In North Texas last week, all eyes were on a trial in Frisco, a northern Dallas suburb. The person on trial was Karmelo Anthony, a 19-year-old accused — and now convicted — of stabbing to death 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a track meet last year.
Anthony is Black. Metcalf was white. Frisco is in Collin County, which has been a hotbed of racist and Islamophobic hatred — some of it spurred on by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who now is the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate.
Mark Wingfield
An already tense racial case has been further inflamed this week by intemperate — that’s an understatement — comments made on video by Jeff Metcalf, father of the slain teenager.
The comments of the elder Metcalf are so outrageous as to remind listeners of President Donald Trump. Metcalf’s attitudes, name-calling and twisting of facts are exact mirrors of what the world has learned to emulate from Trump.
In the video, Metcalf calls Anthony the “watermelon felon,” calls his parents lazy and irresponsible, says most Black people can’t keep jobs and live messed-up lives and gives an outlandish answer for why there were no Black jurors selected.
To be clear: These videos contain the most vile racist language I’ve heard in a long time. And all the while the grieving father is quoting Scripture and claiming he has forgiven Anthony for killing his son.
All this matters more than you might imagine because part of Anthony’s defense was that the younger Metcalf and his white teammates were berating Anthony as he took shelter from a rainstorm under their canopy.
“These videos contain the most vile racist language I’ve heard in a long time.”
Prosecutors argued Anthony intentionally provoked the encounter and was the aggressor. Witnesses testified that after being told to leave the tent, Anthony reached into his bag and said, “Touch me and see what happens.”
Prosecutors said Metcalf shoving Anthony was not justification for Anthony to stab him in response. Instead, they called Anthony’s action a “sneak attack,”
Anthony did not take the stand in his defense. His attorneys argued that Anthony acted in a split-second act of self-defense out of fear. They said Metcalf and his teammates physically confronted Anthony and made the first physical contact by grabbing and shoving him. They portrayed Anthony as a student trapped in a stressful, chaotic moment who reacted to being physically pushed by larger students.
The essentially all-white jury didn’t buy any of this, however. They sentenced Anthony to 35 years in prison.
Background: During voir dire, the state struck down the last three Black potential jurors because they were educators. Out of an original pool of 600 potential jurors, the state managed to whittle down the list to be overwhelmingly white, with two or maybe three Asian or Hispanic women among the 12 seated jurors. We the people do not know the exact racial makeup of the jury because that information was not released by the court and cameras were not allowed in the courtroom.
No one has denied that Anthony stabbed Metcalf with a small, foldable knife. And no responsible person has said that was a good thing. The real question is why the stabbing happened and who is to blame.
Let me say this clearly: Austin Metcalf should not be dead. At the same time, high school students shouldn’t be allowed to bully other students and berate them.
Bullies shouldn’t be murdered. But bullies also shouldn’t be tolerated. Where were the coaches and responsible adults in this case? Who was supposed to be in charge but wasn’t?
And now that we’ve heard from Austin Metcalf’s father, it’s not hard to imagine what his son had learned at home. These statements are so outrageous that I thought they were fake, but they are not. This is real.
Here are some direct quotes:
- “Oh, there was no Black jurors! You know why? Because you can’t be unbiased. You’re dumb if you answer the question ‘I can’t send a Black man to jail because he’s Black.’ You’re not getting on the jury. You’re so unintelligent you can’t even fill out a form correctly. You don’t even know who your daddy is because 78% of you don’t have your father in the home anymore. (You have) Baby Mamas running around with eight kids so they can get EBT cards to feed you all.”
- “You think I’m being racist? No, I’m being real because it isn’t only Black people; white people do the same. I’ve called them out just as hard as I call you out. Anybody who doesn’t work, who wants free government handouts, who wants to live in a socialistic society, move to Russia.”
- “Normally I don’t normally attack people like this, but I have been cooped up and caged up and this anger — this is something I’m trying to work on it, develop it and follow it into a more constructive way, but tonight is the one time I’m gonna allow myself. It’s OK. Tonight I’m allow myself to say what I really want to say because most of the time I don’t say what I want to say because it’s not correct.”
- “Life is not easy. God doesn’t say that. God says there’s gonna be trials and tribulations. God says there’s going to be people out there who will deceive you. I mean, if you want to go back to Old Testament eye for an eye, Sodom and Gomorrah turn to stone, man lays with the man you die, I mean this is all your personal choices.”
- “I stay in my lane, just don’t come in my lane with your … . I respect everyone until they disrespect me. I’ve been disrespected by so many people so many times while I had to sit here and take it.”
The elder Metcalf then starts calling names — singling out Anthony’s parents and another relative who spoke in his defense.
“What did you do to that boy to make him stab somebody?”
He says of Anthony’s father: “You’re a coward, and you raised one. … What did you do to that boy to make him stab somebody?”
He calls Anthony’s mother a “drunk bitch” and says to her: “My God, what kind of mother are you?”
And of Karmelo Anthony, Metcalf says: “I got a new name for Melo, OK, because he was such this little boy … . How about watermelon felon? How’s that one strike you? I hope he enjoyed his first night in that cell last night because he’s going to have many nights to think about what he did.”
In the next breath after those slurs, Metcalf says: “I forgave him, so I don’t carry the hate and the anger, so I don’t get ate up like cancer that kills you on the inside. It’s like me drinking poison and hoping it kills you. It doesn’t work that way; you’ve got to let that stuff go. It will kill you. It will eat you up inside. So when people ask me, ‘How can you forgive him?’ — If I didn’t, I would have wound up killing him and going to prison myself.”
On one hand, we can see the pain of a grieving father in these words. But on the other hand, we can see the Bible-infused racism that permeates MAGA culture today. It’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump uttering the same awful words.
The fact that Karmelo Anthony carried a knife to a track meet is not the only cultural problem in this story. Somehow we also need a reckoning with racist words that cut like a knife too.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global.