Urban Decay and Feral Teens

 

It appears the simulated violence in video games is no longer exhilarating enough for some urban teenagers.  There’s a new game in town that is all the rage among seemingly asocial posses of thrill seekers.  They call it Knockout.

The object of the game?  To see if the teen has enough skill and strength to knock unconscious some random pedestrian in one well-placed blow.  When successful, the unsuspecting pedestrian falls like a tree and the posse celebrates. 

Sometimes the prey doesn’t recover.  One man, Ralph Santiago,46, was found dead in Hoboken, N.J., his head and broken neck wedged between two iron fence posts. Video surveillance recorded his assailant delivering the knockout blow.

Apparently, this phenomenon is moving across America’s vast landscape, coming soon to a city near you. There have been deaths as a result of such attacks in Syracuse, St. Louis and New Jersey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u_PEBsEyYHQ

America, what have we done!? How have we allowed our society to decline into a re-enactment of Lord of the Flies?

The proverbial elephant on the table, based on the reports of such incidents to date, is the race of the young people shown in the videos mindlessly attacking innocent people who happen by at the exact moment these feral human beings decided to get their “fun on.”

These are the first two comments I saw when I scrolled down on yesterday’s CBS DC report on Knockout:

jimjenky• 3 minutes ago

• Yep, call me a racist, but soon as I saw the article title I knew the race of those playing this game. Oh, but we need to understand that this is the result of slavery, the break-up of the black family, the on-going racism of America and its effects on the lives of black youth, etc, etc, etc. The biggest problem with black America, especially with black youths, is the continued excuses that are given for their poor conduct, thus encouraging further poor conduct. Face facts, America, the greatest enemy of black America are black Americans. Time to look at whether this is cultural of genetic.

Roxy• 3 minutes ago

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Yes, the guilty parties were black.  And no matter how hateful we find the comments I’ve pasted above, the truth is that I also knew without seeing the video that the kids involved would be black.  That is particularly problematic for me because I am also black and I spend a good deal of my time writing about and fighting against the stereotypes that plague me and other mothers of sons who are black and innocent of such ignorant,feral behavior.

To answer the commenter jimjenky, let me say this:  It is not genetic, it is cultural.  It HAS been looked at to see if this kind of amoral behavior is genetically inherent to descendants of black Africans.  It is not.  So no, it is not about race.

It is about decade after decade of poverty among black families who cannot join the White Flight that renders inner cities dark-skinned and even poorer. 

It is about children in those dark-skinned cities being raised by child mothers, who were raised by child mothers, who were raised by child mothers.

It is about the propensity for residents of these dark-skinned cities to turn to drugs and drug trafficking to both escape the relentless grind of poverty that they can’t hope to escape and to earn the kind of living they think they deserve. 

jimjenky stated: “Face facts, America, the greatest enemy of black America are black Americans.”

This is where it gets difficult for me.  This is a statement I cannot refute.  I, too, am afraid of groups of black teenagers.  As a senior citizen, I am feeling more and more vulnerable to the dangers of simply leaving my house. 

Last week I was afraid to carry my cell phone while walking my dog because young black men and woman are making a sport out of jumping out of cars and snatching the devices right out of the hands of pedestrians.  Now I have to be concerned about being the random target of a so-called game to see if one of those thugs can knock me out in one punch.  The chances that these crimes will be committed by black youths are well into 90th percentiles. 

What’s interesting about my concerns is that I do not live in a blighted neighborhood.  On the contrary, this is considered an upscale in-town neighborhood with a fair amount of cultural diversity, but still predominately white.  In-town Atlanta has undergone an impressive gentrification over the past three or four decades.  In fact, many of those white flyers have reclaimed large sections of the inner-city, pushing the dark-skinned city dwellers outward into the exurban areas and creating new pockets of urban-like blight.

The problem is the feral thugs are mobile.  If they have no car to use to cruise the areas where the stuff they want is likely to be, they steal it.  Their thought process seems to be simply “I don’t have one; I need one; I’ll take yours.”  There is no conscience involved.  It is pragmatic. Morality and conscience have vanished among this group. 

It has vanished to the point that knocking innocent passersby unconscious is a leisurely pastime.  

You and I may disagree about how we got to this place, but this is where we are.  Blaming it on black people will not protect non-black people from the Knockout Game.  Blaming it on white people will not protect non-white from becoming prey. 

America, we have a problem.  There is nowhere to hide.