RACISM KILLS: ON THE DEATH OF NOLAN WELLS

Mr. Nolan Wells

I have been sitting with the deaths of Nolan Wells in Mississippi, Jerrad “Jay” Jackson in Michigan, Kohen Wiley, the one-year-old baby shot by local law enforcement in Mississippi, and Tyrin Johnson in Tennessee. (see Ebony Magazine Article for more information) There are probably many more that have not and will not be reported. Violence—individual and state violence; historical and contemporary toward Black bodies—is as American as apple pie.

The story of Nolan Wells, whose funeral was held this week in Mississippi, has gained national attention. Nolan, an 18-year-old, was last seen celebrating with three white friends on the Fourth of July on Horn Island just off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The three friends returned home, and Wells would never return home alive. What followed was a slew of theories of what took place on Horn Island or on the boat, a Jackson County Sheriff announcing the death as an accidental drowning, complete silence from the three friends and their parents, and a Black family left to seek justice for their son in an all-too-familiar story of Black death through a less-than-transparent Mississippi law enforcement investigation. Seeking justice, the parents of Nolan Wells hired attorney Ben Crump to conduct an independent investigation and shed a national spotlight on their son’s disappearance and death.

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A note before you continue reading: Let me say explicitly that the story is still developing, the cause of death is still unfolding, and we do not know the details of his death nor if his death was racially motivated. What we do know is that we live in America—hard stop.

What has simultaneously reached the broad American audience is a conversation that necessarily remains a constant of Black families: “be mindful of the company you keep” and “remember that racism is a murder pedagogy; racism kills.”

Last week, I was interviewed by award-winning local journalist Tammy Barney for her nola.com/Advocate article on the death of Nolan Wells titled, Why Nolan Wells’ Death is a Bigger Conversation for Black Families Across America. In an almost Mamie Till-esque tone, the article begins with the words of Nolan Wells’ mother, “This is not how I wanted the world to meet my son, but here we are.” The article, in many ways, is the continuation of a conversation that most (at least) Southern Black families have with their children who find themselves in predominantly white environments—stay woke, be mindful, and do not be fooled that proximity and familiarity should be mistaken for friendship and recognition of your equal humanity. Unfortunately, ideological whiteness like colonization, in the words of Christina Sharpe, has always been a murder pedagogy.

A Murder Pedagogy. In the article, I ask a simple question which should be followed by a simple answer. The question is one humanity has had to ask ourselves since the dawn of the power play we now call colonization: Whose life is of most worth? The answer: All life is imbued with inherent dignity and no one life outweighs another.

Unfortunately, throughout history, we have all been enraptured by the lie of white and/or European supremacy, and it has infected every corner of the globe. For this, I go to history and often return to the work of Charles W. Mills, philosopher, professor, and author of The Racial Contract. Mills reminds us that “white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.” First, this is not a celebration, but a fact and an admonishment. Secondly, he does something critical here by identifying whiteness not as a ‘color,’ and we already know it is not a race, but as a set of power relations. Power relations with political, economic, psychological, epistemic, and moral implications. Mills reminds, “For what people of color quickly come to see—in a sense the primary epistemic principle of the racialized social epistemology of which they are the object—is that they are not seen at all.” And in the white delusion of racial superiority, Black people and people of color are therefore not seen by whites as ‘human’ in the same manner as their white counterparts see one another.

Christina Sharpe and others call and imply that whiteness is a murder pedagogy, through which mental models, societal structures, institutional norms, medical benchmarks, and systems of education (and religion) both explicitly and implicitly, consciously and subconsciously normalize and sustain violence against Black (and indigenous, and other people of color) bodies.

If we have learned anything academically and socially over this last decade of heightened racial awareness, it is that even the most well-meaning of white people and those people of color infected with ideological whiteness hold beliefs, ideas, views of Black people that have been long uninterrogated, dominating the subconscious and which often erupt to the surface in moments of anger or rage.

In my youth, I have experienced the ease with which anger has “provoked” “friends” to spew the venom of racism and audacity to utter the ‘N-word’ with the justification of “we are not talking about you, you are Black, and there is a difference between being Black and being an ‘N-word’. Needless to say, they ceased being acquaintances because they were never ‘friends’. I am constantly reminded that racism, both devout and complicit, is back into the white American psyche.

I wonder if this is what Nolan experienced on that fateful day. The hysterical rage of whiteness overcoming any notion of ‘friendship’ among those present or those he trusted. A rage so totalizing that death, murder, is its only balm.

Too far? I do not think so. History teaches us otherwise. We only need to look at the history of lynchings in this country for evidence. The Equal Justice Initiative, NAACP, and records at of the Tuskegee Institute report that from 1882 to 1968 nearly 5,000 Black men, women, children, and white sympathizers were lynched in this country, with the highest number of lynchings during that period occurring in, you guessed it, the state of Mississippi.

