The Knockout Game Myth and Its Racist Roots
SCARY BLACK MEN ARE TAKING OVER!!!!!!11TYJust the same old trope about “black mob violence” and the “coverup” by the “politically correct” “liberal media.”
Read the whole thing, you’ll recognize some of the names of the purveyors of this bullshit.
“Groups of black youths roam the streets looking for a solitary pedestrian, preferably white (hence the alternate name ‘polar-bearing’) but Asian or Hispanic will do. The trick is to knock him to the ground with a single punch… . Widely available video exists of almost all Knockout incidents, since the really cool thing is to have your buddies film it and upload it to YouTube. And it’s so simple to do in an age when every moronic savage has his own ‘smart phone.’” -Mark Steyn, National Review Online
The stories are chilling-conjuring a world of senseless, alien violence as incomprehensible as it is reprehensible. Rightfully, we are mortified and outraged and we fear for a country in which A Clockwork Orange ultra-violence finds life in our streets. The analysis of many pundits is startling: these attacks are racially motivated hate crimes against whites by black youths and the media and our politicians refuse to identify these racist motives out of political correctness.
What goes mostly unspoken in these commentaries on the “knockout game” is the idea that these assaults are racially motivated and so white people should be wary of groups of black men. Some take this further and blame the “liberal media” for the violence, since the media allegedly hid the “truth” about the race of the criminals. If only the media would tell us when black people attack white people, we’d know to not trust them and we’d be safe, the logic goes.
But are these pundits correct? Are these crimes committed by roaming packs of black “savages” against white people?
Image: Mark Steyn from NRO
Here’s the fascinating thing about this “spreading” trend: nobody seems to have any evidence that it’s spreading, or that it’s new, or that it’s racially motivated, or that black youths are the ones typically responsible, or that whites are typically targeted. This hasn’t stopped Mark Steyn, Thomas Sowell, and Matt Walsh from describing this specifically as a crime committed by blacks against whites, CNN from claiming that it is “spreading,” or Alec Torres at NRO from say it is “evidently increasing [in] popularity.” Most sources claim that it is spreading, and a number of sources claim that it is racially motivated. But how do they know? Where are they getting their data from?
Alec Torres wrote what appears to be the most thorough survey of all the reported accounts of the “knockout game,” but these “reports” are actually newspaper reports, not police reports, so they don’t give us a reliable picture. Yet, Torres is confident enough to conclude: “Most of the victims have been whites and Asians, and attackers tend to target Jews, immigrants, and the elderly in particular. Most of the attackers have been African American.”
“Most” is an awfully slippery word to describe a increasingly popular, violent hate crime.
