John McWhorter on Karmelo Anthony
Commenter “Kate” linked to this thread on “X” by John McWhorter, about Karmelo Anthony and his motives for stabbing Austin Metcalf. I had read the thread last night; it’s long, so I’m just giving the link here and discussing some excerpts.
McWhorter made this statement that Kate posted in her comment:
Young Black men need to be told not to fall for the idea that being dissed justifies physical violence.
Well, yes, as far as it goes. But “physical violence” covers quite a range. A fistfight – are those out of style? – used to be the way it was commonly done. A stab through the heart was not the norm, nor is it today. After all, it’s not as though most young black men are murdering people, although the murder rate is certainly higher in that population. Most young black men manage to learn that being dissed doesn’t merit stabbing anyone in the heart.
Plus, who was dissing (disrespecting) whom? McWhorter doesn’t highlight the fact that it was Anthony who was disrespecting the other team. Although McWhorter describes it he doesn’t characterize it that way. It was Anthony who crossed a boundary by coming to the other team’s tent, and who would not leave when asked many times. He defiantly stayed and even insulted (dissed) people there.
McWhorter writes about it this way:
Anthony sat down under a team’s tent. Anthony was neither on the team nor a student at its school, and an unwritten but widely known rule is that only team members are permitted under a team tent. Multiple student witnesses – and not just “whitenesses,” as several were Black — testified about what happened next. Anthony was told several times to leave the tent but refused, including a profane epithet, culminating in warning “Touch me and see what happens.” Team member Austin Metcalf shoved Anthony, who pulled a knife out of his bag, stabbed him in the chest, threw the knife into the stands and ran away. Caught by the police, he immediately admitted to the stabbing, reportedly saying “He put his hands on me. I stabbed him.” Metcalf died in his twin brother’s arms.
Anthony was the provocateur. He also came prepared with a knife, which was prohibited by the schools involved. Since he never took the stand, we’ve never heard his excuse for having a knife there, nor have I heard anyone else explain it. The venue was not the inner city, either; it was a relatively prosperous and peaceful area of Texas with a lower-than-average crime rate.
McWhorter goes on:
There is no reason to think Anthony was trying to kill Metcalf. He was trying to hurt him severely, putting him in the hospital, for shoving him, as he indicated in at first saying “He’s not gonna die.”
What on earth? That’s absurd, and McWhorter is dreaming there. No one stabs someone in the chest, with force, without trying to kill them. And “hurting someone severely” always carries the risk of death anyway. Anthony was not a child, nor was he dumb or insane. Perhaps he lived in a video-game or cartoon world, in which people stab people in the chest and the victims spring up again perfectly fine. But I very much doubt it. And “he’s not gonna die” is probably just a hope at that point, since Anthony realized he himself would be in big big trouble if Metcalf died.
McWhorter adds this:
Also, claims such as prosecutor Bill Wirskye’s that Anthony meant “Touch me and see what happens” as a provocation are based on a misreading of Black English. “Touch me and see what happens” is not a command to touch. It means “If you touch me, you will find out.”
McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia, and one of his specialties is black English. I’ve seen him in many podcasts and sometimes agree with him and sometimes disagree, but here he’s not making any sort of sense that I can see. The two statements – “Touch me and see what happens” and “If you touch me, you will find out” – seem very much the same and both are indeed provocations or dares.
McWhorter is by no means the worst commentator on Karmelo Anthony’s crime, but I find him quite annoying because he knows better.
[NOTE: Much of McWhorter’s “X” essay has to do with explaining Anthony’s behavior in terms of Sowell’s book in which he traces some of the violence in black culture back to the influence of certain strains in the southern whites among whom black people lived early on in the US. That entire topic interests me little at this point, because the historical roots no longer matter; it’s the current behavior that matters all these centuries later.]
I do have some doubt as to whether Anthony had formed an intent to kill. Younger people are notoriously able to shrug off reality. They think they’re immortal.
Anthony no doubt wanted some trouble. And he may have been thinking about how he would make someone very sorry that they had messed with him; that of course they would “deserve it” if they touched him. But I think there’s a good chance that he didn’t envision someone dying right in front of him as what they would “deserve.”
You have to see the whole trial and hear from every witness to make the best judgement.
