The recent news about “The Knockout Game” is disturbing. The Chicago “flash robs” story has been bubbling along under the radar for a couple of years. The CNN story makes a weak point.
On Monday morning’s edition of CNN’s New Day, expert guest Harry Houck, a former NYPD detective, went there, explaining to the New Day anchor team that while “not every black kid is doing this,” the only suggestion he could offer to avoid such attacks was “crossing the street, getting away from them” if you see “a group of black youths.”
Thanks a lot. What about the story as an indicator of the state of racial relations in the USA ?
Houck replied that the trend is real, adding that “Urban myths don’t exist. These attacks exist in everyone’s minds, especially in those victims.”
That’s when the familiar language of race-baiting began. Asked if the media was contributing to the problem by hyping the attacks, Houck replied that “I think we have to let the public know what’s going on to protect ourselves. That’s our job. That’s the police department’s job to protect the public. No matter how politically incorrect it might be. It’s to know what is going on and how to protect themselves.”
In fact, it has been concealing the magnitude of the problem. I’m reading a book titled, “White Girl Bleed a Lot”, which provides lots of examples andd lots of videos. The black kids, boys and girls, who are the perpetrators have been videoing the attacks and uploading the videos to You-Tube where they can be seen by millions. They are proud of what they are doing.
When I first saw a book by Colin Flaherty with the title “White Girl Bleed a Lot,” I instantly knew what it was about, even though I had not seen the book reviewed anywhere, and knew nothing about the author.
That is because I had encountered that phrase before, while doing research for the four new chapters on intellectuals and race that I wrote for the revised edition of my own book Intellectuals and Society, published this year.
Is the media “hyping ” these stories ?
Ignoring racial violence only guarantees that it will get worse. The Chicago Tribune has publicly rationalized its filtering out of any racial identification of attackers and their victims, even though the media do not hesitate to mention race when decrying statistical disparities in arrest or imprisonment rates.
Such mob attacks have become so frequent in Chicago that officials promoting conventions there have recently complained to the mayor that the city is going to lose business if such widespread violence is not brought under control.
Two recent victims were doctors attending a convention of oncologists at McCormick Place. They were walking on north Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s “Miracle Mile,” a heavy tourist destination where I have spent many hours. The newspaper stories mention “young men” as the culprits.
No one was seriously hurt in the flurry of five random attacks by a mob of young men on Chicago’s lakefront over the weekend.
There is no mention of race in the article. Those reading these sanitized accounts have begun to read the code. First names of the attackers help.
Three other teens were charged with robbery as adults: Dvonte Sykes, 17, of the 7500 block of South Normal Avenue; Trovolus Pickett, 17, of the 8400 block of South Dorchester Avenue; and Derod’te Wright, 18, of the 3500 block of South State Street. They remained in custody Monday night in lieu of bonds ranging from $200,000 to $300,000.
The CNN “expert” is also getting pushback from the program hosts.
“I ask people who I run into every day, ‘What are you doing?’ They say if they see a group of black youths, they cross the street.”
Co-host Michaela Pereira pushed back, telling Houck that “black kids don’t need to be feel, made to feel they’re a threat simply because they are hanging out with friends.”
Houck generously allowed that “Not every black kid is doing this. it’s very few, but if you are the victim, if you are a potential victim and you are afraid walking down the street, you see a group of black youths, everybody I am talking to says they are crossing the street, getting away from them,” and added that “the good black kids will be saying ‘Why are you crossing the street when I walk by?’”
It’s actually not that few, if you look. Flaherty’s website has quite a few videos although the Kindle version of his book does not play the videos for me. The CNN “expert” would have been more accurate to say that not all the victims are whites . Asians are targeted and gay men, black and white, are especially targets in gay parts of Chicago like the “Boystown” neighborhood and Streeterville , another gay neighborhood.
What are we to make of this? Is it a trend we should fear ?
There is a sea change occurring in America fifty years after MLK Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. This paradigm shift is spreading with the growing realization among our citizens that Black America (including our president) seems to hate Non-Black America. Temper this sweeping statement with the fact that blacks in America may genuinely like non-black individuals, just as whites in 1850 who believed blacks were a lower form of life still knew individual black men they respected for their particular talents and/or character. However, if we take specific individual knowledge out of the equation, on the whole, being black trumps everything else for blacks in America today. This is not true of any other ethnic or racial group.
I think his impression is a bit alarmist.
Thomas Sowell is not the only black public figure to comment on the “knockout game.” Allan West has also spoken up here and here.
I keep hearing commentators asking for the voices of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and others to speak out. But you’ll hear only crickets because there’s no profit in it for them, and certainly no political gain by way of victimhood.
It must be getting really bad because Sharpton, “Mr Race Riot”, has finally spoken up.
Sharpton, the president of the National Action Network and an MSNBC host, said, “this kind of insane thuggery—there is nothing cute about that. There is no game play about knocking somebody out, and it is not a game. It is an assault and is bias, and it is wrong.”
This video hows what may begin to happen:
Personally, I believe this is an inevitable result of the collapse of the black family.
Pay Moynihan tried to point out the problem but he encountered an early example of leftist bias. The bias of “low expectations,” as George W Bush put it.
“There is one unmistakable lesson in American history,” Moynihan wrote, “a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.” It’s a statement just as true and nearly as unwelcome as it was four decades ago.
The recent feminist outbursts of hatred toward men, predicts similar effects in the white population, already nearly equal to the black in female households.
Shooting back, or as in one example in Flaherty’s book, stabbing the attacker, won’t solve the problem. The president and the black celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, are only making it worse as they allow these thugs to claim victimhood.
Let’s hope it diminishes as a trend although I am not optimistic when I see the Obama administration, and its allies empowering the worst elements in this situation.
hehe fav’d. Keeping this for future reference thanks heaps bro.
hehe fav’d. Keeping this for future reference thanks heaps bro.
It doesn’t help much that the academy and taste makers have relentlessly pushed the idea of “White privilege” and that White’s need to pay…something…for past injustices. The media has a steady diet of White guys as clueless losers dominated by women and inferior to the Other.
Eric Holder asked (no doubt sarcastically) for an honest discussion about race. I don’t think he really wants honesty. (He never has.)
We’re rolling through 50 years of civil rights events. The remediation regimes from that era seem to roll on forever and require the minting of new victims. I sometimes wonder what we have gained, since the abuses of that era were going away naturally, and the injection of federal minders into the process just mucks it up.