The abuse of a black teen’s death

Americans were supposed to have left racial reckonings behind, in 2020 or thenabouts. Yet the death of Nolan Wells, a teenage star black athlete from Ocean Springs, Miss., has become an opportunity for a mini-reckoning in the past few weeks. Promoted by his family, the racialized interpretation of Wells’s death has gained circulation through a prestige media once more prepared to surrender rigor and probity in pursuit of a factitious theme: black parents, beware letting your children socialize in mixed company. On July 4, Wells went with a group of white friends to participate in a local institution: a massive, Independence Day teen boat party off Horn Island, a barrier island about 10 miles off the coast of Mississippi. His body was found two days later, apparently drowned; he was 18. The