RigelDog:
To not know that plunging a knife deep into the center of a person’s chest with enough force to break the sternum and penetrate the heart is likely to kill them is to be divorced from reality in a way that is profound. Most people over 5 years old would know that would have a good chance of being a death blow.
Anthony was a good student and was not insane. He knew or absolutely should have known..
I wonder who was paying for that tent at the track meet, and who set it up. I wonder if the tent was rented or owned by the team, for the athletes representing the school at the event.
Mostly, I wonder why McWhorter characterizes this as some kind of ‘unwritten rule’, as if the protocols are an undefined mystery that relies on shared habit. I’m pretty sure sporting events that involve teams from different towns meeting up to compete have plenty of written rules, prepared by their Division, including those governing team spaces.
I knew I saw something similar to this a little while ago. In fact, it was in a comment at today’s Open Thread, posted by Snow on Pine. It’s a different sort of analysis, better overall, I think.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/06/two_americas_black_rednecks_and_karmelo_anthony_and_civilization.html
I went to mixed race junior high and high schools in the 60s. Black students, girls as well as boys, were manifestly more disruptive and violent, and by several orders of magnitude, than the white students, My high school was located smack in the middle of an inner city neighborhood and walking home or waiting at the bus stop could be quite an adventure, so to speak — especially after football practice, when it was dark out. In my high school there were numerous, and I mean numerous, black kids like Karmelo Anthony. Thugs and bullies to the core, almost psychotically violent. Two kids were knifed to death by black kids during my time at the school and others were severely injured by stabbing or being beaten to pulp, Walking in the halls, going to your next class, could be a very tense undertaking. You had to be constantly on yellow alert, DEFCON 3, with your head on a swivel. You had to be careful not to look directly at the bad black kids because that might well trigger a psychotically violent physical outburst from them. They were real pieces of shit and I made a point of standing my ground against them and I was mostly successful in doing so because I had the size and weight and reputation sufficient for dealing with the situation. Most other kids who found themselves on the receiving end of an “outburst” were not so capable and suffered accordingly. And to be sure I had my problematic experiences, e.g. I was mugged literally at knifepoint one night after school when I was off school grounds.
The Jewish kids walking though the black neighborhood to their homes in Skokie really got the treatment. Sometimes it seemed they were being forced to run a gauntlet. In general it seemed that the black hated the Jewish kids more than most other white kids, the more because the Jewish kids were adverse to defending themselves. Their passivity seemed increase the level of violence in the perpetrators.
“Touch me and you’ll find out,” or “what are YOU looking at?”, yeah I know all about that. And that was 60 years ago.
Apologies for the typos in the preceding. Typing too fast, I suppose; ran out of editing time. So, a correction:
“Sometimes it was as if those Jewish kids were being forced to run a gauntlet. In general it seemed that the black kids hated the Jewish kids more than the other white kids, the more because the Jewish kids were adverse to defending themselves. Their passivity seemed to increase the level of violence in the perpetrators.”
An addendum: I saw a black kid, a known bad actor, slash the face of a white kid with a straight razor. Happened at a mix-race dance. There was a of blood. The white kid to this day has a scar running from his forehead down one cheek to his jaw. The black kid wasn’t charged for the assault. There were no consequences of him.
The Polish kids, in the Polish neighborhood — which of course bordered the black neighborhood — were not as a general rule hassled by the blacks. Those Polish kids were tough and big. They didn’t take shit from anyone.
Situations like that which IrishOtter describe persist because authorities allow it. Such schools should be patrolled by armed sheriff’s deputies and students like those he describes removed from the premises. If they’re under 14, place them in day detention centers run by the sheriff’s department where they’re kept under lock and key most of the day and attempts are made at small group instruction. If they’re over 14, tell them they can get lost. They can learn from a hard assed employer willing to take a chance on them or they can be dealt with by the criminal justice system.
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Ideally, core city school systems would be replaced with voucher distribution programs and every private school would have plenary discretion over whom it admits and whom it retains.
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NB, Anthony attended a different high school in Collin County. The county is about 10.5% black. He’s not an example of slum culture. Suggest he’s an example of adolescent honor culture exacerbated by the sort of narcissism (largely white) professional managerial elements have been promoting among blacks. Added to which, of course, his own character and personality.
