I have just become aware, thanks to Fox News and an author who publishes under the conspiracy-minded World Net Daily imprint, that roving gangs of black teens are randomly attacking innocent white victims in a racist ritual known as the “knockout game.”

The motive is mischief, not robbery. These impeccable sources also claim the mainstream media, in a woeful act of political correctness, refuse to report the racial nature of this crime wave.

The country is in denial, said Colin Flaherty, author of “White Girl Bleed A Lot,” a crime compendium that has become a favorite of conservative voices who stoke racial animus for fun and ratings.

“If we can open this up to some real talk,” Flaherty said, “maybe that’s the first step to solving a very nasty problem in this country: black mob violence, black-on-white crime, whatever you want to call it, the numbers are ridiculously out of proportion.”

He’s right about one thing: The numbers are ridiculously out of proportion. According to the FBI, in 2011, there were 3,645 victims of racially motivated hate crimes. Nearly 72 percent of them were victims of an offender’s “anti-black bias,” as the FBI puts it. Sixteen percent were victims of an “anti-white bias.”

So what, Flaherty says.

“If you use statistics, which I don’t, people say you are stereotyping,” he said. “Every incident by itself may be insignificant, but when you put them together, there’s something going on.”

What that something is, he can’t exactly say.

But I can: It’s part of the ongoing demonization of black teenagers.

“We still have issues of anti-Semitism in the black community,” said Amanda Susskind, Pacific Southwest regional director for the Anti-Defamation League. “But even that is way down.”

There is no consensus among law enforcement that the “knockout game” is even a thing. “If ever there was an urban myth, this was it,” a Jersey City police spokesman told the New York Times last week.

But that has not stopped a Republican New York assemblyman from proposing a “Knockout Assault Deterrent Act,” requiring teens to be tried as adults with prison terms of up to 25 years.

That, friends, is how you institutionalize racism.

Last week, Fox’s Greta van Susteren interviewed Phoebe Connolly, who said she was punched in the face by a teenager while riding her bicycle in Washington.

But Connolly veered off message. She saw the attack “as another reason to better support our youth with activities and youth programs.”

Van Susteren course corrected, listing four deaths she said were attributable to “the so-called knockout game.”

She never noted the race of the assailants. Then again, she didn’t have to.

“Take a look at a few of the attacks caught on camera, so you know what to look out for,” she said. “We have also confirmed, thugs on the streets in some places are calling these attacks ‘polar bear hunting.’”

Polar bear hunting. The knockout game.

Any way you spell it, it’s just a way to whip up race anxiety.

– Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times