Rick Chow shot a 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack Belton in the back for water bottles that he never actually stole. Yes, his life was worth less to this man than a bottle of water. A jury in South Carolina acquitted Chow of Cyrus’ murder.
Not even manslaughter?
Although he has shot people in the past, Chow was acquitted and is a free man today. The state of South Carolina also seems to feel that Cyrus’ life was worth less than a bottle of water.
Meanwhile in Texas, 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony was outnumbered and bullied by White teens at a sporting event when one began to shove him. Karmelo stabbed him and, at 19, has been sentenced to 35 years for murder. He will be my age, 54, when released, will spend the next 35 years doing unpaid labor, and will never regain his voting rights. He has been returned to the slavery his ancestors endured. (That is what incarceration is.)
Not even manslaughter?
Our children are not safe in White towns or White spaces. Anti-Blackness in Asian American and Latin American communities makes those folks’ spaces frequently unsafe. This is why I chose to raise my children in Baltimore. The anti-Blackness in the U.S. puts us in far more danger than anything you might’ve seen on The Wire.
The real racial sickness in the Karmelo Anthony and Austin Metcalf case is not just that America reflexively sees Black boys as threats. It is that this country has a profound, almost religious inability to recognize white boys as violent, dangerous, deviant, and frightening despite this country’s long history of evidence.
White boys can be hulking, aggressive, entitled, bullying, reckless, and cruel, and still the culture rushes to soften them into “sons,” “athletes,” “good kids,” “troubled teens,” or “boys who made a mistake.” But let a Black boy say, “Don’t touch me,” and suddenly everybody and their mama becomes fluent in menace, intent, and criminal psychology.
The fact is, America has trained itself to see danger in Black fear and innocence in white violence, and that is why so many people cannot even ask whether Karmelo Anthony was afraid without first deciding he must have been the threat. This is a country that keeps pretending white aggression is not dangerous until somebody Black survives it.
Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a rifle, killed two people, and went home free.
Karmelo Anthony was scared and defended himself. He faces life in prison.
Cyrus Carmack-Belton was 14 years old, shot in the back while running away. The jury watched it on video. They still said not guilty.
Same country. Same justice system. Completely different outcomes based on the color of their skin.
We are exhausted. We are heartbroken. And some days, if we are being honest, we feel completely hopeless. Because how many verdicts do we have to survive before something changes?
Austin Metcalf should be alive. His parents should not have had to bury their son. No one should treat that loss like a side note. A child died at a high school track meet, and that grief is real. But grief does not mean silence. Austin’s death does not mean we have to ignore what Texas did to Karmelo Anthony.
Karmelo did not ask Texas for special treatment. He asked Texas to apply the same law it claims belongs to everyone. He asked a jury to believe that a Black teenager, surrounded in a tense confrontation, touched after warning someone not to touch him, could be scared enough to defend himself. Texas said no. Texas said his fear did not count enough. His panic did not matter enough. His life in that moment was not worth enough.
That is the rot in this case. Not because every self-defense claim should win. Not because every death can be excused. Not because a knife is harmless. A knife is deadly. A stab wound to the chest is deadly. Karmelo used deadly force. That is not the question. The question is whether Texas gives a Black teenager the same benefit of the doubt it gives other people when they say they were scared.
Had the roles been reversed, this country would not be struggling so hard to understand fear. If a white teenager had warned a Black teenager not to touch him, had been touched anyway, had said he was surrounded and scared, half this country would already be calling him a victim. They would call it tragic. They would call it complicated. They would call it self-defense. But when the scared teenager is Black, suddenly everyone becomes a prosecutor. Suddenly every second has to be perfect. Suddenly fear is no longer fear. It is treated like aggression.
Karmelo was convicted of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was 17 when this happened. His defense said he was smaller, outnumbered, frightened, and reacting in chaos. Prosecutors said this was not fear. They said it was escalation. They said it was murder. The jury accepted that story. Reporting from the courtroom said no Black jurors were seated, and the defense objected to the prosecution’s strikes of Black prospective jurors. The judge let the panel stand.
Self-defense is not a magic word. You do not say it and walk free. The law asks whether a person reasonably believed force was needed right then to protect himself. Deadly force has an even higher burden. But “reasonable” is where the bias hides. Reasonable to whom? Reasonable when the person afraid is white, armed, older, angry, or standing on property? Reasonable when the person afraid is Black, young, cornered, touched, and already treated like the threat? In America, white fear gets treated like evidence. Black fear gets treated like an excuse.
This country has spent generations treating Black children like adults whenever it wants to punish them. Black kids are children when America wants to lecture them, but adults when America wants to cage them. They are old enough to fear, old enough to blame, old enough to throw away, but somehow never young enough to protect. Black childhood comes with conditions. Black innocence can be taken back at any moment. Black fear is treated like a lie before the child even opens his mouth.
