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.
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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.
There were no signs of foul play, according to the local authorities. The water around Horn Island is unpredictable; the party was large, drunken, and chaotic; an accidental drowning would be the most obvious scenario. Yet Wells’s parents, Christine Wells-Wonsley and Elmore Wonsley, rejected that explanation, and the social-media machine swung into action, claiming there was something ominous in the fact that Wells was the only black kid hanging out with a group of whites. In dreaded Mississippi no less.
To suspicious, racially charged minds, the preliminary assumption of apparent drowning by Mississippi authorities was another cover-up, a time-honored tradition of theirs. Speculation abounded that Wells may have been the victim of race-based violence at the hands of his friends.
Legacy media institutions have lent credence to the narrative. The Wonsleys, accompanied by their lawyer, Benjamin Crump, a headline-seeking civil-rights attorney who represented the family of George Floyd, appeared on Good Morning America on July 10, where they claimed that Wells’s death was “suspicious,” and that they believed content may have been deleted from his phone. The family has stuck to talking points about wanting justice and the truth — a reasonable demand from any grieving parent. But if Wells’s death is “suspicious,” such suspicions have content, and their only possible implication is that Wells’s white friends were involved in his wrongful death.
And people are believing it. Wells’s fate, according to a story that ran in The New York Times on Friday, has “sparked anguish among black parents about the safety of their children in predominantly white spaces.” On the surface, this may seem like the paper’s usual project of foregrounding black voices and the black experience.
But it’s nothing so benign. The Times story contains zero statistics or hard information about real danger to black children from white ones — because, regardless of the eventual findings in the Wells case, such danger statistically doesn’t exist. Undeterred, the paper promotes the idea that it’s the enlightened next frontier of racial justice for black children to be afraid of their white peers.
But think about it. Such a narrative undermines one of the greatest achievements in American society: the de facto, widespread daily reality of the integrated, post-racial friend group.
Viewed in a more rational light, Nolan Wells, prior to his tragic death, was an American triumph. His proud black parents believed in emphasizing the black heritage of Mississippi, and he had friends of all colors, yet he was also popular and thriving among the sons and daughters of the good old boys (and girls) in a wealthy, coastal town in the Deep South. Allegedly, he stayed behind on Horn Island when the boat he’d come out on departed, because he was flirting with a girl — a white girl, a matter that now goes unremarked upon, even in Mississippi. Wells’s friendships represented true American diversity and were a dramatic change from the past. Such outcomes have been the inspiring result of the civil-rights movement and a major goal of societal progress. Only, our prestige institutions seem bent on undermining them.
It’s yet another example of a racial-justice machine run amok and achieving the opposite of its stated outcomes. The grieving parents — whose motives have been questioned, but let’s not — have launched an independent investigation and flown their son’s body to Washington, DC, for a second autopsy, due to concerns about the quality of justice available locally.
Their lawyer, Crump, is known for taking on cases much less meritorious than Floyd’s. An all-star cast of racial-justice celebrities has also become involved in the Wells case: filmmaker Tyler Perry paid for the funeral, civil-rights activist and former football player Colin Kaepernick paid for the independent autopsy, and the Rev. Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy.
Whether it has been the family’s intention or not, what’s followed has been a perfect storm of armchair internet analysis over a murky situation involving hundreds of partying, presumably drunk teenagers, and multiple, obscure pieces of evidence. The white teenagers whom Wells rode out with returned without him, according to an interview given by Wells’s friend Warren Hudson, a member of the group, because they were having trouble with their boat.
“Nolan decided to stay on the island with the girl that he was with. And the girl is a witness to that, too,” Hudson has said. The family, for its part, disputes that Wells would have remained behind: he wasn’t the type to remain behind, supposedly. The girl’s sister disputes that she and Wells had significant interaction. Countering, the teens and various Reddit threads say that riding out with one group to Horn Island and returning to another for ephemeral or unclear reasons is totally normal practice at such parties.
And, on the internet, anything can become suspicious or blown out of proportion. Crump claimed that a photograph of Wells in a pool on the mainland with a group of white teenagers was taken later on July 4. If so, it would demand explanation — if Wells was back on the mainland, how did his body end up drifting off Horn Island? But the photo, ABC News has confirmed, wasn’t taken on July 4. A statement by the president of the United Cajun Navy search-and-rescue organization that Wells was “fully clothed” when its operators found him, has also been used by Crump to suggest foul play. This, despite the UCN assertions that in the context of Horn Island, “fully clothed” meant wearing a bathing suit. Crump, the UCN claims, deliberately obscured the facts.