Contemporarily, the 1998 murder of James Byrd, the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd in 2020, and too many others of blessed memory to name—modern-day lynchings.

Of this number, there are far too many accounts of murders due to a white populace’s jealousy of Black wealth accumulation, a Black person’s failure to yield sidewalks to white people, too many false accusations of a sexual nature to mention, and in the case of Mississippi’s most infamous lynching—the murder of Emmett Till—the false accussation of a 14-year old Black male child of making improper advances at a white woman. This woman later, in old age, admitted that she lied.

A murder pedagogy—racism kills.

Racism Kills. In America, we see the lethal impacts that racism and the lie of white supremacy have been indisputable for the last four hundred years.

In addition to the historical and ongoing implications of physical violence on the Black body, recent studies (2026; 2023) have quantified the impacts of systemic racism and discrimination on health disparities and premature mortality, which have revealed profound disparities in Black mortality.

I am going to save you from reporting the plethora of dismal health statistics and raise the following from the JAMA study published in 2023:

• From 2001-2023, Black Americans experienced 1.63M excess deaths relative to white Americans

• In 2018, a study revealed that racial and ethnic inequities cost the United States at least $421B based on medical expenses, lost productivity, and premature death.

If you require further evidence, you need only note that average life expectancy for Black people in 2023 was 74 years compared to 78.4 years for white people, and 81.3 years for Hispanic people. This is nothing to say of the research on the economic, psychological, and social impact of systemic racism through which Black people have continued to flourish, in spite of.

A 2022 study published in The BMJ (nee the British Medical Journal), emphatically stated, “Black people in the United States are more likely to die young – not because there is some intrinsic biological risk, but because of racism.”

Imagining a New Social Contract in the Wake of Nolan Wells. So, what?

Truthfully, I do not know if we will solve the issue of systemic racism in my lifetime. All signs point and the current milieu all point to “hell no”; however, as you know, I dwell in reality suspended in a perpetual state of possibility. So, I want you to join me in exercising our collective social moral imagination. I invite you to join me, briefly, in projecting new possibilities.

The question I am sitting with is not “How do we eliminate racism?” but rather: What kind of society must we become such that racism becomes intelligible? This is an ontological question and a decision about who we decide to be together.

Perhaps, we might imagine not a new social contract, but a call for a New Social Covenant. Covenants are transformational; they reshape identity, belonging, and mutual responsibility. America’s crisis is not merely constitutional; it is spiritual and relational. We do not simply suffer from bad policies. We suffer from a diminished collective social moral imagination.

The death of Nolan Wells—and every act of racial terror before it—reveals that our current social contract remains rooted in the mythology of hierarchy. It promises liberty while distributing dignity unequally; proclaims equality while permitting systems that determine whose grief is public, whose fear is legitimate, and whose lives are treated as expendable.

A society that makes racism unintelligible cannot be built merely by adding diversity to existing institutions or strengthening anti-discrimination laws, though both remain necessary. The new covenant requires reimagining the assumptions upon which society itself rests.

If I were to write the opening lines of such a covenant, it might read something like this:

We hold these truths not merely to be self-evident but to be sacred: that every human being possesses irreducible dignity; that our lives are fundamentally interconnected; that the flourishing of one is bound to the flourishing of all; that justice is incomplete wherever belonging is denied; and that we are entrusted with the ongoing work of creating communities where every person is free not only to survive but to become fully human.

I gave a podcast interview on A Perfectly Imperfect Union: Reflecting on America 250, this morning and will continue to sit with movements that are developing. More to come.

Closing: In the meantime and until we can collectively engage in a process of truth-telling and conversion, I beg of all Black parents to discuss this incident (even while we do not know the full story) with your children. Help them to define and discern friendship and safety. Help them to understand the society in which they live while also encouraging them that they should not be imprisoned by any limitation imposed from elsewhere.

Help them to understand that inherent in the lie of racial superiority is enshrined a deeply ingrained psychological insecurity, uninterrogated self-hate, and collectively unexplored inhumanity all projected outwardly as power.

As we grieve, may we also imagine forward.

As we lift Nolan Wells’ family, may we begin to resist the limits of the world as it is and move toward the world as it could become.

As we educate ourselves and hold tight the children in our midst, may we cultivate the moral, spiritual, and social imagination to make our more-human future real.

May we all be of good courage.

May Nolan’s memory be a revolution.

Special Note: Dr. Robinson-Morris gave Eat the Scroll Ministry permission to reprint this article dated July 22, 2026. Thanks, Dr. Robinson-Morris.