearly unconscious white man later identified as 27-year-old Christopher McKnight is laid out on the ground at Government Square after he has been attacked.
His face is bloodied and beaten nearly beyond recognition; his arms are covered in blood; a gaggle of black teens swarm around him, hovering closely.
A few reportedly tried helping.
They are cursing loudly at one another, excited and turned on by the sight of the man and their nearness to his near-lifeless body. They jockey for position in a frenzy fed by their own bloodlust for violence and their immunity to its consequences.
Police initially called this, appropriately, an “anti-white crime.”
Which makes this, in my mind, a self-hating hate crime.
Who, in their right mind, just waits for the bus, rides it, then goes home, gets a snack, checks in on social media to see who’s the first to post something about the evening’s near-lynching, then just goes to bed?
This shows me a sad truth.
We have indeed raised a generation of young black folks who devalue life to the point they feel no fear, no empathy; they have no recoil, no emotional reflex — simply more anger.
All they know to do is point, shoot and post.
I could only watch 22 seconds of the 1:19 video.
More than enough.
Yet, in all this black teenaged mayhem, no one — powers that be, that is — no one is talking about this for what it is: a first-class failure in city planning and police deployment.
Some questions:
Why was this concert scheduled so late (11 p.m.) on a holiday weekend when everyone knows young folks don’t have anything to do and are largely unsupervised?
Didn’t the chief of police just issue a curfew?
And why, oh why was the concert scheduled to coincide with the end of the fireworks and the Reds game? Don’t we know by now we can’t all just get along and in that crush of humanity something is bound to go wrong?
And speaking of police, why were there reportedly only eight officers assigned to Fountain Square for this event?
And speaking of events, all anyone can think or talk about or report is the safety of tourists during the All-Star Game. As usual, Cincinnati, aren’t we throwing our bigger problems under the bus for the sake of appearances?
We did this in the aftermath of the 2001 riots in the thicket of the economic boycott, and, thankfully, national acts who declined to perform here helped us understand we had a house to get in order. However, presently, we are now blind to our major flaws because of the dust of all the development that’s in our eyes.
Speaking of cancelled shows, now Fountain Square overseers 3CDC have nixed the rest of the summer concerts on the Squares so the entire city will be punished for the actions of a group of people. Police estimate that between 50 to 100 people of the estimated 3,000 on the square caused the trouble.
And even if black teens numbered in that smaller minority and they are somehow not responsible for the beating of McKnight, they still bear some responsibility for hovering, filming and posting, just as the city’s social machine bears responsibility for “planning” this train wreck. I honestly feel sick.
It does not make me sit up straight at my desk thinking about and then deconstructing and trying to articulate the roles of black folks in scenarios like these, especially considering how many of our American cities have been burned and devastated by the heinous deaths of unarmed black men.
For us to just go off the rails during peacetime, during a time of alleged social fellowship, makes me wonder what it would take to really set certain among us off.
Damn.
We look unsocialized.
It feels unsafe.
Got the mainstream media gobsmacked; they don’t even want to say “black teens,” which might be part and parcel part of the problem.
Summer in Cincinnati makes me sick.
Used to be we’d gauge how violent things would be based on how hot it was. It was just a bunch of ghetto musings. So now what’s our excuse? It’s not been hot these past few weeks, yet the sirens keep wailing.
And it feels like we could surely use a strong breeze to blow some of this mess out of here.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2015.