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The utterances of his family members during this whole ordeal suggest they’re a rancid bunch.
In the past , pre COVID – I have done quiet a bit of volunteer work thru the church with kids. One was at a poor apartment complex where the church held Bible Studies and snack time for the kids. The other – for several years on my part – was at a group foster home for boys. Similar thing – Bible study and snacks plus yearly off campus Christmas Parties for the kids. You had well behaved and not so well behaved black and white kids. But overall, the blacks were more disruptive and often required a strong adult presence – in the form of a black staff member at the group home.
Our cultures are not the same overall.
IrishOtter:
That sounds like a terrible experience.
I went to a NY public high school, some years earlier of course, about 8% black or something like that. Plenty of kids, both black and white, were poor. Most of the rest were working class. There were some fistfights, but nothing worse than that. Fortunately.
So I wonder what made the difference between your school and mine.
We had ONE uniformed cop in my HS and he was old and fat and ineffective. He was a joke to the students. During my time in HS I somehow contrived to find myself in the middle of THREE black race riots. One took place at the end of a football game in which I was playing. The black kids from my HS ran onto the field when time ran out to confront the black kids from the opposing school, who were running to onto the field for the same purpose. A violent swirling melee ensued on the field and it was some wild shit. My teammates and the players on the opposing team banded together and we marched of the field in column of twos with helmets and pads on like Greek hoplites withdrawing from a battlefield. It was crazy, it was surreal. The Cook County Sheriff’s riot police were in attendance, keeping out of sight in two panel trucks parked next to the field, having been forewarned that there would be trouble between the black kids of the two schools. The moment the fighting got underway the back doors of the trucks flew open and the riot police burst forth from the trucks and charged into the crowd. They were wielding three-foot nightsticks, or clubs, or whatever you want to call them, and they swung them with maximum force at the rioting kids. I saw one policeman break his club on the head of one kid, he hit him so hard with it.
True story, guys.
I live in in an outlaying suburb of San Antonio – a city which is at least half Hispanic, with a small admixture of blacks … a lot of whom are retired military. I served alongside a number of servicemen and women who – as we used to jest – had the year-round permanent dark tan. Not a few of them had enlisted just to escape from inner-city-urban hell-holes and were not shy about saying so to me. Ambitious, striving, patriotic, good and responsible comrades and neighbors…
That said – the uber-violent, combative black youth and the nasty, resentful, fight-picking thug subculture noted by IrishOtter and exemplified by violent adolescents like Karmelo Anthony and every news story one reads about a violent brawl in a fast-food place, a concert venue or a street takeover … is a horrendous problem. Honestly, the rest of us are tired of dealing with it – it’s a problem for the larger black community to fix if they want to do so, and if it can even be done. The rest of us just want as little to do with the urban black culture as we can manage. Distant, polite, disengaged – walk away.
I have lost count of the occasions when I have gone to a happily uneventful, community street festival, a book event, a public gathering of some kind, had a wonderful time…and on looking around, saw that there were no or very few black people there.
It’s sad, knowing this. But the problem of teens like Karmelo is one that only the larger black community can fix. The rest of us are better off keeping a distance from those individuals from it which we don’t personally know.
John McWhorter has become a disappointing, rather dishonorable figure in my view. I don’t think he had to choose this path.
neo: Nietszche’s famous quote comes to mind when I think about, and try to make sense of, those times. I don’t know if they made me stronger — maybe, to some extent, but sure wasn’t there damage too? Certainly made me more cautious and alert, and in any public gathering no matter the racial composition.
Also when I knew I was going to be in dodgy neighborhoods — say, on Chicago’s South Side, when I worked at the University of Chicago — I sometimes went armed.
Still do.
Now I’m retired, living across the border in the very sane and tranquil state of Indiana, where the taxes are low, governance is honest, and the populace is mostly white. We do have a smattering of Indians and Koreans, and they blend right in, they’ve assimilated. No blacks, though. They’re all up the road a piece in Gary, and NO one goes there.
I have no firm idea, nor am I eager to venture any sort of explanation, concerning what made our schools different.
BTW, aren’t we more or less the same age? I’m talking about a period spanning 1962-1968.
