America Keeps Seeing Only Black and White

A South Carolina jury’s acquittal of an Asian store owner accused of killing a Black teenager, and a Texas jury’s quick conviction of a Black teenager for killing a White student, have done more than settle two criminal cases. They have exposed how quickly public debate collapses into a narrow Black-and-white script, and how little patience many people have for facts that do not fit it.

That is the real story here. Not simply the verdicts, which were shaped by different evidence, different witnesses and different claims of self-defence, but the reflex to treat jury composition as a racial scoreboard and every outcome as proof of a pre-written moral tale. In one case, the presence of Black jurors did not prevent an acquittal. In the other, the absence of Black jurors did not prevent a conviction. That should have ended the lazy argument. Instead, it has only made it louder.

Two Verdicts, One Shrinking Conversation

The temptation to flatten these cases into a single argument is obvious. In Columbia, Chikei “Rick” Chow, an Asian convenience-store owner, was tried over the fatal shooting of 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton. In Frisco, Texas, Karmelo Anthony, a Black teenager, was tried over the fatal stabbing of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf. One defendant walked out of court acquitted of murder; the other was convicted of murder and given a 35-year sentence. That is enough for many commentators, who like neat patterns and dislike awkward distinctions.

But neat patterns are usually nonsense. The South Carolina case turned on a confrontation outside a store, a chase of more than 130 yards and a shot fired into the back of a fleeing teenager after a suspected theft of water bottles. The Texas case turned on a dispute at a high-school track meet, a tent area, a knife and a claim of self-defence after Anthony said he had been told to leave. The law, the evidence and the atmosphere were not the same. Pretending they were is a way of avoiding thought.

The jury makeup was also not what the loudest voices wanted to pretend. In the Chow trial, court records and local reporting described a panel that was roughly half Black and half White, with two jurors from other or unspecified backgrounds. No Asian jurors were reported. In the Anthony trial, reporting described a jury that included White jurors and other minority jurors, including Asian and Hispanic members, but no Black jurors. Some online commentary called that an all-White jury, which was false. Falsehoods spread quickly when they suit a theory.

That is the point. A simple rule of racial matching does not exist in American law, and the two verdicts show why. If a jury’s racial composition alone decided the result, one would expect Chow to be convicted and Anthony to be acquitted, or at least for the presence or absence of one group to predict the outcome. It did not. The facts, the legal arguments and the jurors’ judgment did what they were supposed to do, or at least what the system claims to ask of them.

Yet public argument did not stop there. Instead, it retreated to the comfortable old habit of deciding first what the case “means” and then selecting the facts that support that meaning. The habit is not new. What is new is the speed with which social media turns it into a moral certainty before the record has even been read.

The Columbia Shooting That Became a Symbol

The South Carolina case began in the most ordinary of American places: a convenience store. On 28 May 2023, at the Xpress Mart Shell station on Parklane Road in Columbia, Cyrus Carmack-Belton was confronted over the suspected theft of four bottles of water. Surveillance footage showed him leaving the store. Chow and his adult son pursued him outside. After a chase that local reporting placed at more than 130 yards, Chow fired once and struck the teenager in the back.

What followed was the usual collision of law, fear and moral improvisation. The defence said Chow was acting to protect his son and himself, and that the teenager had pointed a semiautomatic pistol at them during the pursuit. Prosecutors said the shot was unjustified, that the boy was fleeing, and that what began as a suspected petty theft ended in a death that should never have happened. South Carolina’s stand-your-ground law was part of the picture, but not enough to rescue Chow from the charge of murder. He was denied immunity and sent to trial.

In early June 2026, after roughly eight hours of deliberation, a jury found Chow not guilty. The verdict did not end the case in the public mind. If anything, it made the location itself more charged. By then, Chow and his family had sold the gas station about a year before the trial, but the site remained associated with his name. In the hours and days after the acquittal, protesters gathered outside the station holding signs that called for justice for Cyrus, chanting, holding vigils and arranging empty water bottles as a memorial. Police stood nearby. The scene was not a courtroom anymore, but a public argument with broken glass.

Reports also said the store was broken into and vandalised after the verdict. Some of the damage echoed earlier unrest after the 2023 shooting. The people now responsible for the property were not the people who had made the original decision to chase a teenager and fire a gun, but that did not spare them from the aftermath. Such is the way these cases work. The official defendant may leave court a free man, but the neighbourhood stays behind to absorb the anger.

There is no reason to pretend the emotional response was irrational. A 14-year-old boy was shot dead while running away after a suspected theft over a few dollars’ worth of water. That is the kind of fact that lodges itself in the public conscience and does not easily leave. Nor is there reason to pretend the defence argument was frivolous. A shop owner who believes his son is facing an armed threat does not think in the language of seminars. He thinks in seconds. The jury had to decide whether those seconds amounted to murder.

