‘Knockout game’: Is it real?

A 78-year-old Jewish woman punched in the face in Brooklyn. A 72-year-old man knocked down while gardening in Fort Myers, Fla. A 30-year-old whose nose and jaw were broken in Philadelphia. All three are the latest victims of a “horrid new phenomenon known as the ‘knockout game,’” said Joseph F. Cotto in UPI.com. The rules of this sick new game are simple: Try to knock out an unsuspecting stranger with a single sucker punch, leaving the victim badly injured—sometimes fatally. In virtually all these assaults in urban communities across the country, the perpetrators are young black men and the victims, white or Asian. Whether because of rage against perceived injustices, boredom, or a “mob mentality,” this senseless, violent game is spreading “like wildfire.”

“Newsflash—this is not a new game,” said James Causey in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Bored teens have been committing these types of assaults for years; the media didn’t notice because the previous attacks “weren’t tagged with a headline-grabbing name like ‘knockout game.’” The hyperventilating claim that it’s a national epidemic is simply the “latest reflection of our national fear of young black men,” said Jamelle Bouie in TheDailyBeast.com. In the 1990s, the media created a similar fiction it labeled “wilding”—the supposed attack of bystanders by gangs of rampaging black youths. Urban violence is real: In 2012, an estimated 127,577 assaults were carried out with “hands and fists” in American cities. But “knockout” assaults only number a handful of anecdotal incidents. There is no epidemic of black teens punching white people for fun.

Such politically correct rationalizations “bring cold comfort to those who have been brutally attacked,” said Clarence Page in Chicago-Tribune.com. Yes, the trend has been “wildly exaggerated” by conservative media outlets eager to feed their viewers’ sense of white victimization. But the game is not just a myth—just look at the many online videos of young men brutally sucker-punching strangers for no reason at all, not even robbery. Our inner cities are plagued by “senseless youth violence,” perpetrated by teens who have no purpose in life and no moral guidance. Instead of denying that the “knockout game” exists, parents, churches, and community leaders in the black community must step up and tell these young people, “You are damaging your own race.”

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