Just because someone gets punched in the face, that does not make him an expert. Or even smart.
Take James Addlespurger. If you have seen any of the recent news coverage on the Knockout Game, you have seen Addlespurger. He was walking down an alley in Pittsburgh last year when he came face to face with six black people.
One of them punched him in the head: He was out cold before he landed face-first on the concrete gutter. They ran.
Now the grainy, black and white security video is everywhere. All the network news and local stations, too. Addlespurger is the poster boy for the Knockout Game. But he does not want any part of it.
Appearing on the HuffPost Live, Addlespurger said he believes he is being manipulated by sinister conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly and others who have pointed out that most of the attackers in the Knockout Game are black. Most of the victims are not:
I work with kids every day. As a public school teacher for 20 years. I understand that kids are troubled. But to stereotype and go down that avenue, I am not going to fan those flames of hatred.
The Knockout Game is a “faux trend,” proclaimed HuffPost Live. Their source? An interview given to ABC’s Nightline by the the person who punched Addlespurger in the face.
Addlespurger is not the only victim of racial violence in the Pittsburgh area, though there is no indication he ever checked. If he had, he would have found that, 30 miles away, there was no video when a mob of black people attacked Washington & Jefferson College running back Timothy McNerney just a few weeks after his attack. He died.
Of the suspects responsible, Detective Dan Staneck of the Washington police told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
We don’t have a very detailed description other than that there were several males, and that the majority of them if not all of them are black males.
Addlespurger is not even the only teacher whose beating was caught on video in Pittsburgh. Just a few weeks before, another security video caught another black mob beating another Pittsburgh teacher. They punched him, chased him, punched him some more, and pushed him into the street where he was almost run over by a car. This teacher did not want his name released, so maybe Addlespurger was not aware of this.
Or how about the four football players from Pitt who were arrested last November for spontaneously assaulting a few white students on campus.
Since Addlespurger did not get the examples so close to home, it is probably not reasonable to expect he would have read about the St. Louis judge who said the Knockout Game is prevalent there, that one man alone is responsible for more than 300 assaults.
Or Addlesperger could have talked to Roan Ciardi. After reading in WND about a case of the Knockout Game in Rochester earlier this summer, Ciardi wrote of his own experience with it:
The same day, around 4 p.m., my son called me from a friend’s house with his voice shaking as he described to me exactly what I had just read about in Flaherty’s article.
Or he could have spoken to Paul Lane, another victim on the Knockout Game. Here again, the alleged perpetrator did not issue a press release announcing his participation in the game from November. Said Lane, following his up-close-and-personal encounter with the “game”:
I listen to left-wing radio. And I could not believe it when I heard my favorite radio personality — Stephanie Miller — say the Knockout game does not exist. That’s crazy.
I’m a liberal Obama supporter but that didn’t stop the violence on me. I have serious concussion issues and my trust for young African American men in particular is now less than zero.
Addlespurger is a teacher. A blues musician. A self-described positive person. His willingness to overlook the racial violence perpetrated on him is not new to Marlin Newburn, who recently retired after 30 years as a prison psychologist and court appointed counselor.
Addlespurger’s willingness to empathize with his attackers might seem like the Stockholm Syndrome to some. But Newburn said it is more accurately called Masochistic Altruism:
This is a better way to describe the teacher and other victimized deniers of the knockout game. Stockholm Syndrome is a pathological attachment to an aggressor as a reaction to terror over time. With Masochistic Altruism, one can sustain a thoroughly false sense of nobility as they take their occasional beating. It’s not being dishonest, it’s a pathology, a psychological illness.
This is in line with people who are codependent, which, although an officially non-psychology recognized pathology, means a person will take abuse from a dominant person or people in the belief they can change them for the better. These people have very low levels of self-worth thus they choose a person or people they believe lower than they are on the human scale. In this effort, they believe themselves as ‘great and good.’
What these apologists are doing is enabling and empowering their attackers, and that means there will be more victims. That’s guaranteed.
Others point out that some are hesitant to talk about the race of their attackers because they fear becoming victimized once again: This time as a racist.
But Addlespurger’s story is that race had nothing to do with the violence against him. And he is sticking to it.
As a teacher, Addlespurger must know that Pittsburgh area schools are also the scene of frequent black mob violence. In January, for two days, 70 black students – and some parents – were punching, kicking, and terrorizing themselves and neighbors near Woodland Hills High School in Swissvale, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Some of the violence was “too graphic for WTAE news to show in its entirety.”
Swissvale police chief Greg Geppert said it was a “riot.”
In March 2010, 11 black students were arrested after earlier riot at the same school. Two police officers were injured. Several students blamed the riots on police and security guards.
After 30 years and thousands of cases, Newburn has seen the face of racial violence — old and young. It is not pretty. Nor widely talked about.
To people who practice this type of racial violence, all non-blacks are the enemy since they were weaned on the idea that whites/Asians/Hispanics/Martians were ‘keeping my people down.’
They may be functionally illiterate, and I have yet to meet one that wasn’t, but their older family members or people in their neighborhood along with the popular culture drove that early message into their skulls.
They believe that they have some black toxic-tribal license to attack, and the more brutal, the more ‘down with the struggle’ they are. The degree of viciousness also demonstrates just how manly (or womanly) they are. In other words, the more sadistic, the higher the social and personal power status.
It’s also great street cred for them, the sacred status for assaulting the all-pervasive and imaginary white power structure, and in regard to Asians and Hispanics, those people are just ‘takin’ jobs’ from them.
The people who practice this kind of racial violence — like the Knockout Game — have imaginary, social injustice tags as legitimate reasons to assault all non-blacks.
To say the black assaults on non-blacks isn’t racist is a blatant lie. Black predators are racist to the bone.
Newburn does not expect to see Addlespurger on his office couch any time soon. He is working it out on his own. Playing music. Teaching. But Addlespurger does have one parting message abut people who might think twice about visiting downtown Pittsburgh because of the threat of racial violence. As he told HuffPo Live, “People who live in this violent city of Pittsburgh should feel safe going down there.”
Follow Colin Flaherty at the website White Girl Bleed a Lot
