Police in Chattanooga, Tennessee are searching for a racist teenager caught on camera flinging bottles, cans, and racial slurs at a black cyclist last week. The young bigot was caught on Charles Peacock’s trio of helmet and bike cameras, leaning out the passenger window of a Ford Edge, while another cheerfully intolerant teen can be seen hanging out of the sunroof.
Peacock, as a seasoned cyclist, tells WRCBtv that he was aware of his surroundings and able to brace for the attack on July 9.
He was about 20 to 25 yards behind me. He was already out of the window from his waist, drawn back with the object in his hand, getting ready to throw it.
After they threw it, they said “I got that fucking nigger.”
I couldn't get a good look at him. [...] My main focus right then was keeping control of that bike and keep from running out into traffic and getting hit.
The footage Peacock captured delivered to Chattanooga police served up a clear shot of the SUV’s license plate, and authorities were quickly able to identify the driver, who then flipped on his bigoted buddy, according to Chattanooga Police Department spokesman Rob Simmons. The unnamed juvie jingoist is just 16 years old. A warrant has been issued for his arrest, but the cops are struggling to locate the hateful high schooler.
Peacock, who is still in pain from the bruise left by the projectile, has no plans to get off the road.
That's not the first time I had a racial slur said to me while riding a bike, but as far as someone to actually throw something at me like that, I feel like that's going too far.
They're not going to run me away. I'm going to keep riding.
Watch Peacock’s full interview with WRCBtv below, along with select clips of the incident.
It’s easy to believe that the mindsets that leads someone to do what this KKKid did can only be found in older generations. A lot of the bigots caught on camera in this almost-constant stream of viral videos are eligible for Social Security and AARP cards, while another significant chunk belongs to Generation X. As such, it’s not surprising that many people—especially white people—have convinced themselves that the racists are “dying out,” because kids today know better, and are better. But that’s actually not true.
(T)he presumption that millennials are uniformly more progressive than earlier generations is false.
Millennials overall are more racially tolerant than earlier generations — but that's because young people today are less likely to be white. White millennials exhibit about as much racial prejudice, as measured by explicit bias, as white Gen Xers and boomers.
Let this serve as a reminder: Millennials, as well as their younger counterparts in Generation Z, can—and do—hate, too.