The moral rot in black America

On the response to the Karmelo Anthony story

Booker T. Washington urged black Americans to pursue education, self-reliance, and good character. He insisted that criminality and vice were holding his people back and argued the only way forward was to build strong families and businesses.

A disturbingly large segment of black America seems to think that not letting blacks kill people is a form of oppression. This fact is repeatedly thrown in our faces every few weeks when yet another black person murders an innocent white person and then black voices flood social media to tell us it’s not his or her fault. Not even if they actually did it. And if you disagree, you’re racist. The latest example is Karmelo Anthony. The depraved, tribalistic, racist nature of the response to this story within the black community has been sickening and appalling to witness. Indeed, it recalls the Palestinian response to October 7.

If you haven’t taken the time to read about this story, allow me. This week, 19-year-old black student Karmelo Anthony was given 35 years in a Texas prison for murdering 17-year-old white student Austin Metcalf. The murder took place when heavy rains delayed a track meet in April 2025 and Anthony decided to walk into another team’s tent. He was asked to leave 15 times but refused. “Touch me and see what happens,” he said, reaching into his bag. There were young girls in the tent and Anthony was making threats and suggesting he had a weapon, so Metcalf did what any noble young man might do. He tried to push the threatening stranger out. That’s when Anthony stabbed him to death, ran away, and later told police, “I was protecting myself.” His mother later told CBS Morning, “My son didn’t mean to hurt anyone. He was defending himself.”

His family then fundraised and pocketed $630,000, used the bounty to move into a $900,000 home in a gated community where young Karmelo won’t have to worry about sociopaths like himself, took a public defender even though they can now afford Johnnie Cochran, and now that the criminal trial is over, they claim Anthony is penniless and cannot afford an attorney for the civl trial. Metcalf’s father almost immediately expressed forgiveness and tried to meet with the Anthony family. As he and his own family now grieve their incomprehensible loss, they also routinely experience death threats from people who think his dead son is to blame in all this and that his killer is somehow the victim. The Metcalf family has also suffered six swattings, which is when you make a false anonymous report to police hoping that a SWAT team breaks open your target’s door, things go wrong, and some more Metcalfs end up in the ground next to their son. Meanwhile, the Anthonys are in their new million-dollar home, paid for with blood money.

And what has been the response? One black mother responded by saying she expects her son to do the same as Anthony, adding, “Fuck around and find out.” Another black mother of five boys is going viral for desperately asking, “What do you want us to do?” As if teaching her son not to murder people is simply too much to expect. One black woman said if you touch a black person who doesn’t want to be touched, and they murder you, you got what you deserved. Another said that even if the evidence shows Anthony was not acting in self-defense, “We gonna stand by ours regardless.” Yeah, we know. As she says this, you can hear someone in the background scream, “Kill all crackers!” I encourage you to watch these videos, if only to pay attention to their diction and lucidity. These women are not intellectually disabled, insane, or on drugs. They’re simply black women who, when it comes to this topic and presumably others that politically code the same way, behave as if white lives don’t matter.

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One black man said he’s disappointed by his own people because this kind of thing should be happening every single week. Black people, he said, should go out and regularly murder “a little boy … a little girl … an old lady.” He added that he wishes he knew where Metcalf is buried because he’d like to dig him up and stab his corpse a few more times. Another black guy actually found Metcalf’s grave and filmed himself pissing on it. One black guy said it’s open season on whites this weekend. One black guy posted an AI-generated image of Metcalf in an open casket with the words “dead loser” on his chest and commented, “Fuck all white people, let’s kill America.”

These examples come from random people commenting on social media. I share them because I want to capture a slice of the general public’s response. But this is just a taste. Believe me when I tell you that I have not even shared 1% of what’s out there right now. There is an ocean of commentary like this. We don’t know what percentage of black Americans feel this way because no such survey has yet been done. It would be reckless and arguably racist to generalize in a sloppy way about the entire community. But these voices are staggeringly vast in number and not at all relegated to the barking mad or the searingly stupid. They also include the black community’s best and brightest. They include people at the heights of cultural, social, and institutional influence. I am referring to people like Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who said black women live in more “fear and agony every single day” than the Metcalfs can imagine. Except their fucking son is dead, so I have to disagree.

I am also referring to people like Twitch influencer Bruce Ray, who posted that he stands with Anthony, adding “#FREEHIM.” Or people like podcaster Larry Reid, who said all blacks should move back to Africa because the Anthony verdict proves this country doesn’t deserve them. Or business leaders and civil rights activists like Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr’s daughter, who said the verdict “requires moral honesty about who is deemed dangerous, whose pain is centered.” Here’s some honesty, Bernice. People who kill kids for touching them are deemed dangerous. People who cannot grasp this except when it happens to black kids are either racist or not especially bright. As I replied, “It is truly heartbreaking to see a young man arrested for killing while black.”

Then there’s professor W. Burlette Carter, who claims Anthony did not get a jury of his peers. She thinks a “jury of your peers” would mean, in this case, a jury of black teenagers. She also admits she didn’t even bother to read the court transcript before pontificating on the verdict. She therefore gets several basic facts about the case wrong. What’s more, she just to happens to be a graduate of Harvard Law School and is currently professor emerita at George Washington University Law, so you would think she understands how juries work or why familiarizing oneself with the facts of the case might be a useful thing to do before forming an opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I think she almost certainly does have this understanding. But I also think she’s an incredibly tribalistic person and that her racial tribalism is shutting down her ability to think straight about this matter.