Karmelo was not some monster. By the accounts offered by his family and supporters, he was a student-athlete with a 3.7 GPA, a team captain, the oldest of four, a kid who worked real jobs at Foot Locker and H-E-B, and someone with no prior criminal record. That should not have to be said for his fear to matter. But in a country always hunting for a reason to strip Black children of innocence, it matters that even the “good kid” facts were not enough to make him fully human in that courtroom.
And no, the comparison cases do not have to be identical. That is the dodge people use when they do not want to face the pattern. Every case has different facts, different witnesses, different wounds, different judges, and different juries. The point is not that every case is the same. The point is that courts keep finding room for fear, panic, mistakes, confusion, and mercy when certain people claim self-defense. Then a Black defendant asks for the same room, and suddenly there is none.
The cleanest Texas comparison is Belton. Caysen Allison, a white student, stabbed Jose “Joe” Ramirez Jr. during a school bathroom fight. Ramirez died. Allison admitted he stabbed him. His defense said he was scared, being attacked, and feared for his safety. The jury did not convict him of murder. It convicted him of criminally negligent homicide, a lesser charge. The system saw a deadly school stabbing, a self-defense argument, and enough room to avoid the harshest label. He received 10 years. Karmelo received 35.
Then there is Kyle Carruth in Lubbock, a grown white man in a heated confrontation with Chad Read. Carruth got a rifle. Read ended up dead. A special grand jury chose not to indict Carruth on any criminal charge. Outside Texas, Rick Chow, a store owner, chased 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton after wrongly suspecting him of stealing water. Cyrus was shot in the back. Chow claimed he acted to protect his son. A jury acquitted him. Chow belongs in this argument not because he is white, but because the fear the jury accepted was not the fear of the Black child who ended up dead. These cases are not the same, but they show the same ugly truth. The system knows how to understand fear when the person asking for grace is not a Black teenager.
The Kyle Rittenhouse comparison is not about identical facts. It is about the machine that shows up for certain people. Rittenhouse killed two people and wounded a third, claimed self-defense, and was acquitted. But the verdict was only part of the story. Conservatives raised money for him. Politicians defended him. Media figures turned him into a hero. After his acquittal, he was welcomed onto stages as if killing people made him a spokesman for freedom. That machine does not show up for Black children who say they were scared. It calls them thugs, predators, criminals, animals, and monsters, then digs through their lives for anything that makes throwing them away feel easier.
This is not a demand that every Black defendant be acquitted. It is a demand that Black fear be allowed to exist. It is a demand that a Black teenager’s survival instinct not be treated like a crime by default. It is a demand that the same America that can imagine Kyle Rittenhouse as scared, Kyle Carruth as justified, Rick Chow as protective, and Caysen Allison as negligent instead of murderous stop pretending it cannot imagine Karmelo Anthony as terrified. Black people are told self-defense belongs to everyone until they try to use it. They are told the law is neutral until they ask it to recognize their panic. They are told their children are children until those children need mercy, and then suddenly they are men. America did not deny Karmelo Anthony the right to claim self-defense. It did something colder. It let him say the words, then refused to believe a Black child could mean them.
I’ve been sitting with the Karmelo Anthony verdict. As a father of two Black boys, and as someone who has walked alongside countless young Black men at Alcorn, I am grieved.
Karmelo, 19 years old, will spend the next 18+ years in a Texas prison, sentenced by a predominantly white jury after prosecutors systematically struck every Black woman from the jury pool. The judge allowed it. The system called it justice.
Whether you agree with his defense or not, that young man deserved to have his humanity weighed by a jury of his actual peers.
He did not get that. The jury took less than three hours to decide his fate. Draw your own conclusions. But when a jury deliberates that quickly on a case this complex, this racially charged, this consequential it at least raises the question of whether they walked in already knowing what they were going to do.
To be sure, I am praying for the Metcalf family, who lost a son and will grieve that loss for the rest of their lives. Their pain is real and it is sacred.
And I am praying for Karmelo and his mother, who asked for mercy and received 35 years.
This is not a moment to be silent. It is a moment to be honest: our system does not weigh Black lives and white lives on the same scale. Until it does, the work continues.
Related Off-site Links:
South Carolina Jury Finds Store Owner Rick Chow Not Guilty of Murder in Killing of Black Teen Cyrus Carmack Belton – Associated Press via CNN (June 1, 2026).
Karmelo Anthony Found Guilty of the Murder of Austin Metcalf and Sentenced to 35 Years – Adria R Walker (The Guardian, June 9, 2026).
Why the Karmelo Anthony Trial Sparks Broader Debate Over Race and Fairness – Safia Samee Ali (NewsNation, June 9, 2026).
Texas Teen Caysen Allison Found Not Guilty of Murder in Stabbing Death of Fellow Student Jose Luis Ramirez Jr. Killed During Bathroom Brawl – Chris Spargo (People, April 26, 2025).
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