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There is also audio of an emergency call to the Sea Tow emergency service, made by the teenage captain of the boat Wells rode out on, on its return trip. This call is an amazing document of civic dysfunction in its own right. “Hey, we’re at the West tip of Horn, and our bilge pump stopped working,” the caller says. “We’re going. We’re sinking. Can y’all please come, we have a membership?” The connection is poor, and the teenager seems distracted — you know, perhaps because the boat is sinking — while the emergency-services operator puts him through the membership-number rigamarole (he doesn’t have it), and a list of rote questions, and becomes obtuse, annoyed, and legalistic in her interactions. “Is the boat sinking or you have it aground?” she asks. “We are sinking, yes!” the teen replies (he’s said it several times already). “Is it aground is the question?” she counters. “No, we are not aground! We’re in 17, no, 31 feet of water!” he yells. Anyone calling Sea Tow better hope the boat is sinking slowly.
Five minutes into the call, the emergency dispatcher instructs the caller to please hold (naturally), and switches lines to the captain of a rescue boat, her tone of voice changing from hostile to polite and simpering. “I apologize ahead of time, I really do,” she says, explaining that she’s sending over a “fee-for-service” job, because there is a caller without a membership number. “We’re so tied up right now, we can’t really do any non-member jobs right now,” the captain says. Eventually, the two find the membership number and proceed — just another example of bureaucracy and increasing inhumanity in our essential services. “Have a drink!” the dispatcher tells the captain.
Internet sleuths and the gossip website TMZ have analyzed the unintelligible background noise during this call to suggest that it captures the moment of Wells’s death, and reveals teens saying things like, “Can we cover it up?”And: “You killed him.” UnHerd couldn’t distinguish any such thing from the audio garble. Reddit threads speculate that the words are there, but refer to the intake hole for the non-working bilge pump, and are “can we cover it up” and “you killed it.”
There is lots, lots more. Are the Wonsleys’ concerns realistic? Is criticism of them for seeming to be mercenary in response to their son’s death itself racist? Would Wells really have stayed behind without his phone (which, along with several other phones, returned to the mainland with the boat)? Do drunk, partying teenagers standing in waist-deep water routinely keep their phones with them?
The most plausible interpretation of the emergency call and the conflicting evidence on all sides seems to be that Wells tragically drowned. The multiple suspicions that have emerged don’t add up to a narrative. If Wells was left behind maliciously, as the family’s statements suggest, he’d then also have to have suffered violence at the hands of a different group of malicious actors. If Wells was being accidentally killed on the boat during the emergency call, various other theories of phone-tampering or that Wells was the source of an argument heard on shore and captured on video, don’t fit in. But most important, none of even these outlandish scenarios has any clear marker suggesting that the problem was race.
And this is the additional tragedy of Nolan Wells.
The race question — until more information surfaces, at least — is in the eyes of the beholders. Even in the possible scenario that an investigation uncovers violence on the part of the white teenagers, and even in the worst-possible-case scenario of an investigation uncovering truly ghoulish racially motivated violence by an island of hundreds of teenagers (who are well known not to be able to keep their mouths shut about anything — so if something happened out there, everyone is covering), there is still, at this early point in the investigation, not a shred of even crazed speculative evidence that says race, specifically, was a factor.
And if it wasn’t, the response to the Nolan Wells narrative — by the media, and by the racial-justice advocates themselves — undermines one of the strongest foundations of a diverse society: the propensity of children to be colorblind and get along until they’re told otherwise.
True American social diversity started with the integration of schools and has been successful, especially with the great leveling influence of team sports. Players are valued for their skills on sports teams, and friendships form, regardless of color. If we look merely at the obvious, there is every sign that this was the case for Nolan Wells. The supposedly suspicious pool photograph shows him jammed in with a crowd of white kids, one of whom has his arm around him. A very many other photos show him laughing and smiling with his white friends. Kids are also exposed to enormous amounts of diversity programming in schools, which they tend to recognize as inherently right. For generations, their friendships have been building the American future.
Race-based paranoia is now undermining this great social accomplishment. Stories like the ones in the Times encourage black parents to be afraid, and to pass this fear on to their offspring.
And for the white peers, might the effect of the Wells story be the same, fear of the other? Wells’s friend Warren Hudson told interviewer Brandon Tatum that he and his family had received “thousands” of death threats. Hudson sat down in front of the camera — bravely, if he’s innocent — to set the story straight and affirm his friendship with Wells. It isn’t impossible that he is perpetuating a cover-up, and that time will reveal him to be a master villain, but if not, his future is being derailed, thanks to his friendship with Wells. Might white parents think twice when a group of white children wants to take a black friend on a boat trip? “But what if something happens to him?” becomes an ignoble but predictable statement.
Keeping children apart because of perceived danger, of course, has always been a tool of soft racism. No one should bow to such impulses, but people will.
Nolan Wells graduated in 2025 from Ocean Springs High School, whose website proclaims that it has a 93% graduation rate and a 13-to-1 student-teacher ratio. He was part of an elite friend group in a wealthy town and, by all accounts, had a bright future. His racial success story is being turned into a failure by outsized paranoia about race — a situation that increasingly seems true of America writ large — to our great detriment.
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