As the author of the notorious essay The Talk—which was, lest we forget, a truthful satire of various lying claims by blacks that they have to warn their children about white cops— I’ve naturally been thinking about what to write when the MSM inevitably calls for my views, now that I have been vindicated by, most recently, the Knockout Game. [Brooklyn cops probe another possible 'knockout' after woman, 72, is punched, New York Daily News, November 25, 2013 ]

But I keep getting defeated by the obviousness of it all. They might just as well be calling with some such request as: “Can you give us 800 words by press time on whether the Sun will come up tomorrow morning / who’s buried in Grant’s tomb / where flies go in the winter?”

Of course young blacks who encounter a lone nonblack want to commit violence against him/her. Of course! As the English expression goes: You could knock me down with a feather.

In the first place, scrappy young men are anyway inclined to that sort of thing. In 1960s pre-Beatles Liverpool where I was a schoolteacher, the fad was for “nutting.” There is a certain way of throwing your upper body forward and down so that your forehead impacts the bridge of the counterparty’s nose, causing sudden intense pain, a gush of blood from the nostrils, and momentary loss of consciousness.

(Do not try this at home. There’s a trick to it that needs practice.) There was nothing racial in it, although Liverpool, an old seaport, was considerably diverse: Most nuttings were white-on-white.

In the second place, in Western multiracial societies, whites are the wimps. Every other race asserts itself, lobbies, agitates, makes demands, and is given quotas, preferences, and privileges. Only whites cringe, defer, and grovel. It is natural to feel contempt for people who are so ashamed of their ancestors and of their own existence.

And in the third place, blacks in the generality hate nonblacks. Why would they not? Everything in the dominant culture encourages them to.

There is, for example, the Dogma of Zero Group Differences, to which all respectable people are expected to adhere. Assuming there are no essential statistical differences between human groups with different deep ancestry—a thing everybody does assume—what accounts for the observed differences between groups? For the huge black-nonblack differences in criminal offending as reported by victims, whether or not police and courts are involved? Or the sensational race gaps in household wealth?

If you cleave to the DZGD—as all the authority figures say you must—the only explanation can be white malice keeping blacks down.

You’d be mad, too.

And then there is the endless stream of propaganda featuring whites being beastly to blacks, from mid-19^th-century Abolitionist porn, via Roots (1977), to 12 Years a Slave (2013).

And then again there is the encouragement young blacks get from older black authority figures. Listen to Michael Eric Dyson explainerating why blacks can’t be racist: Michael Eric Dyson Shares Why "Black People Can't Be Racist" Backstage At Don't Sleep!—YouTube. Dyson is Professor of Sociology at a prestigious university (Georgetown!). Why would a semiliterate black teenager not assume Dyson is speaking some kind of sense from a base of deep academic knowledge, rather than—as is actually the case—minstrel-show gibberish?

Why wouldn’t dimwitted young blacks hate us? What’s newsworthy here?

So I can never feel that much explanation is required as to why young blacks beat up on whites. But what needs explaining is why whites put up with it, even excuse it. [I Was a Victim of the Fake "Knockout Game" Trend, By Matthew Yglesias, Slate, November 25, 2013.] What needs explaining—what always needs explaining—is white ethnomasochism.

It really is a very peculiar thing. American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor, who has a first-class mind and has thought long and deeply about this, declares himself “stumped”:

I'm stumped. Even the Yanomamo and the tribes of Irian Jaya think they are hot stuff, and want their people and traditions to endure for ever. Only whites—and only in the last 60 or 70 years—have been seized by some form of mass insanity that requires them to believe that their mere existence is an offense to others, and that the desire to live in a white society and enjoy European culture is “hate.”

We are not short of offered explanations. Most popular:

• It’s the Jews. The theory: Nursing an atavistic hatred of gentiles, and fearful of being the only noticeable minority in an otherwise homogenous society, Jews seek to demoralize and shatter gentile culture.

Occasional VDARE.com contributor Kevin MacDonald takes this line, drawing on evolutionary psychology to fortify his explanations.

It seems to me, though, that MacDonald just replaces something that’s difficult to explain with something that’s even more difficult to explain.