That decision was legally final. The public response was not. The site became a symbol because symbols are easier to handle than complexity.

Frisco and the Speed of Condemnation

The Texas case produced a different verdict but the same cultural noise. In April 2025, Austin Metcalf was stabbed during a confrontation at a high-school track meet in Frisco. Anthony, then 19, said he acted in self-defence after being told to leave a rival school’s tent area. Prosecutors said the killing was murder. The jury agreed, rejecting the lesser claim of manslaughter and returning its verdict in less than three hours.

The sentence, 35 years, was severe enough to satisfy those who wanted a hard line and harsh enough to anger those who thought the defendant had been judged too quickly. It also became another occasion for sloppy public accounting. Some commentary described the jury as all White, as if the absence of Black jurors were the only fact that mattered and as if the presence of Asian, Hispanic and other minority jurors could simply be erased. That was not reporting. It was the race filter applied after the fact.

Jury selection mattered here in a very concrete way. Prosecutors used peremptory strikes on the final three Black prospective jurors. The defence raised a Batson challenge, arguing that the state had excluded jurors on the basis of race. The judge denied it, accepting the prosecution’s race-neutral explanation: those jurors were educators, and the case involved a school-related incident. One Black prospective juror reportedly said during questioning that he would “have a hard time putting a brother in jail.” That line is not a slogan. It is an admission. It tells you exactly why voir dire exists.

The point of jury questioning is not to stage a performative census. It is to test whether a person can set aside group loyalty and decide a case on evidence. If a prospective juror says he would struggle to convict a Black defendant because he sees that defendant as a brother, the problem is obvious. That juror may be sincere, sympathetic and morally earnest. He is still the wrong juror for that case. The law does not ask him to disappear his humanity. It asks him to subordinate it to the oath.

That makes the public reaction to the Anthony case especially revealing. Many of the same people who insist that a jury lacking members of the defendant’s race must be unfair also insist that a juror who admits race-based hesitation should not be struck, or that striking him proves bias. Both positions cannot be right. Either impartiality matters, or demographic theatre matters. The system is supposed to choose the first.

The speed of the verdict also mattered. Less than three hours is not a long time to spend with a homicide case, but speed alone proves nothing. Sometimes a brief deliberation reflects an open-and-shut record. Sometimes it reflects confusion, irritation or groupthink. The number by itself is not a verdict on the verdict. Still, in a culture that likes to read every trial as social commentary, short deliberations are treated as proof that the jury never really considered the case. That may be true in some cases. It is not true because someone wants it to be true.

What Jury Selection Is Actually For

American criminal law does not promise demographic symmetry. It promises due process. That distinction is routinely blurred by people who want their own preferred racial arithmetic to stand in for justice. The Sixth Amendment requires an impartial jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community. It does not require that the seated jurors mirror the defendant’s race, the victim’s race or the race of the loudest commentator on cable news.

That is not an accident. A jury system built on racial matching would quickly become unworkable, and worse, it would rest on a bad idea: that people think only through their group identity. The law has never fully escaped the pressure of that idea, but it has also never formally accepted it. Peremptory strikes exist so lawyers can remove jurors for strategic reasons. Batson v. Kentucky, decided in 1986, bars strikes based purely on race. If a lawyer or prosecutor strikes a juror for a race-neutral reason, the judge must decide whether the explanation holds water. That is the mechanism. It is imperfect, but it is the mechanism.

The Chow and Anthony cases both show the limits of treating composition as destiny. In Columbia, a jury that included substantial Black representation acquitted an Asian defendant accused of killing a Black teenager. In Frisco, a jury with no Black members convicted a Black defendant accused of killing a White teenager. Those two outcomes cut against the lazy assumption that a jury lacking members of a defendant’s race is automatically biased against him. They also cut against the opposite idea that the presence of members of a defendant’s race guarantees sympathy.

That is a harder truth than many people want. It means jurors are not loyalty markers. They are individuals who bring their own experience into the box and are then asked to leave their prejudices at the door. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes the screening process catches the problem before the oath is even taken. When a prospective juror says, in effect, that he may not be able to convict a man because the defendant is “a brother,” the screening process is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

The Chow case shows the same principle from a different angle. If one were to insist that the absence of Asian jurors in a case involving an Asian defendant rendered the trial suspect, one would have to explain why the presence of Black jurors did not similarly invalidate the Anthony verdict. The answer is that demographic absence is not the test. Evidence, procedure and impartiality are the test. People keep forgetting this because it interferes with the thrill of grievance.

