The Verdict I Cheered

What O.J. Simpson taught me about the machine that just misfired on Karmelo Anthony

For five years, I have watched the same machine start up on cue. A name goes viral, a video makes its rounds, a verdict lands, and within the hour, the country sorts itself into the two camps it sorted into the last time, and the time before that. I know the machine because I have felt it move in me. There is a quiet satisfaction in watching your side land a clean punch, and I am not above enjoying it.

So when Karmelo Anthony’s name began trending after his conviction, I braced for the familiar sequence: the hashtags, the marches, the corporate statements, the certainty hardening on every side. Some of it came. Most of it never did, and the engine that turned the whole country over in 2020 coughed once and went quiet.

That silence is worth sitting with, because my own camp is already misreading it. The anti-woke crowd watched the machine stall and started celebrating, certain this was the day wokeness finally died, and sanity walked back through the door. I understand the urge. I also think they are dead wrong, and the reason cuts closer to home than any of us would like to admit.

The high tide

George Floyd was the high-water mark of a certain kind of belief. I am not speaking of policy, though policy followed. I mean a faith. For one summer, the country behaved as though it had found the master key to every locked door, and the key was race. Corporations issued confessions. Campuses reorganized around the new creed, and people who had never prayed in their lives discovered a liturgy and meant every word of it. The crowds were not marching over a single death. They were worshiping. A movement that asks for that kind of devotion is no longer making an argument. It is asking for your soul.

The tide going out

Karmelo Anthony is the tide going out.

When his conviction landed, the same hands reached for the same lever. The familiar voices spoke up, the appeals went out, and the framing arrived on schedule: another black child failed by a hostile system. The lever moved, and the engine did not turn over. No streets filled, and no institution capitulated. The machine misfired because the symbol could not bear the weight laid on it. Floyd could be processed into a clean story. Karmelo Anthony could not. You had a young man convicted of driving a knife into another teenager’s chest, a family that reportedly skipped the sentencing, and an appeal that kept arriving with a donation link attached.

The detail that makes this different from 2020 is where the pushback came from. Not the usual outside critics. It came from inside. A growing number of black Americans looked at the same facts and refused to play along. When even Charleston White publicly walked back his support and called it a money grab, the apparatus lost the one thing it cannot manufacture: the consent of the people it claims to speak for.

The inversion

Look at where the grief actually lived. The people closest to the blood reached for lament, and some reached for mercy. The father of the boy who died spoke of forgiveness, not because he thought the sentence unjust but because he refused to let rage own the rest of his life. The mother said it plainly: for the journalists and the activists, this was a story, and for her family, it was the rest of their lives.

Proximity produced lament. Distance, with nothing real at stake, produced ammunition. The people with the most reason to demand a pound of flesh asked instead for the grace to keep living, while the ones with no skin in the matter turned a buried child into a billboard.

The weight no event can bear

Strip the tribes away and look at what both sides are doing. They are asking one dead boy and one convicted boy to carry the verdict on an entire nation. That is a weight no event can bear, and laying it on two teenagers is its own idolatry. People cannot stop watching because they want to know a true verdict was rendered, and we no longer share a court we trust to render one. A jury spoke, a judge defended it, and an appeal will test them both, yet nothing settles, because the real appeal has moved to the court of public opinion, and that court never adjourns. A society that has surrendered every standard higher than itself is sentenced to relitigate every case forever.

Scripture will not let me hold this loosely. The law God gave Israel did not merely forbid favoring the powerful. It read, “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:15). The command cuts both ways at once. “Unequal weights are an abomination to the LORD, and false scales are not good” (Proverbs 20:23). A scale that reads heavy for my tribe and light for yours is false, even when my tribe is the one history wounded.

The scale I carried

I would like to tell you I have always wanted justice more than I wanted my side to win. It is not true.

I am old enough to remember the white Bronco crawling down a Los Angeles freeway with O.J. Simpson in the back seat. I remember the names the culture has worked to forget, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. I remember the glove, and the line that turned a double murder into a slogan: if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. And I remember the verdict that came down that fall: not guilty. The split screens caught everything, black celebration on one side of the country, white disbelief on the other.

To my own shame, I cheered.

Not because I believed Simpson was innocent. I cheered because he won, because somewhere in me I had decided that a black man beating the system was a victory worth having on its own terms, whatever the truth, whoever was in the ground. It took me years to see what that cheer exposed. I had grown so attached to a story of black victimhood that I celebrated a verdict that served no justice and honored no victim. It served an idol, and I had been worshiping it quietly, the same way the crowds worshiped in 2020, the same way some are worshiping now. I have no standing to indict the machine until I admit I once helped run it.

What I am watching for

So no, I do not read Karmelo Anthony as wokeness dying and reason returning. That reading is too clean, and it credits the crowd with a conversion it has not made. Distrust of a lie is not love of the truth. A man can stop believing a con and still want nothing to do with justice.

The danger now is not another riot. It is quieter and worse. It is a culture deciding that because the last verdict was a hustle, every verdict is a hustle, and walking away from the idea that justice can be found at all. That outcome does not arrive with fire. It arrives as a shrug. Exposure is necessary, but it was never sufficient. The tide going out shows you the wreckage on the seabed. It does not rebuild the shore.

What we do with it

Refuse the lever. When the next name trends and the machine fires up, do not let your tribe drag the appeal into the court of public opinion, and do not let the other tribe do it either.

Hold one scale. Weigh it all by a single measure: the killing, the fundraising built on top of it, and the cruelty running back the other way in mocking shirts and dehumanizing branding. A standard that exempts your own side is no standard.

Keep the victim visible. A real boy died, with a father who chose forgiveness over rage, and he is not a prop in anyone’s argument.

Then take the question of final justice to the only court that has never handed down a false verdict. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Genesis 18:25). Every case the public never resolves, He will. That is not permission to stop pursuing justice now. It is the only thing that keeps the pursuit from curdling into rage on one end or despair on the other.

The tide is going out. What it leaves behind depends on whether we still remember what we were looking for in the water.

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Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

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