Britain’s population, for example, is only one percent Jewish on the most generous assumptions, perhaps less than 0.5 percent. Why do 99 percent allow themselves to be dictated to by one percent? Why are they such wimps? And we’re back where we started.

• It’s Christianity. Inspired by Nietzsche, or at any rate by one reading of Nietzsche, the argument here is that the meek, yielding, turn-the-other-cheek aspect of Christ’s teaching, which gave Christianity its foothold in the Roman Empire as a religion of women and slaves, fatally sapped the white race’s will to self-preservation.

Out on the fringes of the White Nationalist movement, this line of thinking has led to neopaganism, a retreat to the supposedly more ballsy religions of the Teutonic forest glades.

This strikes me as even less satisfactory than the previous. For centuries Christian armies were defending their ethnies, invading other people’s territories, and slaughtering infidels (and other Christians) with utmost vigor. The bomber crews who were flattening German and Japanese cities seventy years ago were much more Christian than today’s diversiphiles.

• It’s the Enlightenment. London University’s Eric Kaufmann is the fugleman here, arguing that the Enlightenment contained within itself a cosmopolitanism and moral universalism that eroded WASP hegemony from within. See Verdict: Suicide—Eric Kaufmann Replies To *Kevin MacDonald.

This I think gets a good piece of the truth. One driving force of the Enlightenment was curiosity, an open-minded interest in other peoples and ways of life. It’s not implausible that this could curdle into disdain for one’s own ethny. Why it actually did so when it did—in the second half of the 20^th century—is less easy to understand, though I think Kaufmann does a fair job with the American case.

As baffling as the source of white ethnomasochism is the odium that now attaches to the phrase “white supremacy.” What’s wrong with white supremacy? Does some other kind of supremacy have a better historical track record? If white supremacy is so awful, why are desperate people risking their lives to get into nations where it is operative?

And even if white supremacy really is a bad thing for nonwhites, why should whites be expected to surrender it? Does anyone expect the Chinese to give up “yellow supremacy” in their territories? Or the Nigerians to give up “black supremacy” in theirs? Or the Malays to give up “brown supremacy” in theirs?

Truly, white ethnomasochism is the great social-psychological mystery of our age.

But we expect it.  We take it for granted.  Thus, even respectable Conservatism Inc. outlets were taken in by this hoax—purportedly a retirement speech by American history professor Professor Noel Ignatiev:

“If you are a white male, you don’t deserve to live. You are a cancer, you’re a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world! They only murder, exploit and oppress non-whites! At least a white woman can have sex with a black man and make a brown baby but what can a white male do? He’s good for nothing. Slavery, genocides against aboriginal peoples and massive land confiscation, the inquisition, the holocaust, white males are all to blame! You maintain your white male privilege only by oppressing, discriminating against and enslaving others!”

See Liberal Professor Tells White Male Students To Commit Suicide To Benefit Society By Noel Sheppard, NewsBusters,  November 25, 2013, with update saying it’s hoax. The source is the parody blog “Diversity Chronicle.”

 The back story: the reason this was credible is that Prof. Ignatiev (who, I have to admit in fairness to Kevin MacDonald, is Jewish) has committed similar sentiments to print:

A Harvard professor wants to abolish the white race.

Noel Ignatiev, a founder of a journal called Race Traitor and a fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute, a leading black-studies department, argues in the current issue of Harvard Magazine that “abolishing the white race” is “so desirable that some may find it hard to believe” that anyone other than “committed white supremacists” would oppose it.[ Harvard professor argues for 'abolishing' white race, The Washington Times, September 4, 2002, links added]

So no, I’m not in the least surprised or puzzled to read about the Knockout Game. What keeps me awake at night is lunatics like Prof. Ignatiev and buffoonish gabblers like Michael Eric Dyson holding chairs at major universities, and the slightly-milder expressions of their ideas (or in Dyson’s case, “ideas”) that I see all over the liberal media.

And, above all, the dumb acquiescence in them of the great mass of decent Americans.

I’d gladly submit to being knocked out in the street—if I could be assured that, on waking, I would understand what the heck is going on here.