By Lauren Floyd, Daily Kos staff | Nine days after at least eight people [now 10] were killed during rapper Travis Scott’s set at the Astroworld festival at NRG Park, journalists are asking all the right questions: What could have been done to prevent the tragedy? Who should the onus fall on to ensure crowd safety? Knowing what we know—what we have known for decades—why are these tragedies still happening? I would add another essential question to the list: How do we avoid one set of rules for Black musicians and another for white?
It’s a question that would be too late to ask in other entertainment businesses, namely nightclubs at which it’s common practice for venues to drive up the cost of entry or staff added security on their one hip-hop night a month. Black nightclub owners marched through Chicago’s Near North Side last June to protest discrimination and racial targeting driving them out of the area. Asa “Duce” Powell, a nightclub owner and long-time promoter, told the Chicago Sun-Times that the city police department’s Near North Side District has been running Black people out of downtown “simply because of the color of their skin for at least 20 years.”
Promoter Monique Taylor told the Portland Mercury a year earlier that so many Black-owned hip-hop clubs have been shut down in the last decade in Portland, Oregon, that she can’t keep track of them. She described “constant police surveillance of her parties, and discriminatory club policies she’s seen go unchecked by law enforcement.” When she once asked an officer why he frequently stood outside one hip-hop club, she told the Portland Mercury his answer was: “‘We don’t like hip-hop. We don’t want all these ghetto Black people in here.’”
It is sentiments like that officer’s that make any conversation about greater restriction in the name of public safety an issue of race requiring legislation applied equally to protect all concert crowds. Keith Still, a visiting professor at the University of Suffolk and a crowd safety expert, told The Washington Post that “sadly, the music industry hasn’t learned anything” from its decades-long history of concert stampedes. In 1979, 11 people were killed when thousands of people packed the outside of a Cincinnati music venue in the hopes of seeing the British rock band The Who, the Post reported. In 1991, three teens were killed when an AC/DC crowd in Salt Lake City rushed the stage, crushing the children.
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Go here to read the whole article which brings up some pretty good points:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/11/14/2063868/-After-Astroworld-tragedy-how-do-we-avoid-race-based-crowd-control?detail=emaildkre2
Let’s Get at the Root Cause of Astroworld Tragedy. It’s Bigger Than Travis Scott
