[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/01/katie.png)In almost every instance of the so-called “knock out game,” perpetrators have been black and their victims mostly white (and/or) Asian. There is _one_—and only one—case in which the racial dynamics of this violence reversed course, an incident from Texas involving a white predator and a black prey. Not unsurprisingly, this is the only instance of “the game” that Barack Obama’s Department of Justice is choosing to pursue as a “hate crime.”
And it is the one and only incident regarding which Katie Couric unreservedly disclosed the respective races of the perpetrator and victim on her daily television show. As for the phenomenon generally, Couric was careful to convey the impression that it was racially-neutral, an activity in which “kids” of all races routinely engaged.
Couric’s take was all too predictable.
It is also a lie, a lie of omission, for like that of all of her colleagues in the left-leaning media, it is painfully clear that Couric’s objective is to manipulate the public into thinking that this phenomenon is something that it isn’t.
In reality, though, Couric is simply doing with this racial issue what leftists have been doing with the issue of race for a long, long time.
Consider slavery, the lynchpin of the narrative underwriting racial politics in America.
To know only the conventional account of slavery is to know worse than nothing. It is to know next to nothing—just enough truth, however miniscule, to make one think that one knows the whole truth.
According to the conventional narrative, whites originally kidnapped blacks from some idyllic African paradise for the sake of reducing them to a lifetime of servitude in America.
In other words, only white Americans were slave masters and only blacks were slaves.
In reality, slavery is an institution that is as old, and as universal, as humanity itself. People of all races have both enslaved and been enslaved. Tellingly, the word “slave” derives from the experience of the Slavish, an Eastern European—i.e. white—ethnic group whose members were enslaved en masse by North African Muslims for a period of nearly two centuries.
Those poor souls who were made to endure the unfathomable evils of the notorious “Middle Passage” were sold by other black Africans, slave traders who were doing nothing other than engaging in one of Africa’s oldest, and most lucrative, practices. To this day, long after Europeans employed their economic and military might to force, not just Africans, but other “people of color” in Asia and the Middle East, to abolish this abominable industry, slavery continues in parts of “the Dark continent.”
The reader may also be unaware of the fact that in early America, the sight of white slaves—not indentured servants, but _slaves—_was not an uncommon one at the slave ports. And in the antebellum South, as late as 1860, there were as many as three thousand black slave masters.
Another inconvenient tidbit that the ideologically approved tale of slavery omits is that, long before whites discovered the New World, slavery had been ubiquitous among the indigenous peoples of what would become the Americas.
So, while whites most certainly did participate in slavery, to know only this is to know next to nothing, for it suggests that there is something uniquely wicked about whites. But if there is anything at all unique about whites with respect to this issue it is that whites—and white English Christians to boot!—were the first (and only) people in all of human history to spearhead a moral revolt against this perennial trade in human bondage. As Thomas Sowell and others have long documented, during the apex of the British Empire, the English deployed their immense power, against considerable resistance on the part of Africans and others, to stamp out slavery throughout the world.
Just the slightest acquaintance with real history brings into focus a dramatically different picture of slavery than that advanced by the politically useful racial fiction of opportunists and activists.
Similarly, a dramatically distorted picture of “the knock out game” emerges after Katie Couric and company have left the reality on their editing room floors.
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