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Karmelo Anthony was found guilty of murder.
And even though the “only good cracker is a dead cracker” chorus immediately cast the case as just another example of white unfair “white” jurisprudence putting down the black man, it was not because Anthony is a black teenager and four hundred years ago black Africans were enslaved and shipped to the Western Hemisphere as chattel to satisfy a rapidly growing need for labor.
Anthony was found guilty because he was guilty. He murdered another 17-year-old student, Austin Metcalf, who was white.
Anthony’s case was an overt example of trying to defend the indefensible.
Based on accounts I read overnight, his defense did more to confirm his guilt than exonerate him, appearing to a great extent to corroborate the prosecution’s positions.
I have followed with a high degree of interest my friend, Jefferson Knight, and his analysis of law versus what he calls “folklore law”, the process wrapped around an invented metanarrative that, in the Anthony case, meant that the white kid was an oppressor, little different than a slave master, and the black kid was just seeking to escape the oppression of a white society and therefore justified in his actions.
Thomas Sowell, one of the most under appreciated public intellectuals of our times, once noted that blacks were not forced into slavery because they were black, they were made slaves because they were available.
[** Much the same as it glaringly obvious and tragic in the 21st century! In how Black Americans avail themselves to a Master that is in every way, the Democrat Party of U.S. politics, Divide and the quasi ownership of human life. At the point of conception. Or its ending, before it has ever been given the choice of option to breathe on its own!]
There is considerable evidence supporting Thomas Sowell’s observation. Slavery existed throughout human history long before modern concepts of race emerged. Romans enslaved Europeans, Arabs enslaved Europeans and Africans, and African kingdoms enslaved rival tribes.
In most cases, the determining factors were military defeat, vulnerability, geography, or economic opportunity rather than skin color. The Atlantic slave trade developed in part because existing African slave-trading networks could supply large numbers of laborers to meet the demands of plantation economies in the Americas.
That said, European societies generally viewed sub-Saharan African cultures as less technologically and organizationally advanced than their own. This perception was not based on skin color alone but on differences in political institutions, military technology, literacy, industrial development, and economic organization.
Throughout history, civilizations have often equated cultural differences with civilizational superiority, whether Greeks describing outsiders as “barbarians” or other societies drawing distinctions between the civilized and the uncivilized. Such attitudes can easily evolve into viewing other peoples as less fully human.
The crucial distinction is that racial inferiority was not necessarily the original cause of African slavery, but it became an increasingly important justification for it.
As the plantation economies of the New World grew dependent on African labor, a moral and political problem emerged: how do you defend the permanent enslavement of millions of people and their descendants?
One answer was the development of racial theories that portrayed Africans as naturally suited for servitude or inherently inferior. Those ideas helped reconcile the contradiction between Western ideals of liberty and the reality of slavery.
Africans entered the Atlantic slave system largely because they were available through existing trade networks because the economics of the era demanded a large labor force. As the institution of slavery continued, economic interests and racial theories reinforced one another, transforming slavery from a common human institution into a distinctly race-based system.
Race was less the original cause of slavery than the rationale developed to sustain it, but that racialization has, over centuries, led to a tension between two competing concepts of equality that have been battling for dominance in American life for decades.
This is where Knight’s concept of “folklore law” enters the picture. Globally, there is no shortage of people who intentionally cast Western culture and its morality as a predominant evil and the cause of the world’s problems—but that requires ignoring the bulk of human history and how unequal treatment of each other was based on real and imagined differences.
Race is just a useful sociopolitical tool right now.
It seems evident that if Karmelo Anthony is a victim, he was not a victim of white racism but of black racism which promotes a narrative that blacks must never allow a white person to challenge them. He was also the victim of a set of terrible parents and a culture that taught it was acceptable to take a deadly weapon to a high school track meet and then use that weapon to stab another teenager to settle a meaningless high school dispute.
In the scope of this specific event, there is no larger context here other than a murder—but there surely is one in the aftermath and it has to do with a collision between two principles: individual equality and group equity.
One treats the individual as the fundamental unit of society; the other views individuals through the lens of group membership and historical disparities.
Supporters of the latter argue that ignoring group differences perpetuates inequality. Critics argue that assigning benefits, burdens, or moral standing based on identity undermines equality before the law and revives the very distinctions the civil rights movement sought to eliminate.
The traditional American understanding of equality, rooted in the Declaration of Independence and reflected in the Constitution, holds that individuals possess equal moral worth and equal standing before the law.
Under that framework, race, class, religion, and ancestry are irrelevant to justice. People are judged by their actions and character, not by the groups to which they belong.
Over the past several decades, a competing view has gained influence. Rather than focusing primarily on equal treatment, it seeks more equal outcomes among groups.
Under this approach, race, ethnicity, sex, and class become relevant considerations in public policy, education, employment, and even the interpretation of social conflicts.
The question is not whether Americans still believe that all men are created equal, the question is what that phrase means.
Does equality require treating people equally regardless of identity, or does it require treating people differently in a futile attempt to produce more equal outcomes?
The former is the basis for what is perhaps the most equal society and culture in history, the irony of the second is that it produces inequality through a series of cascading intended and unintended consequences, but which is chosen may well decide our fate as a nation.
Michael Smith
