Just when the Knockout Game is declared dead, a week of heightened bloodshed proves reports of its demise to be greatly exaggerated.
Five months after the New York Times said this spontaneous racial violence was an urban myth; four months after NPR admitted it happened once in a while but race had nothing to do with it; three months after CBS News said maybe it was happening after all; two months after a Philadelphia family court judge said racial violence exists because white people deserve it; and one month after CNN said the Knockout Game fad was over, victims and videos and witnesses and suspects just keep piling up.
Just in the last 10 days, there have been several reports, but many in the media still refuse to connect the dots and report the central organizing feature of the Knockout Game: The perpetrators are black. The victims are not.
News of the latest case surfaced last week from Florida. The lead sentence from WOKV-TV tells the story: “The ‘Knock Out’ game has officially come to Jacksonville.”
This time the victim was disabled. He was at a service station, supporting himself with a cane and filling his car with gas when Kevin Kejuan Johnson allegedly punched him in the face. Police arrested Johnson this week after identifying him from video and getting a “search warrant for his phone, which they say reveals multiple videos of juveniles walking up to unsuspecting individuals and punching them.”
The victim said Johnson was one of several black people at the attack.
The Knockout Game is pretty simple: Gather a group of black people. Find a white person. An Asian will do. Older is better. Then punch him or her in the face until he or she is knocked out, your arms are tired or the person dies. The game is often spontaneous, but never random.
Hundreds of examples of the Knockout Game are documented in “White Girl Bleed A Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It.”