The ‘knockout game’: moral panic and the politics of white victimhood

Abstract

In the fall of 2013, the ‘knockout game’ – random black-on-white assaults – became the dominant storyline in the US media. Despite no measurable increase in these types of attacks, a moral panic emerged that drew from and amplified numerous previous panics around race and violent crime. While in many ways the ‘knockout game’ is the latest iteration of exaggerated and projected white fears of black violence in the US, the current racial formation is one that increasingly promotes the idea that white Americans are systematically subordinated. In spite of a lack of material evidence to support this claim, media outlets have played a key role in stoking racialised moral panics and normalising what had once been fringe theories of white racial victimhood – to the extent that more than half of white working-class Americans feel they are part of an oppressed racial group.