I did think the Selwyn Duke essay was more clear about what the problems are. McWhorter was trying to explain but making feeble excuses as well. What Duke pointed out was that the black redneck culture has been expanded and made more violent by the “entertainment” media and social media. Redneck culture, black or white, would have resulted in a lot of fistfights, not casual stabbings and shootings. The gang violence may have a more Hatfield vs. McCoy flavor, when directed at the opposing gang. Answering a modest push, especially when he was the one who instigated the situation, with a knife to the heart is inexcusable.
I wonder if lower levels of impulse control are something that could be independent of IQ. I look back sometimes at my own youth and think that might be true.
neo @ 7:08,
“I wonder what made the difference between your school and mine.”
Time and the cultural changes wrought by the Great Society programs. One of the foundational premises of The Civil Rights movement was that two wrongs can make a right. Specifically, racism against Whites in general, Jews in particular and Asians ‘for good measure’ is deserved and justified as a form of reparations… i.e. ‘payback’. Ancestral ‘Sins’ that can only be ‘atoned’ for by cultural, national and racial suicide… has long been the hardcore left’s ‘solution’ to “white guilt”. It’s all of a piece.
McWhorter – those “crackers” made him do it. No personal agency.
I don’t find McWhorter worth taking seriously any more, since he said — a week or two before the Butler assassination attempt — that he wished someone would kill Trump.
Yes, he supposedly apologized — that is, he acknowledged that he shouldn’t have said it in public — but he also said he did, in some part of himself, still believe it. So the “apology” is worthless.
I used to enjoy his witty, creative takes on linguistics. But after that, I’ll never take him seriously again. And this half-baked effort to find a way to blame white people for murderous brainless thugs like Karmelo Anthony is not going to change my mind.
Aggie: “I wonder who was paying for that tent at the track meet, and who set it up. I wonder if the tent was rented or owned by the team, for the athletes representing the school at the event.”
My understanding of it (and from looking at videos) is that the tents (really I would call them canopies as they usually do NOT have sides, only a roof) are provided by the schools participating in the event. Each school has/owns their own tent that they bring with them; some tents are bigger than others. Some teams/schools might not even have a tent.
When I was in high school decades ago, our cross-country team went to several events where other teams brought their own tents (some with their team logo/mascot printed on it). These tents were for shade as well as storing coolers and other equipment under. Our team did NOT have a tent; but we knew that you just do not go under another teams tent – that would like like walking into the opposing teams locker room. You just do NOT do that. I see no reason to believe that Karmelo Anthony did not know that either.
I’m with Neo on this – I find McWhorter’s comments annoying because reading his education background he most certainly should know better than to make some of these downright stupid ignorant comments.
University of Michigan did a study some years back on the culture thing. Had students sign up for an experient, hassle them, insult, shove. Then do blood studies. Guys from the South spiked adrenalin and testosterone higher than guys from the north and the spikes lasted longer.
Could refer to Fischer’s “Albion’s Seed” where the crackers came from disorderly areas; northern England, Ulster, Scotland. Honor culture and shepherd culture (complicated).
My kids went to a better-than-average school system outside of Flint, MI. Few blacks and they from middle class families. No problems. Then a “project” was built in the town and things changed. The school bus covering that project needed a cop on board. One teacher my wife knew (she’s retired from the system) said there were fifteen fights by the Christmas break, all by kids from the project. The middle-class blacks and the project kids did not get along.
I don’t see McWhorter, or Sowell, for that matter, making the case that blacks have no agency which can overcome the cracker culture Sowell refers to in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”. But agency requires a desire to change and an idea that changing is a good thing compared to the present.
But the problem of teens like Karmelo is one that only the larger black community can fix.
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Again, Anthony is a suburban kid with an episodically bad attitude. The ameliorative measure in his case is incapacitation which functions as an example to others. The homicide rate in Collin County, Tx is 5 per 100,000. That’s high for a complex of suburbs and there’s room for improvement. Please note, though, that the rate in a typical slum neighborhood in this country is more along the lines of 25 per 100,000.
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As for slum disorder, it’s an issue, not a problem. There is no discrete ‘fix’. There are measures you can take to improve matters. The measures have a number of moving parts, are expensive, but are (IMO) worthwhile. The sustained institution building necessary to implement them has as an antecedent an understanding of human behavior, social relations and valued things which is incompatible with the worldview of the social segments for whom the Democratic Party is an electoral vehicle.
