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 know I’m going be in dodgy neighborhoods — say, on Chicago’s South Side, when I worked at the University of Chicago — I sometimes go armed.
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.