On May 28, 2023, a 61-year-old Asian store owner in South Carolina pursued and fatally shot a 14-year-old Black boy in the back, according to the New York Times. Prosecutors in the SC trial say that Chikei “Rick” Chow chased Cyrus Carmack-Belton more than 130 yards from Chow’s Columbia gas station convenience store after wrongly believing the teen stole four bottles of water, The Independent reported.
In 2026, three years after the shooting, he walks free, and a young boy is dead over bottled water.
The Defense team, according to The Independent, claimed that Carmack-Belton pointed a gun at Chow’s son, and Chow acted only in the protection of his son. They also say that the store owner performed CPR on the teen. However, the prosecution says that Chow fired unprovoked, and witnesses testify to not seeing anything in the victim’s hands. CNN reported that deputies found a gun several feet from the victim.
According to News19, after over eight hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Chow of murder as the Carmack-Belton family broke into sobs.
Protesters gathered on Parklane Road the next day, where Chow’s former gas station is now under new management, said The Independent. At one point, protesters crowded an intersection, chanting and holding signs reading “Justice for Cyrus.” Protesters also arranged empty water bottles to spell “Cyrus” as they held vigils.
Another Case of “Self-Defense” and Another Verdict
In 2025, a Black 17-year-old boy was competing in a track meet in Texas. He sought shelter from the rain under an opposing team’s tent, where a verbal altercation quickly escalated into the Black athlete stabbing a peer in the chest, according to The Guardian.
The next year, The Guardian reported, jurors in Collin County, Texas, found now-19-year-old Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder for the fatal stabbing of Anthony Metcalf.
Anthony’s school, Centennial High School, did not have a tent on the day of Metcalf’s stabbing at a track meet, The Guardian reported. When it began to rain, Anthony sought shelter under Frisco Memorial High School’s tent. Witnesses say that Austin Metcalf and his twin brother Hunter, among others, told Anthony to leave the tent as many as 15 times.
CBS reported that the confrontation escalated as both the prosecution and defense witnesses alleged that Anthony verbally provoked Metcalf and reached into his backpack. The prosecution described grainy camera footage of the incident, illustrating Metcalf pushing Anthony out of the tent, Anthony stabbing Metcalf with a 5-inch knife, and then running away. Emergency responders rushed Metcalf to the hospital, where he died of his injuries.
The jury rejected self-defense and sudden passion claims, finding Anthony guilty of murder and sentencing him to 35 years in prison.
In Anthony’s trial, the prosecution attorney, Bill Wirskye, asserted that the case “has nothing to do with race,” said CBS. Arguing the race-neutrality of the case, the prosecution dismissed all qualified African American jurors.
Activism and Viral Criticism
The conversation that emerged, especially online, centered on race. For example, musician Cardi B wrote on X, “This is not justice,” and Senator Ted Cruz reposted a viral, false claim on X that Anthony’s family withdrew fundraiser money to buy a house and vehicle, which Hindustan Times fact-checked.
Regarding the jury, which was not all-white but lacked any Black members, @queenie4rmnola said: “No Black people on the jury means Karmelo wasn’t judged by a jury of his peers.”
These are just a few of the narratives furthering division and racial outrage on social media.
Comparing Anthony’s case with Carmack-Belton’s sparked a national debate: the cases concluded within weeks of each other but with contrasting verdicts. Critics of the contrasting outcomes argue deep-seated racial biases in the justice system — critics like Emancipate NC say that Black defendants receive the harshest penalties and cases with Black victims receive greater leniency.
Whether these claims hold substance, they reinforce public distrust in our country’s governing institutions. As of 2023, 74% of Black Americans believe the criminal justice system is designed to hold them back, according to the Pew Research Center.
Outrage at Chow’s not-guilty verdict follows a long history of Asian-Black tension in the United States. Returning to the killing of Latasha Harlins, we know this is not the first time similar stories have happened.
In 1991, Soon Ja Du, a Korean store owner, shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins because she believed the young Black girl was stealing a bottle of orange juice that she intended to pay for, EBSCO says. Harlins’s death was one of the catalysts of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, contributing to ethnic tensions for many years to come.