The law does not produce perfect outcomes. It produces verdicts after a contest under rules. That is less emotionally satisfying than a racial tally. It is also, on most days, better.

The Selective Outrage Problem

The public likes symmetry when symmetry flatters its instincts. When it does not, the instinct changes. That is why one of these cases is often treated as proof of systemic unfairness while the other is treated as an ordinary murder trial with a verdict attached. The racial lens is not applied evenly. It is applied where it helps the argument.

When a Black defendant faces a jury without Black members, many people immediately ask whether exclusion occurred. When an Asian defendant faces a jury without Asian members, the question is far less likely to be asked, let alone answered with the same energy. Yet the logic is the same. If representation is so central to fairness, why does the absence of one group trigger public alarm in one case and near silence in another? The answer is not principled. It is cultural habit. American discourse has trained itself to see almost everything through a Black-white binary, and everything else gets squeezed into the margins.

That binary also warps the treatment of lawyers. In the Chow case, online criticism reached for the language of betrayal, as if crossing racial lines to defend a client were itself a kind of treason. That is not a legal argument. It is tribal instinct dressed up as moral seriousness. A lawyer is hired to test the state’s case, not to serve as a spokesperson for a racial bloc. Choosing counsel should turn on skill, judgement and knowledge of the law. Choosing a lawyer because he or she shares the defendant’s race is the same kind of error as rejecting competent counsel for the wrong race. The job is not to assemble a purity parade. The job is to mount the strongest defence available.

The same is true of jurors, despite the sentimental language that often surrounds them. A juror is not a symbol chosen to reassure a crowd. A juror is a decision-maker. If the person in the box cannot separate an emotional identification from the duty to judge evidence, the person should not be there. That is not racism. That is jury selection working.

Social media, of course, rewards the opposite. It rewards the quick moral pose. It rewards the claim that a verdict proves one side’s entire worldview. It rewards the notion that if the jury looks wrong, the verdict must be wrong, and if the verdict fits the preferred narrative, the jury details can be ignored. That is why the Anthony jury was described by some as all White even though it was not, and why the racial composition of the Chow jury was treated as less politically significant even though no Asian jurors were reported.

This selectivity is corrosive. It teaches people to care only when the racial ledger runs against them. It also teaches them to ignore the obvious truth that a jury can acquit a defendant even when the panel is racially mixed, and can convict a defendant even when the panel is diverse. That truth is an insult to simplistic politics. It is also the only truth worth keeping.

The High Cost of Mounting a Defence

The verdict in the Chow case did not just leave behind a broken storefront and a furious public. It left behind a bill. Public records do not say exactly how Chow paid for his defence, but they do make one thing plain: serious murder cases are expensive, and the costs can swallow a family’s savings, business assets and future in one go.

Chow’s defence team included experienced South Carolina criminal lawyers, among them Shaun Kent and Jack Swerling. Observers said the case appeared to be staffed by several high-profile attorneys, which is rarely cheap. Public discussion after the acquittal put the legal costs at more than $1 million, though that figure has not been confirmed in court filings or official statements. Whether the true number was somewhat above or below that estimate, the point is the same. A proper homicide defence is not a routine legal expense. It is a financial event.

The family had already sold the gas station about a year before the trial. That sale likely helped pay the lawyers, along with whatever savings the family had built up over years of running the business. There was no public evidence of a defence crowdfunding campaign, no obvious legal fund and no visible safety net. In many serious cases, that is how it works. People who can pay, pay. People who cannot, get someone appointed or take a plea. The law likes to call that equality before the court. It often looks more like a reminder of who can afford to insist on trial.

That economic pressure is not a small detail. It shapes bargaining power from the first arrest onward. A defendant with assets can hire a stronger team, retain investigators, challenge the state’s narrative and wait for trial. A defendant without assets may take a plea to avoid the risk of financial ruin, even if he believes he can win. The system does not always coerce a plea in the crude sense. It merely makes the alternatives expensive enough to feel coercive.

Chow’s acquittal did not end the financial burden either. The family still faces the possibility of a civil lawsuit from Carmack-Belton’s family, which would bring new legal bills, discovery costs and the chance of a settlement or judgment. In other words, even a successful criminal defence may not end the matter. It only changes the ledger.

That is one of the uglier truths of American justice. People like to talk about verdicts as if they are clean endpoints. They are not. They are milestones in a long and costly process that can drain the accused, the victim’s family and the surrounding community at once. By the time the law finishes, the social damage is often already deep enough to outlast the case file.

