[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2013/12/knock-out-game-main.jpg)NPR cannot make up its mind whether the Knockout Game is an “old phenomenon with fresh branding,” or just a conservative fairy tale.
Meanwhile, victims, witnesses, videos and stories of racial violence continue to pour forth.
At least one from an NPR employee, John Hingsbergen:
“Folks, as a Program Director at an NPR station, I don’t usually get involved in discussions like this, but I have personal experience with this so-called game,” Hingsbergen said in the comments section of an NPR blog on race called Code Switch. “It was this past May, just a block from the Hilton Garden Inn on First St, N.E. While I was taking a brief walk around the area, within sight of the hotel and with plenty of other people on the sidewalk, a teenager walked up to me smacked me on the side of the head. Thankfully, he was not strong enough to ‘knock out’ this 60+ year old so all I did was spin around, only to see him take off running to the other side of the street to join two companions who were laughing as if it was the most hilarious thing they’d ever seen.”
Laughing is a constant of the Knockout Game. So is the fact that most of the predators are black. Most of the victims are not.
Hingsbergen gets to the hard part: “Is there a racial component? I choose to believe not but sadly this was an African American teenager attacking an older white man.”
An email asking Hingsbergen why reporting the news without fear or favor should be an occasion of sadness went unanswered.
Besides joyful violence, there is one other part of the Knockout Game and racial violence that is almost always present: The media ignore it. Condone it. Or deny it. And Washington is full of NPR and other media outlets doing just that.
The most recent racial violence came on Friday: ten black people attacked a still unidentified man in Washington, D.C. He lived. They laughed. “After the punch, I remember chuckling,” he told the ABC affiliate.
In November, Phoebe Connolly was riding her bike through a Washington, D.C. neighborhood when she passed through a group of black people. CNN calls them “teenagers.”
Then one “reached out and punched me in the face,” she told Anderson Cooper. “The whole group of kids laughed.” The day before the same thing happened to another woman in the same place, Connolly said.
A few days later, a black person punched New York Congresswoman Grace Meng in the head and stole her purse. She now believes she could have been the victim of the Knockout Game. She doesn’t remember the laughing, or much else about the attack on the streets of Washington.
Black-on-Asian violence and black mob violence in Washington are documented in White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore it.
Racial violence is a regular and frequent part of life in the nation’s capital.
On Halloween, a “large group of assailants” beat and robbed a 50-year-old teacher at the Metropolitan Branch Trail, a hiking and biking path from Union Station downtown to the suburbs in Maryland.
This was one of dozens of similar mob attacks at the Metro Trail over the last three years against bikers and hikers and joggers using weapons, including stun guns and pipes.
In June, the Washington Post sent two reporters to do a story on the ritual mayhem at the trail. Despite the added brain power, they were not able to detect a central organizing feature of the violence. All the assailants were black. Most of the victims were not. More often than not, they were laughing.
Almost as if it were like some kind of game.
The reporters may have missed it, but many of 1,200 readers who left comments did not. Said one: “‘Youths’, ‘Kids’ are just euphemisms for uncivilized violent animals like Travyon Martin. They are racist to the core and want nothing more than ‘revenge’ for they way their ancestors were treated 150 years ago.”
There was even a comment from Reverend Bacon about some kind of game:
“Yes, they usually remember to steal something, almost as an afterthought, so that their apologists can claim it was about robbery. In many recent examples of the knockout game, they have forgotten to do this.”
At least one Post scribe has no trouble detecting racist behavior. In a November story, Washington Post columnist Mary Curtis declared it was easy: Just look at the pattern. For example, people who do not like Barack Obama are not going to come out and declare they are racist. Or leave a calling card. Or issue a press release.
But if you look at the pattern, then it becomes “A Question of Race,” she said.
Well, it’s a start.
Steve did not see a pattern until he became part of the pattern. He is a resident of Washington and a victim of racial violence. So are others he knows. His pattern began in October 2010.
I was walking away from the Jon Stewart event on the Mall when a girl came up behind me on the sidewalk on 14th Street and screamed that she had just been punched by a group of kids.
I turned around to witness a group of 5-10 black kids colliding with pedestrians and throwing punches whenever they were confronted. Within a few seconds, they started pushing me in the back & when I responded a punch arrived to my throat and the group started running away when I attempted to notify police.
Multiple friends refuse to attend events in certain parts of D.C. including Adams Morgan and Chinatown where a multitude of attacks have been perpetrated over the years. There is a persistent air of racial tension around the city.
I have been attacked several times by gangs of blacks in D.C. (male & female) over the past few years.
Earlier this week, Stewart said the Knockout Game is a fear-based figment of white imaginations.
This figment also makes regular stops on the Washington Metro – another site of frequent black mob violence. Most of which goes unnoticed by the Washington Post and now, Jon Stewart. But at least one D.C. outlet thinks it is a story: The UnSuck DC Metro blog.
This is an typical report from 2011: “Harrowing Account of Yet More Metro Violence.”
I have never been more disgusted or shocked by what I witnessed Saturday night at the Anacostia Metro. I went to pick up a family member at the Metro, and just as she was telling me about the fights (Yes, plural!) that happened on the Green Line train [between L’Enfant and Anacostia], we witnessed a group of 6 to 8 young black teenagers kick, stomp, punch and push a lone teenage girl.
I could not believe my eyes! I also could not believe there was not an officer in sight.
When the family member arrived, she had her own story as well:
When she got on the train toward Anacostia, a group of teenagers proceeded to verbally and physically assault a group of young women. One of the boys threw a bottle and another threw the contents of a bottle in one of the woman’s face. The assaults got so out of hand that some people landed on a woman and her baby.
The attacking group had the doors to the train blocked so people couldn’t get off the train. My cousin told me she was so scared that she hid behind some seats and pulled out the box cutter she used for work.
And every time the web site runs another story of racial violence, readers – often dozens at a time – post their most recent encounter with black mob violence in Washington.
Some on video. Such as the two white women attacked by a black mob on the Red Line in Southeast Washington. No one knows what these two women were doing on that Metro in that part of Washington. On the video, they told their attackers they “did not want any trouble.”
To the black mob that confronted them, threatened them, beat them and robbed them, it was no trouble at all. All the while one of the members of the crew was rolling video.
Did they call it the Knockout Game? Probably not.
Are more and more people in Washington coming to believe that non-black people are targets of black mob violence under whatever name?
Now that is a pattern.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Leave a Reply