Earned Skepticism

I have been thinking a lot lately about the death of Nolan Wells. This tragedy hits close to home. Ocean Springs is not too far from Moss Point. Both are in Jackson County. And I have family members who know his mother and father.

Everything about this story is heartbreaking. The death of a promising young Black man, the questionable circumstances surrounding that death (a group of white friends left him on Horn Island), the ongoing demand for answers from law enforcement, and the spiraling conspiracies on social media about it all make it difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle passions from evidence, relevant detail from spectacle.

The hard fact remains. A mother and father must bury their child. And the weight of history, particularly the history of Mississippi, and the reality of our current troubles bear down on those trying to make sense of this tragedy.

Think about it. Racial distrust has deepened over the last decade or so. Trump and his MAGA followers have stoked divisions and hatreds in pursuit of their political agendas. We have kept track of what this might mean for the workings of government in Washington, D.C., but little attention has been given to the impact of this sinister shift downstream – the permission structure for the expression of hatreds in the daily lives of people close to the ground.

Today, in addition to the assault on Affirmative Action, DEI, and American history, Black people hang from trees and people doubt the investigations of police that describe the deaths as suicide. Questions are left unanswered as to why all this is happening now. (Jillian Colleen Jefferson has compiled a record, an echo of Ida B. Wells’s Red Record, of what she describes as modern day lynchings. And Mississippi leads the way. See A Crimson Record https://drive.google.com/file/d/1twIekbOTlto0wEtY0uAL_0IW__VV1Ity/view?pli= )

Nolan’s death happened in this environment. No wonder skepticism shadows this case. That skepticism bears the markings of history’s lessons.

I am not old enough to have experienced the Mississippi that John Silver called “a closed society.” But I have heard stories of its brutality, of all the bodies that lined the rivers of this state and soaked the soil of this place. These stories function like a Greek chorus in my imagination. They remind me that Mississippi’s brutality was unrivaled and that the reality of our present days is resonant with an ugly past.

The general outline of that history takes the form of a kind of common sense about race matters. Not so much a hatred of others, but an earned skepticism about the moral capacities of those hell-bent on keeping this Republic white. We know what white people can do. The examples are too many to gloss over.

The distrust has enabled us to navigate a world where the madness of racism can do unimaginable harm. We teach our children to be skeptical, too. Don’t trust that a cop will recognize you as a human being today, we tell them. Do whatever he or she tells you to do. Answer their questions respectively, we say, because we want our babies to come home to us. And above all, no matter who you are with, listen, listen for the crackling sounds of danger.

Earned skepticism is rooted in an informed distrust cultivated in separate worlds. We must admit that our intimate lives are profoundly segregated. According to one study, the core social network of the average white American is almost 90% white. (https://prri.org/press-release/prri-survey-friendship-networks-of-white-americans-continue-to-be-90-white/). We are walking mysteries to one another. Even when there are friendships that run deep, that are loving and enduring, those friendships are exceptions that prove the rule.

I understand completely the disbelief around the circumstances of Nolan’s death, because I have felt it myself. Friends would not have left that young man on the island. True friendship carries with it a tenderness expressed in an abiding concern for the well-being of another. Ralph Waldon Emerson was right: “the only way to have a friend is to be one.” Leaving the young man on the island without his phone, to my mind, was not an expression of friendship.

But, if I am honest, that judgment is separate from the facts of the case. All of what I have said doesn’t prove anything about the death of Nolan Wells. It does not confirm the guilt of his white “friends.” It only shows how his death carries the burden of these dark days.

Passions and facts comingle here. Death and distrust are coiled together like a breeding ball.

Earned skepticism does, however, force the hand of those who claim that we should trust law enforcement and give these white people the benefit of the doubt. It demands transparency and accountability. Nolan’s mother and father must grieve and fight. They must plan the funeral of their baby and challenge the story around their son’s death.

Earned skepticism may generate wild conspiracy theories on social media, but here, on the coast of Mississippi in a place where beautiful Magnolia trees and grand white oaks make for an idyllic scene, a mother and father MUST be skeptical if they are to discover what really happened to their baby in a state haunted by ghosts.

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