Then we have Dr Stacey Patton, a black professor at Howard University, which is the most prestigious historically black college in the country and one of the most influential black institutions in the world. Patton recently wrote an open letter to Metcalf’s grieving father: “Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son Is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have Boundaries.” In it, Patton mocks Metcalf’s father because during his victim-impact statement in court, he said that he harbored no ill will toward any race, adding, “We all bleed the same color.” Amen, sir. How many of us could extend such kindness in a moment of such pain? Yet she mocked him for this because, despite his good heart, he still blamed a black youth for murdering his son because a black youth murdered his son. Metcalf addressed Anthony in court directly: “You failed your parents, you failed yourself, and you failed society. You don’t belong in this community.” He added, “You can’t even look me in the eyes right now, but you can stab my fucking son in the heart.” To which Patton responds, “And right there, in his own words, Jeff Metcalf told on himself.” She adds, “So let’s talk about Jeff Metcalf’s failure as a father.”

What could prompt such a response? Patton is eager to tell us. She doesn’t like how people picked apart the life of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old black boy who was shot by police in Cleveland in 2014 while playing with an airsoft rifle in a park. I didn’t like it either. The story was heartbreakingly difficult to read and all the prying was gross. But she also dislikes that the public did this to Trayvon Martin, which was less morally black-and-white since he got into a fight with George Zimmerman and ended up on top of him, allegedly smashing his head into the concrete, until Zimmerman killed him. She also adds to the list Michael Brown, who shortly after robbing a convenience store in Ferguson in 2014 was confronted by a cop, reached into the officer’s car, tried to grab his gun, and got himself killed. Because the public “picked through … school records … social media pics … text messages” and “scrutinized” the “size … behavior … family” of these boys, Patton explains, it therefore makes sense to shit on a grieving father. Bear in mind, this is a woman who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, authored several books, and won multiple reporting awards from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, National Association of Black Journalists, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the National Education Writers Association. Patton is a successful and highly influential person. She adds:

Quite frankly, I am glad Karmelo did not give you the courtesy of looking you in the eye. Because even there, even in that courtroom, even with a Black boy sitting before the machinery of the state, you still wanted control. You still wanted access to his body and deference. You still wanted his face, his gaze, his submission, his performance of shame.

Patton blames the father of the murder victim. But notice that she has no blame for the murderer’s parents. She even blames the father for his grief. But Patton isn’t done yet. Next she lionizes Anthony as a powerful and defiant young black man. He didn’t look away out of shame, she wants us to believe, but out of power and some kind of ancient wisdom, as if this teen stabbing is actually a sort of fable about black masculine transcendence or something. “There was power in him not looking at you,” she writes. “There was refusal in it. There was survival in it. There was an ancient knowing in it.” An ancient knowing? People like this make me want to believe that hell is a literal place.

But enough of Patton. She isn’t the point. The point is, the pattern she exemplifies demands an honest reckoning with something our public discourse works hard to avoid. Namely, black violence and the moral rot within black communities that enables and even celebrates it. This generates a toxic culture that can be dangerous or exhausting to even be around. Black folks themselves who are sick of it have come up with a term to describe this phenomenon: black fatigue. This is refreshing to see for two reasons. First, for the health of our national discourse, we need to find a path to a place where we can talk honestly about race and race relations in America — with a discerning eye, and a kind heart. The problem is, any criticism of blacks or black culture, even when warranted and fair, often gets labeled as racist. Because of this, many would rather remain silent than take the social or professional risk of saying anything. This only hurts the country, and black people in particular, I would argue. Second, it’s therefore encouraging to see blacks themselves speak up.

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But whenever the discussion does come up, the reflexive explanation for black overrepresentation in violent crime, as well as various other types of unfortunate behavior, is to cite socioeconomic factors. Yes, poverty is real, and its effects are real, but the data does not cooperate with that explanation as cleanly as some suggest. Consider that the sons of black families in the top 1% of income are convicted of crimes at roughly the same rate as the sons of white families earning $36,000 a year. A study by Freakonomics co-host Steven Levitt found that economic conditions had only small effects on crime, and mostly on property crime. A large Swedish study found that increasing people’s income did not reduce their crime rates. A University of Washington study found poverty is not the driving force behind crime so much as one’s friends or family disruption (70% of blacks are born to single mothers).

It’s simply not true that violent crime is much higher among blacks solely or even primarily because of socioeconomic factors. Prince George’s County in Maryland has the highest concentration of black wealth on the East Coast and is one of the richest majority-black counties in America. It’s been called a “bastion of black wealth.” Yet the violent crime rate in Prince George’s County is about 475 per 100,000, which is over 30% higher than the national average, while the poorest white county in America is Owsley County, Kentucky, with a violent crime rate of just 78.

There’s a problem in black culture that we must name clearly, even as we do so with precision and care. In the days after Anthony’s conviction, black voices emerged to celebrate. They mocked a father’s grief. They claimed a teenage boy deserved to die for the transgression of touching a black person. Even professors at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning lent their credibility to this evil, suggesting the father’s anguish was pathetic and contemptible. This is not what a call for justice sounds like. This is the gleeful desecration of human suffering.

Yes, we can acknowledge the real wounds in black communities, the legitimate grievances, the history of racism blacks have long suffered in this country, the litany of ways our justice system has historically failed our black brothers and sisters, all of it, everything, without having to pretend that this celebration of a child’s death flows from anything resembling moral clarity. It flows from something else entirely. It flows from a toxic culture of violence and racial narcissism in which victimhood becomes license for cruelty, and racial solidarity curdles into hate. The hard but necessary part is naming this without indicting an entire community for the sins of its worst members. But we cannot stay silent about those worst members. And their words deserve the open contempt of anyone who believes in human dignity.