After Chicago "Teen Takeover," Time to Revive The More Accurate Term, "Wilding"

Word Became Taboo for All the Wrong Reasons

In the late 1980s, the New York City media had a term for “random, motiveless assaults” by wayward youths (In Brooklyn, “yutes”). They called it “wilding.” A 2002 New York Times article described its origin: “The word caught on after it was used by the initial suspects in the famed 1989 Central Park jogger attack. ‘We were going wilding,’ one of them told the police investigators, who had never heard the term before. Within days, it was adopted to describe bursts of violence by roving groups of young people.”

On occasion, the media circa 1989 would even acknowledge that these “young people” were, as they say, “of color.” Since then, the wilding phenomena has exploded, and yet despite the explosion, the word “wilding” has become taboo for, as shall be seen, all the wrong reasons.

For now, the media are stuck on empty euphemisms to categorize these “random, motiveless assaults.” The Chicago Sun-Times, for instance, headlined its article on the Friday incident, “Teen killed, 8 wounded in shootings during ‘teen takeover’ in Loop after tree-lighting ceremony.”

NBC News proved equally timid about citing the demographics of those involved. “A teenager was fatally shot and at least eight other teens were wounded in separate shootings in downtown Chicago on Friday night, just hours after the official Christmas tree lighting ceremony at nearby Millennium Park.” Dang those teens!

To its humble credit New York Times, at least acknowledged a pattern among these wayward Chicago young’uns: “One person was killed and eight teenagers were injured in two separate shootings in downtown Chicago on Friday night after the city’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Chicago has been the scene of repeated incidents of violence in recent months A gunshot was fired during a fight between hundreds of teens in Oak Park on Halloween night at the end of October.”

The media, of course, avoid any talk of race unless the suspected perp is white and then it will talk of nothing else, to wit, from the Times, “Mr. Floyd, who was black, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital on Monday after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white officer.” Now multiply this lede by a million or so.

The wilding problem, of course, is not limited to Chicago. Gangs of violent teens, almost all black, have been destroying the quality of life in every Blue city in America. In Kansas City, where I live, they have helped turn the city’s two most popular entertainment districts into ghost towns and have been working on the amusement parks as well. More unpredictably, they have spoiled one cherished civic celebration after another.

Sometimes, as in Chicago last weekend, these stories break out nationally, to wit, “Charges have been filed against two teenagers after one person died and 22 were injured in a shooting following the Kansas City Chiefs Championship parade.” Just as Chicago may never have another tree lighting ceremony, Kansas City may never have another Chiefs parade. (Fear of another parade, in fact, may explain the five losses.)

Earth to media: we cannot begin to address the problem unless we are willing to identify it and name it. Let me take a stab: Wilding (noun), a mass display of lawlessness, sometimes lethal, orchestrated via social media by disaffected young people, almost always of color, predominantly black, aided and abetted by media too complicit to acknowledge that the problem even exists.

Not surprisingly, Barack Obama had a good deal to do with both encouraging the phenomenon and suppressing the coverage. In his 2020 memoir, Promised Land, he all but confessed. Dissembling, as was his wont, he related how “an attention-seeking real estate developer,” namely Donald Trump, “ominously” took out full-page ads in New York newspapers—the Times included—asking for a return of the death penalty in New York State.

What prompted Trump’s outrage in 1989, Obama explained, was a highly publicized night of “wilding” in New York City’s Central Park that saw several New Yorkers assaulted and robbed and one woman jogger brutally raped and left for dead. Fortunately, she survived.

Trump made only one mention of race in the ad. The sentence read, “Many New York families—White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian—have had to give up the pleasure of a leisurely stroll in the Park at dusk.” It was Obama who injected race, noting that those accused of the rape were “Black and Latino teens” and that the victim was a “white jogger.”

Obama noted too that the accused were later exonerated of the rape, which is technically true of the physical penetration, but there is massive evidence that the five attacked the jogger, sexually molested her, and helped the adult rapist subdue her. Despite the evidence, Obama and the media made heroes out of the “Central Park Five.”

Before doing so, they should have checked the Times archive. As the Times reported days after the attack, “The youths who raped and savagely beat a young investment banker as she jogged in Central Park Wednesday night were part of a loosely organized gang of 32 school-boys whose random, motiveless assaults terrorized at least eight other people over nearly two hours, senior police investigators said yesterday.”

In his nasty little sidebar, Obama failed to mention that Trump never called for the teens to get the death penalty. That was to be reserved for “murderers.” In 1989, there were 2,246 murders in New York City, the fifth straight year the city had seen an increase. In 1989, Trump’s op-ed ad barely made a stir. (After 20 years under the tough policing standards of Mayors Giuliana and Bloomberg, that annual number had dropped to 335).

The fact that the New York Times published Trump’s op-ed suggests how close to the conventional wisdom were Trump’s opinions. The Times reporting on the ad—“Angered by Attack, Trump Urges Return Of the Death Penalty”—was admirably nonjudgmental.

In the years since, the media and the Blue city nabobs have followed the lead of the Obamas: ignore the root causes, scream racism, blame Trump, and cancel the word “wilding.” That is a whole lot easier than trying to rein in the increasingly feral behavioral of their current and future voters.

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