Fall is one of my favorite seasons of the year. Perhaps it’s the gorgeous leaves, the steaming mugs of apple cider, or the fact that my fall fashion game is significantly tighter than it is in the warm seasons of the year. It’s also the season of festivals, football and state fairs (my personal favorite). These are all-American forms of entertainment. There is one consistent feature of these shared American amusements that we talk little about – the potential for and frequent enactment of white violence.

This past weekend, students at Keene State College in New Hampshire got, as one student put it, “way out of hand,” as they turned over a car and danced on top of it, threatened an elderly person, threw glass bottles, and popped fireworks. These violent white college kids were so unruly that the police had to come in riot gear and bring out tear gas, to quell the riots. One white female student reported feeling very unsafe. Why are these white kids so mad that they are terrorizing residents and destroying property? Should we be concerned about the fact that they seemed to really enjoy it? Is that sociopathic?

It would be easy to talk about this Keene State College business as an isolated incident of drunken college students, getting “out of hand.” But that would be politically and culturally irresponsible, since this is after all #FergusonOctober. Several states over from New Hampshire, down in Missouri, citizens exercising First Amendment rights, citizens with righteous anger, who might get a “little out of hand” with an errant glass bottle or two, are met with a much larger show of force – tanks, tear gas, stun grenades. We’ve had no reports of Ferguson protesters threatening old people or threatening to kill the police. And thank God for that, because we would have witnessed a serious amount of bloodshed to go along with our protests if that had occurred.

But beyond #FergusonOctober, any person who has ever lived in a college football town knows exactly what Saturday nights after big games are like. My first academic job was in a college football town. When I arrived, my students instructed me of survival protocol for home games: “Get your food on Thursday night. When you go in the house on Friday evening, don’t come back out till Sunday.” Less a set of racial instructions, these were more pragmatic tips so that I didn’t find myself caught in the middle of town in a traffic jam caused by drunken revelers. Drunken white revelers.