In Salon, Brittney Cooper does her best to find a racial angle to the violence in Waco:

And indeed we did get a front row seat to such insanity this week, when three biker gangs in Texas, had a shootout in a parking lot that left nine people dead and 18 people injured. More than 165 people have been arrested for their participation in this thuggish, ruggish, deadly, violent, white-on-white street brawl but there has been no mass outcry from the country about this. Though these motorcycle gangs were already under surveillance because of known participation in consistent and organized criminal activity, as Darnell Moore notes at Mic, “the police didn’t don riot gear.” Moore further notes that “leather and rock music weren’t blamed,” and there hasn’t been any “hand-wringing over the problem of white-on-white crime.”

For the life of me I cannot fathom where Cooper has got the idea that there’s been no “mass outcry”? Indeed, I’m not sure how much clearer the public and the state authorities could have been. Thus far, there has been only one response to the behavior of the bikers in Waco, and that has been flat condemnation – without caveat or mitigation. Nobody has suggested that the violence was “unacceptable, but . . .”; nobody has asked whether the bikers were simply trying “to communicate”; nobody has argued that they were responding to oppression or to poverty to a lack of parental care. Nobody has recruited history to their side. To a man, we have all agreed that we are dealing here with a bunch of dangerous criminals, that it was a good thing that the police showed up and opened fire, and that anybody who was involved should go to prison. The contention that this country doesn’t care about what happened strikes me as being utterly false.

Ramming her argument home, Cooper writes:

Most white citizens will insist that this was just an isolated incident, even though the gangs were already under surveillance for consistent participation in criminal activity. And this studied ignorance, this sense in which people could look at this set of incidents and simply refuse to see all the ways in which white privilege is at play — namely that no worse than arrest befell any the men who showed up hours later with weapons, looking for a fight — returns me to the words of Malcolm X. For many Americans, this is just good ole American fun, sort of like playing Cowboys-and-Indians in real life. As Malcolm reminded us, “whites idolize fighters.” So while I’m sure many Americans are appalled at the senseless loss of life, there is also the sense that this is just “those wild Texans” doing the kind of thing they do.

If the police were indeed playing “Cowboys and Indians,” they were playing to win. As Cooper herself concedes, the cops in Texas had been monitoring the groups for a while — to the extent that they had a team ready at the shootout’s venue in case things got out of hand. During the fight, CNN reports, cops shot four bikers dead, and would have likely continued to taken them down if they had persisted in their behavior. In the aftermath, nearly 200 people were arrested, the vast majority of whom (170) have been charged. Per the Waco Tribune, moreover, “there is a very significant increase in law enforcement in McLennan County right now,” and “local, county, state and federal agencies are involved in investigations into the biker gangs.” Are we to presume that they are there to partake in the “good ole American fun”?

Hardly.