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An ordinary person in this country draws status distinctions: between citizens and foreigners, between adults and youth, between men and women, between functional people and the infirm and incompetent. They have concentric loyalties. They believe in personal agency and assess people according to the fruits of that agency – skills, manners, attitudes, character. The professional-managerial type is (with some exceptions) not like that and they promote from their positions narcissism and megalomania among slum rabble (as well as people who are not rabble but have features in common with them). What they do is injurious to ordinary people.
OM at 8:45pm has it exactly right. I read the McWhorter piece before neo had posted about it and initially thought “that makes sense”. Then on further reflection I realized what McWhorter was really doing was absolving black culture of any culpability in this sort of action (to include the defenders of Anthony) and laying blame for those current behaviors at the feet of the white Europeans of centuries ago. Utter BS.
Instead of pouring money from a variety of sources into local monopolies and hoping for good results, the ideal system would be funded by a simple Educational Endowment bestowed on each individual student.
Provision of educational services should look like what the demonopolized telecommunications industry has become, large intensively competitive high tech providers. These providers would be competing to offer educational services that worked, and that parents and students wanted
This ideal system would protect its users from poor teaching performance. If a student failed to exhibit minimum educational achievement, payment would not be made. Instead, it would accrue in the student account, providing twice the amount the next year to the provider who could catch the student up.
Seriously underperforming students would accrue several years of catch-up funding, providing extra incentive for the type of personalized attention that would benefit them. Military veteran servicemen and women teaching small groups of students, developing personal relationships, can change lost kids into enthusiastic young adults.
The funds would remain in the student account indefinitely, allowing dropouts to get an education as age and experience created the desire. The endowment would also provide funding for prison schooling, attracting providers who would adapt to the requirements.
Home schoolers whose students exhibited the required achievement would be paid.
Special needs students would still receive extra funding but at an individual level.
Opening educational services to the free market would allow for practical job-related instruction, and college level courses, to be included as providers fought for market share.
Competition among educational providers would make full use of technology, would provide useful training for actual jobs, and would deliver far more education for the same money. Gamification would keep students involved in ways that existing K-12 material can’t touch. The use of AI would allow the tracking of each bit of knowledge and understanding to be monitored at the individual student level and presented in various ways until understood.
The late 1970’s in the United States was a time of surprising deregulation. It was the beginning of the end for the telephone monopolies. Those inside the regulated industries, and the regulatory agencies, warned of doom and disaster if competition were allowed. The doomsayers were wrong. The free market provided solutions that were impossible to forecast. Competition and the profit motive brought out the best that humans can create.
Communications solutions today are employing far more people than the old phone monopolies, and are delivering services never dreamed of in that era. The forecasts of disastrous unemployment and system collapse if the phone monopolies were opened to competition were totally and completely wrong.
K-12 is the phone monopoly of our time.
I suggest that those interested should check out the YouTube offerings of attorney Andrew Branca regarding self-defense. He has several up in response to the Karmelo Anthony case. Self-defense fails spectacularly when the “proportionality” and “innocence” elements are applied.
McWhorter is a Columbia prof “specializing in Black English”, and there is the problem or problems. Why is a costly Ivy League university teaching black English to its students? Why dignify the disuniting black English by teaching it? So it can be translated into ordinary English?
We have learned that Columbia is a university in name only, from its anti-semitic and pro-Palestinian stance.To do this McWhorter stuff with Federal moneys makes us taxpayers involuntary accomplices in outrageous and immoral behavior.
I think there is probably some truth in Sowell’s view that blacks were copying “rednecks,” who as someone noted above originated in the very violent English-Scottish border culture, as described in Albion’s Seed.
However! I grew up in rural Alabama in the ’50s and early ’60s and through the ninth grade went to an all-white school that was at least 50% redneck, by any reasonable criterion (people in the South know what it means). That school had *no* serious violence, nothing beyond trivial fist-fights. (It was also, I can see now, a pretty decent school for its time and place.) I’m sure the fact that most of the families knew each other, at least casually, had an effect.
After ninth grade I went to a school in a small town (15,000 or so population) and the same was true there, though the redneck segment was more like 20%.
