Knocking out the knockout game
by digby
One of the recurring themes in American life is the idea that violent mobs of young black men are on the rampage killing decent white people. It comes up over and over again in our history, going all the way back to the beginning. I wrote a bunch about this after Katrina, starting with this post. I don’t think it’s all that complicated really: when you treat a group of people like dirt it’s natural to fear they might not like you very much.
But the truth is that these “wildings” are almost always a figment of the overactive lizard brain. When you combine it with nonsensical sociological concepts like the “super-predator” which had the entire country freaking out over young black men who were supposedly impervious to any kind of normal human behavior, you get these bouts of hysteria as we are seeing now with the right wing hand-wringing over the “knockout game.”
Dave Weigel puts the myth to bed:
The new scare is the “knockout game,” in which black youths supposedly attack innocent people just for fun. Conservative pundits decry the MSM for suffering from political correctness and whitewashing crimes perpetrated by black people, but a more reasonable explanation for why most media outlets aren’t devoting round-the-clock coverage to the knockout game is that—sorry, Sean Hannity—there is no hard data showing that it’s a trend.
An important clarification: the game definitely exists, and has been around for at least a couple of years. I’m not claiming the game doesn’t exist. But the idea that it’s reached epidemic levels, or that it’s only being played by young black people, is a fallacy. As Alan Noble convincingly writes, “Analyzing data is not as simple as watching some YouTube videos and Googling ‘knockout game.'” And when it comes to the knockout game’s supposed popularity, the data is almost entirely anecdotal:
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.”
Weigel goes on to note that the genesis for this latest nonsense happens to be Colin Flaherty “who probably has a Google alert set up for ‘black suspect.'” He concludes:
Crime happens to every type of person, and is perpetrated by every type of person. What makes the false narrative of the knockout game—or any “black mob violence” story—crop up every year is the fact that some people will always believe the color of someone’s skin predisposes him to commit a crime. When a few YouTube videos are able to convince terrified white folks that young black people are dangerous, they may as well assume that all cats can play the keyboard.
When I was writing a lot about this phenomenon, I used to enjoy posting this little anecdote:
About ten o’clock in the morning, there was an alarm of a fire at the house of Serjeant Burns, opposite Fort Garden….
Towards noon a fire broke out in the roof of Mrs. Hilton’s house…on the East side of captain Sarly’s house….Upon view, it was plain that the fire must have been purposely laid…. There was a cry among the people, the Spanish Negroes; the Spanish Negroes; take up the Spanish Negroes. The occasion of this was the two fires…happening so closely together….and it being known that Sarly had purchased a Spanish Negro, some time before brought into his port, among several others….and that they afterwards pretending to have been free men in their country, began to grumble at their hard usage, of being sold as slaves.
This probably gave rise to the suspicion, that this Negro, out of revenge, had been the instrument of these two fires; and he behaving insolently upon some people’s asking him questions concerning them…it was told to a magistrate who was near, and he ordered him to jail, and also gave direction to constables to commit all the rest of that cargo [of Africans], in order for their safe custody and examination….
While the justices were proceeding to examination, about four o’clock there was another alarm of fire….
While the people were extinguishing the fire at this storehouse, and had almost mastered it, there was another cry of fire, which diverted the people attending the storehouse to the new alarm…but a man who had been on the top of the house assisting in extinguishing the fire, saw a Negro leap out at the end window of one of them…which occasioned him to cry out...that the Negroes were rising….