“The ‘Knockout’ Game” 2
I’ve had an uneasy feeling about reports of the “knockout game” since I first heard them.
They sound too much like the “wilding” hoax of a generation ago, which led to a lynch mob-like conviction of five kids for something that they did not do. I see that Will Bunch also has qualms.
Chauncey Devega sees the stories of the “knockout game” as yet another in a long tradition of attempts to dehumanize Not White persons and dress them in menace.
I will not try to rewrite what he has expressed so well. Here’s a nugget:
(By the way, both as a trained historian and as a Southern boy who knows bigotry when he sees it, Devega is quite right–when nothing else works, or even when everything else works, bigots foment fear. Fear is their friend, their tool, their go-to weapon against good will. And now back to the nugget, already in progress . . . .)
Moreover, the way that the knockout game moral panic has been circulated by the news media is a very chilling echo of how race and rumor were historically used to incite white racial pogroms, spectacular lynchings, and other types of terrorism against African-Americans. Of course, there is an important distinction: the knockout game is an example of wanton street thuggery by criminals; the lynching tree and racial terrorism were rituals of mass white violence against innocent black Americans.
Follow the links–both of them. Read the rest(s).
November 27, 2013 at 11:21 am
Whatever it is, it’s not happening here. Urban mythology coupled with lotsa random people in the street spouting rubbish.
November 27, 2013 at 2:52 pm
Supposedly, it’s walking down the street and randomly cold cocking passers-by just because you can.