McWhorter: Why Are Blacks So Homicidal?

It must be the fault of the Scots-Irish.

From Twitter:

John McWhorter

@JohnHMcWhorter

Folks, I’d like to get my two cents in on Karmelo Anthony. This is a long one -- pretend it’s an editorial.

“He put his hands on me. I stabbed him.” Why does a boy spontaneously justify stabbing someone on so thin a pretense? And why do so many Black Americans see his 35-year prison sentence as racist?

This killing took place in Frisco, TX, a north Dallas exurb that enjoyed the highest black and Hispanic test scores of any school district in the country, as I pointed out in 2019.

I think the answer to both questions takes us to Scotland, Ireland, and northern England.

But not to Africa!

At a track meet at Kuykendall Stadium in Frisco, Texas in April of last year, 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.

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.”

Uh … I think a common legal term is “depraved indifference.”

… The question is why Anthony thought being pushed justified sinking a knife into Metcalf’s body. The answer is the culture of “disrespect” in young Black male culture, documented by many (including black sociologists). His calculus was “If he even touches me, I am disrespected, and will respond in destructive kind.”

But of course he didn’t respond in kind, he instantly escalated to a potentially lethal level.

The idea is that being dissed merits what we might phrase as cutting someone a new one.

There is no reason to suppose that this is due to Black people having some inborn propensity to violence.

Well, of course not, so therefore whatever half-baked idea the author proposes as an alternative must be true:

The Black economist Thomas Sowell has traced the “disrespect” culture to the whites from the “Celtic Fringe” – an area comprising parts of northern England, Scotland, and Ulster County in Ireland -- who migrated to the South starting in the 1700s and established plantations (or worked on them as indentured servants). Black people, often enslaved, worked alongside and around them and their American-born descendants. At this time (although certainly not now), whites from the Celtic Fringe area had the same tripwire response to being dissed – “touchy pride” -- as well as many other traits now commonly associated with “gangsta” Black culture.

In his classic study of early migrants to America “Albion’s Seed,” the historian David Hackett Fisher referred to the oppressed people of this northern borderland region, encompassing Scotland, northern England and Ulster County in Ireland, as “some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land.” “Manliness and the forceful projection of that manliness to others – an advertisement of one’s willingness to fight and even to put one’s life on the line – were at least plausible means of gaining whatever level of security was possible in a lawless region and a violent time,” Sowell notes.

OK, but as I’ve pointed out before, Sowell’s argument that African-Americans were particularly influenced by the culture of the Scots-Irish (or what David Hackett Fischer calls Borderers) is implausible because blacks and Scots-Irish didn’t associate anywhere near as much as blacks and southern English lowland Southerners did. The Scots-Irish headed for the hills when they could, in part to get away from the slave economy. Thus, West Virginia, the most Scots-Irish state, is only 3.7% black.

The whites who were the most culturally influential upon blacks were plantation owners, who were typically from southern England and were more genteel than the Scots-Irish. Hence, when Liberia was set up, African-Americans tried to reproduce the plantation culture of the lowland South, not the Scots-Irish culture of the highlands.

Hundreds of thousands of people from this region migrated to America starting in the early 1700s, eventually migrating to the South. Many established plantations and bought enslaved Black people to work on them. Referring often to the scholarly and sympathetic study of this “cracker” culture in America by the historian Grady McWhiney, Sowell notes that they manifested “a touchiness about anything that might be even remotely construed as a personal slight, much less an insult, combined with a willingness to erupt into violence over it.”

The step is short between that and “He put his hands on me. I stabbed him.” It is hard not to see the parallel between the “cracker” culture and the sociologist Elijah Anderson’s study of late twentieth century Black culture of “the streets,” where “respect is viewed as almost an external entity that is hard-won but easily lost, and so must constantly be guarded. (...) Many of the forms that dissing can take might seem petty to middle-class people (maintaining eye contact for too long, for example), but to those invested in the street code, these actions become serious indications of the other person’s intentions. Consequently, such people become very sensitive to advances and slights, which could well serve as warnings of imminent physical confrontation.”

But the big difference in contemporary African-American culture is the enormous tendency toward …

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