Some eight or ten years later that school was integrated, and someone I knew who was a student there was “cut”–slashed with a knife–by a black kid. Not an extremely serious injury, fortunately. But still: Sowell’s thesis is not wrong but less than adequate as an explanation. Not that I have read the book–I’m only going on what people have said about it.
McWhorter is a Columbia prof “specializing in Black English”, and there is the problem or problems. Why is a costly Ivy League university teaching black English to its students?
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His discipline is linguistics. He’s not teaching a language, but studying how it is ordered.
@Mrs Whatsit: I don’t find McWhorter worth taking seriously any more, since he said — a week or two before the Butler assassination attempt — that he wished someone would kill Trump.
Yes, that was the end of my respect for McWhorter too.
–The Glenn Show, “John McWhorter – June 2024 Q&A”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPKxLaR3-1A&t=1069s
Yes, his apology that he shouldn’t have said so publicly wasn’t an apology.
I liked McWhorter’s “Losing The Race”. I don’t know if it deliberately connected withOgbu’s wo rk in Shaker Heights schools, but some of the conclusions matched.
And, for whatever reason, he comes alongside, so to speak, Sowell’s aphorism that cultures vary and differences have consequences.
Not getting him where he wants to go with the Left, I guess.
McWhorter’s supposed summary of what Sowell was saying seemed to me to be off.
McWhorter spoke as if the blacks in the south came into contact with the Scots-Irish honor culture _through the slave-owners_ . I think it was rather the poorer, lower-“class” Scots-Irish who didn’t have the wealth to own slaves but who populated parts of the south, with whom the blacks came into contact and could have been exposed to this culture.
In any case, discovering that a cultural practice in the present may derive from something we can point to in the past is hardly _exculpatory_ for Karmelo Anthony and others who behave like him. But it seemed, from McWhorter’s piece, that that was his intent. Another strike against McWhorter (in my opinion).
Maybe this is coming 180 degrees. From taking a knee to honor George Floyd 6 years ago to more and more people forcefully criticizing the obvious differences among the races. For instance several days ago Adam Carolla vigorously disputed the assertions made by people like McWorter, saying “there’s a culture problem and they’re going to have to fix it,” He specifically mentioned the out-of-wedlock birthrate.
Something I’ve noticed through the years: the grifters such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton offer many solutions almost exclusively dealing with white people doing this or that wrong but when it came to fatherless families these same people would hammer black people harshly, something like the force of a tiny falling feather. (sarc)
Maybe the times they are a changin’. The influx of Asians and Hispanics and their comparative behavior and success have put the race hustlers in an extremely difficult spot. After all, if white people are the evil, incorrigible racists as asserted then how do you explain the success of the aforementioned minorities? The fault dear Brutus……
Slaves had plenty of contact with their owners. Honor culture in the South: such as the duels. Such as Senator Brooks of Mass being beaten within an inch of his life in the Senate Chambers for insulting a relative of a South Carolina congressman.
Overseers: while lower class than the owners, they were enforcing the rules that the owners laid down.
Slaves in the South had plenty of exposure to honor culture, from the upper classes on down.
Richard Aubrey
While black parents and the school board invited Ogbu to research why black students’ achievement in Shaker Heights lagged behind white students, they didn’t like his conclusions and recommendations. (Attitudes of black parents and students…) Which meant that Ogbu’s recommendations were not followed.
Several decades later, academic articles and news reports found out that the black-white achievement gap in Shaker Heights schools had not changed. As Ogbu’s recommendations were not followed, Ogbu can’t be blamed.
And yes, McWhorter’s and Ogbu’s conclusions were fairly similar.
— Kate
This^^.
For decades now, ever since the Great Society, the government (both Federal and State) and elite class have been busily feeding the worst elements of poor, and especially black, culture. (Possibly) well-intended welfare programs worked to shatter family structures, leaving young men with few or no decent adult male role models, and female-led families having difficulty enforcing authority on young men. Media repeatedly told young black men that ‘it’s whitey’s fault’, always. After a while, this sort of thing accumulates.
Which is not to excuse Karmelo Anthony’s choices. Only to recognize some of what might have fed into them.
I remember, many years ago, listening to Limbaugh one day when he commented that the Great Society might have had good intentions, but had devastated the black family.
