Knockout Game Racism And Media Bias: ‘Only White On Black Is Hate?’
When it comes to the Knockout Game, racism and bias are being alleged by some in the media.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Conrad Alvin Barrett is a white man who was charged with a hate crime for breaking the jaw of a black man. The reason police know he was playing the Knockout Game was because he recorded the crime on his cell phone and yelled “knockout” as he ran away.
In the past, social media has been used to organize flash mobs where people will turn up in a public place and do some sort of organized event, usually a dance or a song. This idea evolved into a violent variant called bash mobs, where a coordinated crowd runs through the streets to commit a string of thefts, crimes, assaults, and property damage, only to disappear quickly. The Knockout game seems to be the ultimate culmination of this trend toward violence, with a group or an individual targeting the first person they see and attempting to knock the unsuspecting person unconscious with just one punch.
The Knockout game went viral when videos showed violent, organized attacks by some black youths. Most media reports focused on “black mobs” that seemed to have an anti-Semitic angle in their targeting of people. There is also a book that documents this trend called “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The return of racial violence and how the media ignore it.” But some people argue the Knockout game has been around for many years and that this disturbing trend is a rise in overall violence, not in racism per se. It’s also only recently that this “game” has been going by the name Knockout, as it’s been called other things.
The reason Barrett’s attack is called a hate crime is because he allegedly used a racial slur and said, “The plan is to see if I were to hit a black person, would this be nationally televised?” Despite this specific evidence, Emily Miller, senior editor of The Washington Times, points out: “So only white on black is hate?”
So only white on black is hate? RT @WashTimes Justice Dept charge white 'knockout' suspect with hate crime http://t.co/gLki0vFgzd
— Emily Miller (@emilymiller) December 26, 2013
The report on the Knockout game also alleges this is the “first prosecuation” and that “many of the victims in news accounts have been white and their assailants have been black, but hate-crimes charges have been rare.” But Philip Bump, writing for The Wire, believes there is media bias in coverage of the Knockout game:
“The attacks are always about race in media coverage because the alleged racial targeting of whites by blacks is the only reason people care about the attacks. It’s not necessarily a conscious filtering, but it is a filter that is applied…. The weird thing about the Barrett attack — one of thousands of random attacks involving people of various races — is that it likely wouldn’t have happened without the media making ‘the knockout game’ into an official sensation. Barrett allegedly wanted to see what happened when a white guy hit a black guy in the knockout game, because he hadn’t seen those covered by the media. Now he knows what would happen. And some of the same people that helped create the knockout game are, however indirectly, rising to his defense. He’s a victim, too.”
Do you think there is media bias in reports on the Knockout game? Or do you think there is a serious social problem that the black community must confront?
