BUZZ
Journalism professor suggests Austin Metcalf’s dad should have taught his son about ‘boundaries’
The grieving father of a white teen murdered by a black teen is actually to blame for his death, according to a Howard University professor.
Last week, a Texas jury found Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder after he stabbed Austin Metcalf in the heart during a confrontation in April 2025 at a track meet. Anthony argued he acted out of self-defense after Metcalf pushed him during an argument under a tent.
Coming to Anthony’s is Professor Stacey Patton, who teaches journalism at Howard University. Patton has previously suggested Charlie Kirk “paid” the “price” for supporting gun rights. She also previously defended riots in Baltimore and suggested racial jokes by comedians can be to blame for the killings of black people.
Patton, in a long post on her Substack page, blamed Jeff Metcalf, the father of the murdered teen, for the death, saying he was a “failure.”
“Since dead Black boys are never allowed to remain innocent, let us stop pretending dead white boys are beyond scrutiny,” Patton wrote. “Let us refuse the sentimental immunity given to dead white boys and grieving white fathers.”
She went on to argue Metcalf was to blame for encouraging his son to practice masculinity by learning to hunt.
Patton wrote:
In your own memorial language, you told us about the kind of white boyhood Austin was raised inside. It was a boyhood steeped in conquest language, hunting rituals, warrior fantasies, masculine toughness, and the romance of force. You told us about a child praised not just for being kind, curious, gentle, or careful, but for becoming a “leader” and a “warrior” in a racist culture where those words too often mean dominance.
You, sir, told us that Austin learned early how to hold a weapon, how to aim, how to take down a living thing, how to be proud of the kill, how to have that moment folded into the mythology of father and son. This tells us something about the values and emotional curriculum being cultivated around him and about what kind of white masculinity was being celebrated.
Lest her point be missed, Patton said Austin should have learned about boundaries and then he would not have pushed Anthony.
“YOU failed to teach your boy that Black children have boundaries,” she wrote. “YOU failed teach humility, restraint, or the sacred fact that another person’s body is not your jurisdiction.”
“You failed, Jeff,” she reiterated.
While she acknowledged that grief is real, she said Metcalf should have more sympathy for the 19-year-old adult man who murdered his son.
“Because grief and rage are real, Jeff. Losing a child is an unimaginable rupture no parent should ever have to survive,” she said. “But there is something deeply revealing about an adult white man standing in a courtroom, pointing all of that grief and rage at a Black teen, and telling him he failed society and does not belong in the community.”
Indeed, she said, there was coded language in how Jeff Metcalf said the murderer of his son did not belong in society (which the jury agreed with).
Patton wrote:
Whether you intended it or not, whether you want to admit it or not, “You don’t belong in this community” carries history. It carries sundown towns, schoolhouse doors, and white mobs outside courthouses. It carries the old civic theology of white space, where Black folks are tolerated only so long as they are quiet, grateful, submissive, and available for punishment. And I’m not about to sit quietly while a Black teenager is verbally exiled from a community that had already decided what he was before the facts could even breathe.
The murder of Austin Metcalf is equivalent to Karmelo Anthony being sentenced to jail, Patton said.
“Austin is dead. Your family is devastated. That matters,” she said. “Karmelo Anthony is alive but caged inside a racial imagination that had already convicted him. And that matters, too.”
She concluded by defending Karmelo Anthony for allegedly simply standing up to Austin Metcalf (by stabbing him in the heart).
Patton wrote:
He sat there and withheld the one thing you still thought you were entitled to command. Maybe that is what enraged you most. Not just that Austin is dead. Not just that Karmelo is alive. But that this Black boy would not complete the scene for you. He would not bow his head the way you wanted. He would not offer his face as a screen for your rage. He would not let you turn his eyes into another courtroom exhibit. And maybe, at an ancestral level, he already knew.
“Besides, he had already seen enough under that tent,” she said.
MORE: ‘BIPOC’ language scrubbed from geoscience fellowship