Race, Fear and the Stories Communities Tell

These two cases are not really about water bottles, or a tent at a track meet, or the precise choreography of a chase and a stab wound. They are about fear, and about what people do with it. Shop owners fear theft, chaos and the loss of control in places where margins are thin and tempers are shorter. Families fear that a child can be killed in a moment of anger, or in a moment that another person claims was self-defence. Communities fear that the law will protect the wrong people, or punish the wrong people, or both.

That fear is real. It is also dangerous when it becomes the only lens through which a case is seen. In Columbia, the death of a 14-year-old produced grief, anger and a sense that a minor suspected theft had been answered with deadly force. In Frisco, a stabbing at a school event produced fear that violence had overtaken ordinary public life, and that the court had to decide whether a teenager’s claim of self-defence could survive the evidence. In both cases, the emotional charge was there before the jury room door ever closed.

Once that happens, the story hardens. One side says the system protects the wrong racial group. Another says the system punishes the wrong one. A third group, usually the most sensible and least listened to, says that the evidence in each case should be examined on its own terms and that racial arithmetic is a poor substitute for analysis. The third group rarely gets the microphone for long.

The trouble is that every community wants its grief recognised and its fear validated, but not every community wants its assumptions tested. That is where the binary does its worst work. It lets people avoid the harder questions. Was the use of force reasonable? Did the defendant face an immediate threat? Did the witnesses agree? Did the prosecution prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt? Was the strike of a juror a legitimate exercise of law or a disguised racial choice? These are the questions that matter. They are also the questions least likely to trend.

The same instinct that turns a verdict into tribal evidence also turns a lawyer into a race traitor or a hero depending on which side of the line he is thought to stand on. That is childish. The function of a lawyer is not to flatter a community’s identity. It is to test the state. The function of a juror is not to reflect the crowd’s grievance. It is to weigh proof. The function of the public is not to decide the verdict in advance and then dress up the opinion as principle.

The country has spent years pretending that every institution can be made morally legible by sorting people into groups. The Chow and Anthony cases show how thin that pretence is. Race matters in America. That is obvious. But it does not follow that race should be treated as the master key to every verdict. Often it is the opposite. The more people insist on seeing only Black and White, the less they see of the case in front of them.

The Lawyer Is Not the Tribe

There is a particular species of nonsense that appears whenever a criminal case becomes racially charged. It says that the lawyer ought to look like the defendant, or think like the defendant’s racial group, or at least avoid offending the tribe. That is not how law works. It is how political pageantry works, and even then, badly.

A lawyer’s duty is not to be a racial proxy. It is to examine the evidence, challenge weak testimony, cross-examine the state’s witnesses and persuade a jury. If a Black lawyer defends an Asian client and is called names for it, that says nothing useful about justice and everything useful about the crowd. It tells you the crowd has mistaken identity for merit. It also tells you that some people believe racial loyalty is more important than competence, which is a ridiculous standard to apply anywhere near a courtroom. In a world where a white person even dares to echo the words of a song that has the N-word, it can result in a huge fall from grace, yet a white progressive woman was applauded for calling a Black ICE agent a House N-word; we can see that progressive virtue credit gives them a wide latitude to offend.

The same instinct appears in reverse. People will excuse a weak lawyer because he belongs to the right group, or denounce a strong lawyer because he belongs to the wrong one. That is the logic of a club, not a court. It is especially absurd in serious felony cases, where the defendant’s freedom, money and future are on the line. If anything should push people toward the best available counsel, it is the scale of the stakes.

This matters because the race obsession does not stop at the defendant. It reaches jurors, lawyers, prosecutors, victims, witnesses and the people outside the courthouse shouting slogans. Everyone gets drafted into the tribal census. Everyone becomes a marker on someone else’s spreadsheet of grievances. Once that happens, there is little room left for the actual work of a trial, which is to decide what happened and whether the state proved its case.

The Chow and Anthony cases make that especially plain. In one, a defendant walked free after a jury with substantial Black representation rejected the murder charge. In the other, a Black defendant was convicted by a jury with no Black members but with other minorities present. If the tribe is the unit of justice, both verdicts should be disqualified by somebody. If the law is the unit of justice, both verdicts can be understood without pretending they were racially engineered.

The crowd does not like that answer because it denies the comfort of a simple enemy. It also denies the vanity of easy virtue. But justice has never been obliged to serve vanity. It is obliged to ask whether the evidence was enough, whether the jurors were impartial and whether the process followed the rules. The rest is theatre.

That is why these two cases matter beyond their facts. They show how quickly a country that speaks constantly about fairness can retreat to counting faces instead of weighing evidence. They show how readily public opinion turns a lawyer into a traitor, a verdict into a tribal win or loss, and a jury into a racial alibi. The law can survive that habit only if people stop mistaking it for the habit itself.