Waco, Texas just had a massive biker gang shootout. Nine dead and 18 critically injured with an estimated 170 gang members being taken into custody. So many, in fact, that they had to take them to a nearby convention center in order to process them all.

Police were there in full riot gear gassing, tasing and pepper spraying people. No, wait. That didn’t happen in Waco, that was Baltimore. In Waco, even though police were being shot at, they managed to contain 170 bikers without excessive force.

Comparatively, in Baltimore, protesters were knocked down brutally before riots had even erupted.

In case you haven’t heard, Freddie Gray died due to a severe spinal injury after being handcuffed in the back of a police van and given a “rough ride” that went too far. He ended up in a coma and died a week later which launched the beginning of protests and eventual riots in Baltimore.

Gray’s crime was running away from the police, and he more than likely ran due to the staggering amount of African American deaths that have recently broken out across America at the hands of the police. When the police caught him, they found a legal-sized switchblade which they deemed was enough to arrest him.

The day of his funeral is when riots broke out. Teenagers that threw rocks—rocks, not bullets—at police were pepper sprayed, people were kicked to the ground, even the peaceful protesters were gassed. In response, local police claimed the force was necessary.

So why can police easily take out over five lethal biker gangs without using any of these tactics? The bikers killed nine people and injured 18, yet it’s the protesters in Baltimore that get brutalized, even though there have been no official deaths other than Gray’s.

Even if people had been killed in Baltimore, why weren’t the police able to subdue unarmed protesters without excessive violence when they clearly were able to contain 170 armed bikers? The answer is pretty obvious.

America, we have a race problem.

Now, let me give a brief preface. I do not think all police officers are criminals. I do not think they are all bad people. I do truly understand that there are good cops out there. However, when we move away from an individual level and to the overall community, there is a huge and violent bias.

The majority of the bikers in Waco were white. The majority of the protesters in Baltimore were African American. Recently, African American person after African American person has been killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Darrien Hunt, Ezell Ford, Omar Abrego and Tanisha Anderson, to name a few. There has been 21 deaths in the last 12 months only.

Am I a fan of riots? No. But there is definitely a problem when we excuse riots perpetrated by white people over sports or pumpkins and then turn around and point at African American riots, calling participants thugs and “deserving” of violence.

It’s a problem when a white crowd is “unruly” but an African American crowd is “violent.” These are the same acts, yet only one is violently criminalized for it.

Police don’t come in full riot gear and brutalize white rioters like they’ve done in Baltimore, Ferguson and St. Louis.

Riots are essentially the only way the underbelly of racism in America has been exposed in the last year, with the dialogue coming from the mouths of protesters.
Before, people would deny oppression of African Americans, saying racism is over. There’s no denying the fallacy of that statement anymore in the wake of Waco.