Du received five years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine.
Before the incident, anti-Black resentment brewed in LA’s Asian communities while anti-Asian resentment brewed in Black ones, the Wikipedia article also noted. Korean shopkeepers suspected shoplifting by Black customers, while Black customers felt discriminated against by the store owners.
I spoke with Chany Chea, Program Director for the Asian American Advocacy Fund, a Georgia grassroots organization. She told me that the division between Black and Asian communities may only end when we address the systems pitting us against each other.
“The system,” Kennedy Crane, 17, said, “is and has always been set up to turn a blind eye, ear, head, and heart to anybody who is not of service to those in power.” Kennedy is a student at the Lovett School, where she supports diversity, equity, and inclusion as a member of Black Affinity Group and the Student Diversity Leadership Cohort. She also advocates for justice on social media, where she brought attention to Cyrus and Karmelo’s causes.
Attorney Gerald Griggs, former NAACP president, told me what the system Kennedy and Chea spoke of is: white supremacy.
Minority solidarity combats white supremacy, both Chea and Griggs asserted. But when juries acquit an Asian man of murder and sentence a Black teen to 35 years in prison within weeks of each other, solidarity seems impossible to achieve.
These cases are not legally identical, but citizens still see a racial double standard.
In response to the verdict in Chow’s case, many Black Americans online have been calling for the boycott of Asian businesses. But this is not interracial solidarity, and it seems to only benefit white supremacy.
No one can change the verdicts of these cases, but we can change our reactions, and that can change the future. As Chea put it, “collective action has always been one of our strongest tools for confronting hate, violence, and injustice.”
She added, “As Asian Americans, that means rejecting the model minority myth and recognizing that proximity to whiteness has never delivered safety or liberation; it only deepens division.”
Writing as a part of the Asian American community, I am all too familiar with the model minority myth. Anti-Black sentiments are ingrained in many Asian immigrants, who experience the construct of race for the first time when they arrive in America.
And Asian immigrants, seeking a better life here, look to emulate the behaviors of those they see as successful, Jezzika Chung writes. But given America’s long history of oppressing nonwhite races, white Americans emerge as the most successful group — and therefore the example that impressionable Asian immigrants sanctify. They equate whiteness with success.
Whiteness, historically, is anti-Black. Nimisha Barton, PhD, explores this in her article “Proximity to Whiteness.”
A University of Michigan article says that White Americans coined the model minority myth in the late 1960s amid the Civil Rights Movement. Racist white Americans argued that the success of Asian Americans disproved racism in America. Asian Americans often matched the education levels of white Americans, and although they remained a marginalized group, they often lacked the activism to combat it.
White Americans used the myth to argue that African Americans should not combat America’s institutional racism and segregation, but rather focus on education, as they claimed Asian Americans did.
But the model minority myth is just that: a myth.
It is founded on stereotypes and generalizations, perpetuating a false narrative. It assumes that Asian Americans are isotropic, or identical in all directions. Asian Americans are subject to inequalities and racism, regardless of the denial by the white majority.
According to the Pew Research Center, most Asians in America live in California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, and Washington—four of which have the highest costs of living in the US, according to insure.com. This means that, compared with other minority groups spread across the country, these populations likely have higher median incomes. In New York City, Asian Americans experience a 27% poverty rate, roughly equal to Black and Latino populations, says the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
But Asian Americans have faced discrimination in America, PBS says, from the Chinese Exclusion Act banning Chinese immigration to the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. They did not, however, experience the dehumanization and enslavement of their population from the country’s inception.
So Asian American racism is deprioritized and overlooked, while the alleged success of our people is used to legitimize white supremacy. The white population presents us as a “good” minority to pit against Black Americans, whom they deem “bad.”
But for the cycle of resentment between Black and Asian Americans to end, minorities must realize the fight is not my race versus yours. That’s the fight that American culture condones. Instead, we must combat the institutions that embedded white supremacy in our nation’s culture. There must be “a mutual understanding” that all parties “have something to offer and share,” and neither “is trying to win an argument,” Kennedy said.
