Your Race Doesn’t Give You a License to Kill

T here has been a lot of insane commentary about the Karmelo Anthony case, largely emanating from people who simply cannot emotionally process or publicly admit that there might ever be a situation in which a black teenager is legitimately at fault for murdering a white person, and is justly punished for doing so. As our editorial on the case recited the evidence:

The facts of the case were not seriously disputed during the trial. On April 2, 2025, while it was raining at a high-school track meet in Frisco, Texas, 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony of Centennial High School took shelter under a team tent belonging to Memorial High School. Austin Metcalf, a 17-year-old Memorial student-athlete, approached Anthony and told him to leave on the grounds that the tent was reserved for Memorial competitors. A brief argument followed, during which Anthony told Metcalf, “Touch me and see what happens.” Despite this warning, Metcalf made contact with Anthony. Up to this point, one might take this as typical teenage boy stuff warranting a pair of visits to the principal’s office. But Anthony then produced a knife and stabbed Metcalf once in the chest. The wound penetrated Metcalf’s heart, and despite emergency efforts at the scene, Metcalf died.

One immediate lesson for the people insisting that Anthony’s conviction for murder is a grave injustice should be: Don’t overinvest your ideology in the need to make the facts of every case fit it neatly. Human nature is messier and uglier than that. Sometimes, the group you’ve identified as the good guys are in the wrong. Sometimes, even the real bad guys have a point. As I wrote of the George Floyd case:

It is always hazardous to draw sweeping conclusions about society from individual criminal cases. Every individual case involves individual facts, and those facts often turn out to be quite different from the initial media narrative. . . . Sometimes the facts are what they seem. . . . But even though experience should counsel some caution, the same people jump to the same conclusions every time. . . . Overdrawing conclusions from individual cases can mislead us about how common things are. This is a nation of 330 million people. Any event that happens, say, a dozen times a year or even a hundred times a year can be made into a national epidemic if you report each instance with wall-to-wall coverage; any event that happens tens of thousands of times a year can seem uncommon if individual incidents are thrown into the statistics pile.

The same was true of the Kyle Rittenhouse case. And if these principles hold true in general, they should above all be true if you work in one of the professions — such as law or journalism — in which paying close attention to the facts of every story is a core value.

A lot of the commentary on Anthony’s conviction has just retreated behind attacks on the composition of the jury (which was racially mixed, but included no African Americans) without regard to the clear-cut nature of the evidence. But there are worse takes. A Substack essay by Dr. Stacey Patton is just about the worst thing I have ever read about an American controversy, which is saying quite a lot.

Patton occupies the sort of position of institutional prestige and authority over young people that should bring with it an obligation of responsible adulthood and good citizenship. Per her bio, she has a Ph.D. in African-American history, which permits her to style herself “Dr.” in public as if she were a pediatric surgeon. She teaches journalism at Howard University, which means that she is helping to mold impressionable college students into people who will wield the power of one of America’s most influential professions — a profession with the capacity to ruin reputations, make private citizens famous against their will, swing elections, and incite wars and riots. Her public work has appeared in “The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC News, Al Jazeera, TheRoot.com, NewsOne, Madame Noire, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has appeared on ABC News, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and Democracy Now.”

Patton styles her essay as a fusillade against Metcalf’s grieving father, Jeff, for his victim impact statement at the trial: “Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son Is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have Boundaries.” It goes on a good deal in this vein: “Let’s talk about Jeff Metcalf’s failure as a father. . . . Let us refuse the sentimental immunity given to dead white boys and grieving white fathers. . . . You failed, Jeff.”

Giving no quarter to the grieving father of a murdered teenager is the least of the sins of this essay. Let’s not whitewash its principal sin: This is a defense of murder. Patton dresses this up rhetorically, but her argument is straightforwardly that Anthony — who brought a concealed knife to a track meet — was justified in using it on an unarmed teen, and driving it into his heart:

YOU failed to teach your boy that Black children have boundaries. YOU failed teach humility, restraint, or the sacred fact that another person’s body is not your jurisdiction. YOU failed to teach him that another child’s space is not a challenge to be conquered. . . . YOU obviously failed to teach your son that touching, confronting, crowding, testing, or policing another person can have consequences. . . .

We have to talk about Austin’s choice to approach and confront. His choice to touch. His choice to believe that another person’s space was his to control. His choice to ignore a warning. . . . Black children have good reason to be on guard around white bodies.

“Boundaries” and “consequences” are euphemisms here for knifing someone in the heart at a public event. If Anthony had punched Metcalf in the face, this would be a very different conversation. But Patton is arguing here that Anthony was entitled to use deadly force — in a situation where Metcalf was not — simply because of Anthony’s race, and Metcalf’s. This is rationalizing murder.

Patton goes on to celebrate Anthony for showing no remorse — again, because his race justifies this:

No, sir. You don’t get to stand up there in a courtroom and talk that kind of sh[**] to one of our own. You don’t get to use the language of grief dressed up in the language of racial banishment. You do not get to say “this was never about race” and then reach for one of the oldest racial scripts in the American archive: you don’t belong here. WTF! . . . Among whom, exactly?

“One of our own” is the tell that this is pure tribalism — one of our own need not apologize for brutality and totally unwarranted escalation, but Patton would never consider writing the same defense of Metcalf if the roles had been precisely reversed. (She also seems unaware that black families are routinely permitted to offer victim impact statements.) “Among whom?” Among people who don’t stab other people in the heart.

Quite frankly, I am glad Karmelo did not give you the courtesy of looking you in the eye. . . . You wanted him to lift his eyes and meet yours so you could decide what you saw there. Remorse. Defiance. Fear. Guilt. Whatever story your grief needed to tell.

But Karmelo owed you none of that. Not his eyes. Not his body. Not his obedience. Not his emotional performance. Not one more piece of himself. There was power in him not looking at you. . . . Karmelo did not surrender. He sat there and withheld the one thing you still thought you were entitled to command.

Imagine knowing the facts of this case and celebrating the fact that the killer showed no remorse, no compassion whatsoever for the family of the victim.

All of this is bad enough. But then consider again the headline: “Black Boys Have Boundaries.” Not boys, or children, or everyone — only black boys. Consider the implication: Had Metcalf had the same confrontation with a white boy, there would be no argument here that a fatal stabbing was the reasonably expected “consequences.” To put it in those terms — that it should be considered more dangerous to quarrel with black boys than with white ones, and that the law should allow more leeway to black boys who kill because this is what they do — is so starkly racist that one would expect to read it on a white nationalist chat board, not from a journalism professor at Howard University. It is not a message anyone who cares about black Americans should be promoting.