This past Saturday October 18, in Keene, N.H., chaos broke out at its annual Pumpkin Festival, after a nearby house party at Keene State College spiraled out of control. The melee left a car overturned and extensive property damage to both the town and the campus. Several students were arrested and 26 were treated for injuries at the local medical center. The eventual mayhem was labeled as a riot, and could only be subdued by Keene police, who confronted the unruly crowds with riot gear, pepper spray and sting balls, some of whom replied with volleys of rocks and bottles. Some students were even heard to chant, “Bring out the BearCat!” a nickname given to the local police’s armored vehicle kept on retainer through the 1033 program.
Though some drew parallels between the riots and the notorious Blarney Blowout at UMASS Amherst, the majority of attention was drawn to the situation with regards to how the riots have been portrayed in the media. Many have expressed outrage at the passive language media outlets such as the New York Times have been using when reporting the story. Consequently, those incensed by the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MI have expressed outrage at what they perceive to be a racial bias towards college students versus peaceful protesters.
One of the more prominent damages in Keene was to Terry Blatti’s new Nissan Frontier. A Salisbury, MA resident who came up to the festival to visit her stepdaughter, found her vehicle with tires slashed and dents on the roof as well as the hood. While Blatti didn’t blame Keene State or its students, she did express disappointment in the vandalism. “It’s just that riot mentality,” she said.
While media outlets like CNN countered that the Pumpkin Festival riots were nothing like the Ferguson protests, citing the looting and the fact that both riots arose from different circumstances, both groups expressed riotous behavior. Emanuella Grinberg, in an op-ed on CNN’s website writes, “Pumpkin Fest was a dramatic version of that [white violent behavior] because of initial characterizations of crowd behavior as rowdy.
Nonetheless, critics continue to highlight the seeming normalization of bad behavior amongst what they allege as “whites” at Keene State, versus the often-negative characterization of protesters in Ferguson. Donna Murch, a professor of history at Rutgers University, however, feels that comparing the two dilutes the message Ferguson hopes to convey. “It demeans Ferguson and St. Louis to compare them to Pumpkin Fest. While the use of tear gas reflects how normative these militarized population control measures have become, Ferguson is a political movement, and looting (in Keene) is quite different from the civil disobedience we are seeing in Ferguson.”