Noise is still a disturbance, and immigration is still contentious. These things are not changing, and in fact, efforts to persuade the public otherwise have brought ever-greater disorder.

This side of things is painfully obvious in the New York subway system, in which back-to-back violent incidents are, these days, its most prominent feature. Some things are a given on the train: Annoyances and eccentricities, especially in New York, make public transit what it is. But likewise can riders expect some level of order, if only downstream of simple no-eating, headphone use, or escalator courtesy rules and norms. And other things, namely the crimes that make up the news cycle of late, are flat-out unacceptable.

One such scene is a stabbing on the metro in response to a noise complaint. In the most recent of New York shock crimes, suspect Abdul Malik Little stabbed in the chest a 31-year-old train rider who protested Little’s playing music loudly from a phone.

Speaker noise is an occurrence that most metro riders have encountered at some point or another and to which, to be plain, many have more than likely taken a dislike. It is a sort of power move “backed by the threat of violence,” Manhattan Institute researcher Rafael Mangual wrote on X.

But the story details also evoke an unavoidable cultural question, taking us back to an Atlantic piece from 2022: The magazine published “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” by Xochitl Gonzalez in the autumn of that year. (And, of course, repromoted it as equally relevant in June 2024.) In short, Gonzalez argues that “the sound of gentrification is silence.” White people place their quiet comfort over minorities’ louder joy, first at Brown University and then in Brooklyn. It is isolating and discomfiting, for Gonzalez, as well as a fundamental of race conflict. From her perspective, poor people have a general aversion to quiet, simple as that.

The piece ends with a sense of hope for the preservation of noisiness, or at least the continuation of occasional outbursts of sorts, in the form of the annual National Puerto Rican Day Parade on Fifth Avenue.

So, is the stabbing a mostly unrelated example or a logical extreme of Gonzalez’s cultural noise assertion? It seems the latter. One lesson, if not the lesson, of her piece laments the self-segregation of minorities into shrinking, din-friendly areas. And it absolutely loathes any imposition of the preference for quiet. She is genuinely indignant about the issue and, like any good progressive, sides with whatever is distinctly un-American.

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Advocating things such as noise pollution as coequal cultural differences does two things: Foremost, it builds resentment. Resentment motivates Gonzalez’s entire piece, and it permits Little’s, the suspect’s, wild eruption into stabbing. It also, as leftist multiculturalism usually does, makes for an insipid culture. Assimilation is not a new concept, and it can counteract that effect. But the ambiguity of norms results in raucous disorder and all-over-the-place opinions on immigration policy. 

Surely, there is more to Little’s case than a Jamaican immigrant gone rogue. That does not mean his crime cannot be counted among the many New York random-outrage crimes, which category has a cultural problem at its heart. Rather, Little’s lawyer has argued that including him in “the trend of stories of stranger attacks on the subway couldn’t be further from the truth.” He was just provoked by an argument, passionate about his side of the disagreement. There is no norm of courtesy or nonviolence, the lawyer claims. Her claim is the problem in real time.