An old black woman called in later in the show to dispute that. Not that the damage had happened, if anything she argued that Limbaugh was understating it. She argued that it was not good-intentioned, but rather political self-interest and malice on the part of elite liberals that drove it, and she made some good arguments.
Couple of things:
From IrishOtter49 @:6:28PM
Black students, girls as well as boys, were manifestly more disruptive and violent, and by several orders of magnitude, than the white students,
From CICERO @ 12:25 PM:
McWhorter is a Columbia prof “specializing in Black English”, and there is the problem or problems. Why is a costly Ivy League university teaching black English to its students? Why dignify the disuniting black English by teaching it?
McWhorter, it seems, takes the position that excessive violence is not necessarily a “black problem” but is ingrained in certain sections of human culture, especially the Scots-Irish branch.
I get that; I live at the southern tail of the Applachian prong, and don’t have to go too far into it to see the divisions; there are places where a 12th generation family is still referred to as “the new people.” I have roots in Tidewater which isn’t too dissimilar; we’ve been here since before the Pilgrims and while, today, few there know me, but if I identify myself as “so-and-so’s grandson” they know the family name, and acknowledge it.
There are similar familial structures across, not just America, but the world; few seem to propagate the level of casual, and often immediate, violence we see from American urban blacks.
I’m wondering why, first, that blacks have refused assimilation to America and American culture so strongly, and second, why the larger culture has not just tolerated, but accepted, it and often encouraged it.
Their history, and heritage, in America was forced labor; as slaves they had no choice about being here, and their lives were the result of that for several generations. It began to turn around in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation, the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, but was still largely in stasis until the late 1940s when the federal government started bringing its power to bear: President Truman desegregated the U.S.military in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled on Brown vs Board of Education in 1954 and Eisenhower sent federal troops to Arkansas in 1957 to enforce the ruling. In 1964 the federal civil rights act was passed.
Beleagured groups tend to form, and retain, their own associations as a measure of self protection and advancement; Jews have done it worldwide, Christians do it in the Middle East, Asians do it in every U.S. metropolis, and it’s not limited to racial or religious identities; like attracts like and unity brings not only a degree of social comfort and, potentially, security, it offers exchange of ideas and experiences and reinforces those associations.
Transformation of a sequestered segment of society into full membership status does not occur instantly, nor can it be forced; it’s a gradual process. Not all that long ago many people smoked, and smoking was accepted everywhere; now, not only are there restrictions against it in many places and organizations, it’s dropped quite significantly in social acceptance. A gradual process.
Smoking becoming less than acceptable occurred over about 25 years or so; we’ve had much longer to fully incorporate former slave society into Greater America; it has not happened, at least not to the degree that would connote full, or nearly complete, assimilation, and it looks like a lot of that is the result of blacks insisting on remaining separate.
People have come here from all over the world, admittedly, voluntarily and not by force; there are neighborhoods in most cities bearing those imprints, and businesses that favor, and quite visibly promote, the associations. None that I’m aware of are so clannish as to deliberately seek exclusion from the greater whole as black culture (excepting, perhaps, the recent influx of Muslims). Pick any immigrant group, and usually by the third generation “Americanization” of families is very well estabished; “old country” traditions and values are not discarded but honored, and temper the assimilation into American culture, becoming fully American while respecting their heritage.
That does not seem to have happened with blacks, and while it’s understandable that they may have a “burr under their saddle” over the issue of slavery and their manner of coming to America – slavery is undeniably wrong, in any type or manner, shape, manifestation or location, and should never have been allowed in a country whose founding principles are freedom and liberty, but it did, and we cannot change the unfortunate past – but blacks serve no benefit to themselves by disdaining full incorporation into American society and culture, nor does that larger culture glory itself by accepting, and offering encouragement, toward the lack of assimilation that separation delivers.
That was a very well-wrought comment.
Now do Caribbean Black immigrants to the US.
Thanks
You’re too kind. McWhorter knows the black super-grievance is not sustainable, but he would rather chew his own leg off than tell his fellow blacks that, because he would instantly be targeted by a significant minority of black Americans (10-20%?) who sold everything else they have to buy into the super-grievance culture.
And the intersectional Marxist “community leaders” count on that… and McWhorter knows that, too.