"Epic Beard Man," the video that shows an old white guy delivering a beatdown to a black guy on an Oakland city bus, has quickly become the most popular street fight video in Web history. I feel that the clip and the reaction to it say a lot about race relations and violence in modern America.
The first thing to note is that sympathy for the combatants (among commenters on YouTube) seems to break down along racial lines. In actuality, both guys were at fault. Epic Beard Man, the Caucasian senior citizen, is actually Thomas Bruso, a well-known belligerent alcoholic mentally ill Vietnam vet who wanders the Bay Area looking for trouble; he clearly provoked the black guy with racist remarks, asking him to "spit-shine" his shoes. The black man, for his part, felt compelled to initiate physical violence, even though Bruso had retreated when it became clear he was being videotaped.
To me, this indicates two things about race in America: 1) white people are scared of being attacked by black people, and 2) black people feel compelled to react violently to racism.
There is a sense among many white people* that black men (and maybe women) are far more likely than the average Joe to initiate violence in public - maybe because of a perceived racial slight, maybe just out of sheer bully-istic aggression. As far as I know, there are no good data to prove or disprove this stereotype, but it does exist; that's why so many commenters assumed that Epic Beard Man was a hero for standing up to yet another black bully. And the fact that many whites fear the sight of blacks has very negative consequences for our society; for one thing, it has prevented this country from having a public transportation system worth mentioning, which is one reason the U.S. suffers as many deaths from motor vehicle accidents each year as we suffered from the entire Korean War.
On the flip side of the coin, there seems to be a sense among black people that overt white racism needs to be answered with immediate personal violence. This is why the black guy in the video - no spring chicken himself, obviously not an experienced fighter, and without any friends to back him up - felt compelled to go shove Bruso, even though Epic Beard Man was clearly trouble. This attitude is probably a relic of days of yore, when white gangs (especially in the South) would go around looking for black guys to beat up. Only by building up the perception that they were loose cannons could black guys deter racist aggression**. But those days have passed, and now the knee-jerk impulse to answer bigotry with fisticuffs mainly just serves to entrench white fear of black fists.
In other words, the vicious cycle continues, and I still can't ride a train to downtown.
So, what to do about these problems? One thing we can do is to end the drug war, and start treating drug addicts instead of arresting them. Many people who do violence in public (including, almost certainly, Epic Beard Man, and quite possibly his opponent) are simply on drugs; get these people off the street. Black leaders could help by publicly saying that racism is rare (even if it isn't), and should be answered with ridicule instead of violence (which it should).
And of course, simply building more public transportation would itself do a lot - once they ride the train with a bunch of black people and see that 99% of them are just normal peaceful folk, white people will lose a lot of the instinctive fear of blacks that they've accumulated from sitting in their de-facto-segregated suburbs and watching Cops and listening to 50 Cent and watching the Epic Beard Man video on YouTube.
* The reader may wonder if I share this stereotype. The answer is: Not really. I generally tend to be wary of any poor-looking person in Oakland or Detroit - cities whose populations are disproportionately black - but that's not quite the same thing; people in those cities closely resemble the rage-zombies of the movie 28 Days Later. But in New York, Texas, or San Francisco, I would not even think twice about being the only white guy on a street full of black guys.
** Note that it's not only blacks who have felt that they had to deter racism with personal violence. Admiral Heihachiro Togo, Japan's most celebrated naval hero (the "Nelson of the East"), encountered racism while studying in Britain, and "on more than one occasion he put an end to it by blows."
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