While I’m officially on vacation this week, I carved out some time to sit down with John McWhorter and record our monthly conversation. (I’ll post the Q&A later this week.) After all, talking to John hardly feels like work. We’ll hit our nineteenth anniversary as sparring partners later this year. But neither is it quite playtime, as we still find ourselves occupying opposing—or at least different—sides of the debates of our times, including where race is concerned.
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In New York City, where John lives, Mayor Zohran Mamdani last week shut down any remaining doubts about his political influence, when all three of the candidates he endorsed in the Democratic congressional primaries—Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—won their races, virtually guaranteeing them victories in the general. John professes unease with Chevalier, whose sometimes strident anti-American and anti-Zionist rhetoric he can’t quite take seriously. Is that what she really thinks? If so, why would she join a government whose legitimacy she doubts?
Good questions. But whatever the answers, I think the recent crop of left-wing candidates and officials shows signs of an upheaval in the Democratic Party. We’ve seen it twice in the last two decades on the other side, with the Tea Party and then MAGA reconfiguring the Republican Party and pushing it further to right. There’s no reason the same thing can’t happen to the Democrats, with an insurgent left wing powered by dissatisfaction with centrist, aging, and ineffective leadership.
The recent trial of Karmelo Anthony, the now-nineteen-year-old Texas resident convicted of stabbing seventeen-year-old Austin Metcalf to death, returned a 35-year sentence, with an opportunity for parole at 17.5 years. Anthony is black and Metcalf was white, facts that have, predictably, affected the discourse around the crime, the trial, and the sentence. John describes the circumstances surrounding the stabbing, and I won’t recount them here, except to say that it should be clear that Anthony is responsible for Metcalf’s death, and the conviction was justified.
The question is why. Why did Anthony refuse to leave when told—apparently correctly—that he should not have been where he was? Why did Anthony respond to a shove with deadly force? As expected, some people are calling this an example of African-descended people’s inherent depravity, an explanation neither John nor I accept. If there is an answer, it may well be cultural. In an extended X post, John takes up Thomas Sowell’s thinking on the matter, which traces patterns of black masculine aggression back to slavery, where, Sowell claims, blacks acquired from Northern English, Scottish, and Irish immigrant laborers the practice of “forcefully” projecting their masculinity when encountering a perceived threat.
Sowell’s idea seems plausible, though it is not definitive. It posits a theory of the pattern’s origin, but it doesn’t explain the patterns’ apparent continuity up through the present. Grand narratives such as Sowell’s are a great help in tracing out the broad strokes of social development. But I think, in this case, looking back to the nineteenth century may obscure more than it illuminates. Many of Anthony’s defenders and detractors are treating this as a “racial incident,” either because they believe Anthony’s race had something to do with the length of his sentence or because they believe his race had something to do with his decision to stab Metcalf.
In my view, none of that supplies sufficient evidence for viewing this as a “racial incident,” much less one that is best explained by the conditions of eighteenth-century Ulster, Ireland. The discourse surrounding the stabbing is indeed racially tinged, but that only demonstrates that the best way to turn something into a “racial incident” is to treat it as though it already was one. It’s a dangerous form of question-begging, and in any case, it ignores what is surely more pertinent information, such as Anthony’s personality and past, his upbringing and social environment. To treat all of that as mere detail cluttering our view of a supposedly essential truth about race risks abstracting away the material circumstances of any incident—a crime or anything else—involving blacks and whites. It turns everything from microaggressions to riots into scenes in a grand racial drama, in which there are clear heroes and villains.
Life is rarely that simple. Make no mistake, Karmelo Anthony is the guilty party. He alone bears responsibility for Metcalf’s death. While his sentence is long, it is not clear to me that it is too long. In the decade-and-a-half before his parole hearing, he’ll have the chance to demonstrate remorse and to reform himself. I hope to God he does, and not only for his sake. I believe that change is possible—for him, and for all of us. I believe that none of us, in our idiosyncrasies and particularities, are quite reducible to the narratives that describe our past, no matter how compelling they are. I have to believe this. To believe otherwise is to fall prey to fatalism, which virtually guarantees that what must change will not. I may not quite be “the master of my fate,” as the poem says, but neither am I its slave.