“We may have come here on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now,” said legendary American civil rights leader John Lewis on August 28, 2013, honoring the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.
For Asian Americans, that means “showing up at rallies, supporting Black-led organizations and campaigns, educating our own communities, and challenging anti-Blackness wherever it appears, even within our own families and community spaces,” Chea believes.
Anthony’s case doesn’t carry the same racial implications as Chow’s, but the online discourse followed a similar pattern, and critics often linked it to Chow’s.
“Shooting a kid in the back is labeled self-defense, but stabbing a kid for putting his hands on you isn’t,” @_Matthew1017 posted on X. Since Carmack-Belton was running away when Chow shot him, prosecutors and people online argued that he did not pose a threat to warrant self-defense. Anthony stabbed Metcalf over a shove, and his trial ended very differently.
“The contexts present two Black boys being failed to different extents by a system,” Kennedy said, citing how the self-defense claim benefited Chow but not Anthony.
While Kennedy pointed to flaws in the system, Attorney Griggs blamed Anthony’s legal team. The defense did not bring Anthony forth to testify. Griggs believes that if he had provided his perspective, the jury could have reasonably determined whether it was reasonable for him to use deadly force. Griggs also expressed grave concerns about the lack of Black jurors. The South has a history of all-white juries, an injustice to people of color like Karmelo Anthony.
“The defense failed Mr. Anthony more than the system failed Mr. Anthony,” Attorney Griggs said. He could have convinced “a jury of his peers,” including people of color, “that his actions were in fact in self-defense,” and swayed them to manslaughter or even an outright acquittal.
Griggs argues that the public should always know what happens in the courtroom. Programs like Fulton County’s CourtWatch, where community volunteers “determine that justice is being pursued fairly and efficiently” (Fulton County’s website), should be launched nationwide, and anyone who cares about the result of contentious trials should watch them develop in real time. Many state courts also run accessible virtual courtrooms on YouTube.
“There are a lot of Karmelo Anthonys out there,” Griggs says. “There are a lot of victims that get caught up in the system that don’t get justice… we need to do a better job of shining light on the entire system.”
Kennedy pointed out that she didn’t learn about the trials until about three weeks after they occurred, although most of the coverage on her social media feed aligned with her own views.
Social media is a growing news source for teens, both Kennedy and Griggs said. Creators and influencers who care about these societal faults must share these stories at every point of the process, not only when the verdict comes out. Know the story as it happens; don’t just react when it’s over.
But everything is online now, including primary sources. We can read trial transcripts, pleadings, and motions all online. We can speak to the defense and prosecution attorneys, and rarely, such as in Anthony’s case, even the judge. Although there will be many legal terms, Griggs recommends using AI to break them down.
Kennedy said we need to draw our own conclusions. This means we must listen to what other racial groups have to say, because “collections of experiences that other races simply cannot understand provide necessary contexts,” she said.
The median age of U.S. senators at the start of the 119th Congress was 64, and the median age of U.S. representatives was 57. This is a problem because, as Griggs puts it, “we’re closer to 2050 than we are in 1950. So we shouldn’t be having a conversation about 1950.”
But “every single great change in history was made by people [who] were 15 to 25,” Griggs says. From the Civil Rights Movement to the abolition movement to the founding of our country in the American Revolution, “that’s the essence of what it means to be young.”
When cases like Chow, Carmack-Belton, Anthony, and Metcalf happen, Griggs calls on young people to use their voices to improve the system, “so these cases become the exception instead of the norm.”
And the Black and Asian American communities must show up for each other. We saw our communities come together during the Black Lives Matter movement. Asian Americans recognized that even if their struggles were unique, BLM fights a similar battle against white supremacy, Kim Tran, an anti-racist consultant and author, discussed on NPR.
Still, “solidarity is not something we practice only after a tragedy goes viral,” Chea said. “It is a daily commitment to organizing together to dismantle white supremacy, building lasting relationships across communities, and refusing to let systems designed to divide us weaken our collective power.”
