America Still Wants To Snatch Black Children From The Future

In May 1916, in Waco, Texas, 17-year-old Jesse Washington was convicted of murder and rape during a one-hour trial in which his feckless attorney offered no defense. The courtroom had already done its work and named him guilty after deliberating for only four minutes. But Washington’s conviction and death sentence were not enough.

A mob of white men and boys dragged him out of the courthouse, stripped him naked, spat on him, kicked, stabbed, and castrated him, passed his genitals around in a handkerchief, and hauled him before a waiting crowd of 15,000 spectators, where they burned him alive under a tree in front of the mayor’s office. 

The pyre where the teenager was chained and cooked for hours was constructed by small boys who were paid to gather scraps of wood and kindling. Another small child, sitting at the top of the same tree above the barbaric spectacle, had to be rescued when the smoke overwhelmed him. Waco’s mayor later complained about the destruction of “a good tree.”

While Washington’s parents and at least one sibling were being held in a local jail, his charred body was lassoed and dragged behind a truck through the Black section of town to send a message. When his charred head fell off and bounced through the street, a gaggle of white boys reportedly picked it up, plucked his teeth from the smoldering skull, and sold them as souvenirs for $5 apiece. And then they all went home and resumed pretending to be human.

One hundred and ten years later, still in the State of Texas, another Black teenager, Karmelo Anthony, has been made to stand before a racist public hungry to see his body destroyed beyond any ordinary measure of justice. No, there was no tree, chain, fire, or white children perched in trees or on adult shoulders after Anthony’s conviction and sentencing. But I am seeing that same old mob’s bloodlust moving through the comment sections across social media pages, including my own.  

I am not being hyperbolic when I say that racist white folks stalking Black people’s social media pages want to drag Anthony from the courtroom and hang him or put him in the electric chair. They want Anthony offered up to the old lynching ritual. They want the state to finish what the Jim Crow mobs used to do with rope, fire, photographs, picnic baskets, and souvenirs preserved in formaldehyde. 

I have also been seeing memes featuring Anthony in a lace slip and fantasizing about him being raped by a hulking future cellmate named “Bubba” during Gay Pride Month. This is the same old racial bloodlust dressed up in homoerotic, pedophilic spectacle where “law and order” means imagining a Black teenager being sexually violated, feminized, bent over, and broken for public pleasure. The lynching fantasy embedded in these memes is obfuscated by the humor.

But Black folks recognize it. And we are not surprised by the verdict or by the bloodlust and depraved sexualized projections surrounding Karmelo Anthony. We know that whiteness requires Black punishment and periodic ceremonial purification through the abuse of Black bodies. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in Between the World and Me: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”  Whiteness wants the Black body destroyed, humiliated, or contained so it can feel restored to itself. 

Listen, I am no longer interested in writing think pieces begging this country to recognize Black childhood. I am not interested in performing another careful explanation of how Black youth are expedited into perceived maturity, or innocence denied, or racial bias, or the long history of Black children being lynched by mobs and the state. All of that is true, but we are well past the point where shame can do any work on people who are too depraved and diseased to feel any shame.

We are living among ghouls.

We are living among people who no longer even bother to hide their appetite for Black pain and death. They do not want justice. They want Black youth to be monsters so they can purify themselves and feel clean. They want the ritual and old satisfaction they brought with them from Europe. They want the reassurance that the racial order still works and that Black life can still be made to absorb the terror, guilt, rage, and moral sewage whiteness refuses to locate in itself.

That is what this entire week has revealed.

Alongside Karmelo Anthony’s conviction in Texas, Chikei “Rick” Chow in South Carolina was found not guilty after chasing down and shooting 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton, whom he wrongly suspected of stealing water. In Colorado, we also saw the homicide convictions of the paramedics who restrained, sedated, and killed Elijah McClain reversed.

Three cases. One week. One message.

I don’t know about y’all, but to me, these cases feel like a get-back or a snapback. It feels like the backlash that has been waiting underneath the Black Lives Matter movement, all the hashtags, murals, removal of statues, the corporate statements, black squares, DEI trainings, all that kneeling and playing dead on yoga mats, tearful speeches, and all those temporary performances of racial reckoning after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. It feels like America has been itching to prove that nothing actually changed. The system has just been holding its breath for a few years, as it waited out the outrage and protests, and then returned to its unapologetic self.

All that performance has been followed by restoration politics and White America reminding Black folks that our protest is permitted only as theater, and mourning is tolerated only when it changes nothing. And, and . . . and . . .  accountability will be treated as an aberration to be overturned, reversed, neutralized, or punished. At the end of the day, these latest cases involving Black youth send a clear message that Black suffering must never be allowed to interrupt the racial machinery for too long.

That is why all these verdicts are so satisfying to racist America. Once the Black body is killed or locked up, whiteness can feel clean again. It can feel restored, vindicated, re-centered, back on top, and call itself innocent, civilized, and human while pretending that snatching Black youth from the future is justice instead of another season of purification. Because whiteness knows it is a crime scene built on stolen breath and masquerading as civilization.

SEE ALSO:

Black People Have Been Boycotting The Same Insult For 40 Years

Cyrus Carmack-Belton’s Killer Found Not Guilty Of Murder

Karmelo Anthony Murder Trial: Teen Found Guilty For 2025 Stabbing