Waiting for an all-white jury to decide whether a Black defendant is guilty may feel like waiting for a storm cloud to pass. You don’t know whether it’s going to rain, whether lightning will strike, or whether it will simply cool the air around you as it passes, chilling you with echoes of past incidents of racial injustice. This week, when the public learned that an all-white jury was selected for the Collin County, Texas, murder trial of Karmelo Anthony, a Black teenager who fatally stabbed Austin Metcalf, a white teenager, during an altercation at a track meet, many expressed concerns. They worried that with an all-white jury, the merits of his self-defense claim may not be fairly considered. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused the right to “an impartial jury,” composed of a “fair cross section” of the community. Groups underrepresented due to “systemic exclusion” are prohibited. And yet, no Black jurors are included.

America has a history of using all-white juries to review cases involving Black defendants. Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer and author, explained that excluding Black people from serving on juries was a “hallmark of Jim Crow.” While their exclusion was once explicit, the methods used today are subtle, often carried out under the guise of colorblindness. In The New Jim Crow, Alexander noted that Black people are more likely to be removed due to felony disenfranchisement and the jury selection process. While these methods seem neutral, they disproportionately eliminate prospective Black jurors. As an example, those who’ve had “negative experiences with law enforcement,” an experience more common within the black community, were eliminated from the pool of jurors.

While some believe we live in a post-racial society, research indicates that the race of jury members continues to affect the outcomes of real-world cases. A Duke University study of trial outcomes in Florida found that “in cases with no blacks in the jury pool, blacks were convicted 81% of the time, and whites were convicted 66% of the time,” a whopping 15% difference (Anwar et al., 2012). A 2020 study of “nearly 400 criminal trials in Louisiana and Mississippi found that Black potential jurors were more than three times as likely as white potential jurors to be excluded by prosecutors for cause” (Frampton and Adelson, 2018). According to the Equal Justice Initiative, “while the Supreme Court’s ruling in Baston v. Kentucky aimed to prevent racially motivated jury selection, peremptory strikes are frequently used to disproportionately reduce minority representation.”

The authors of an Equal Justice Initiative report stated that “the right to a jury of one’s peers is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as a safeguard against abuses of power by state and federal governments.” Thus, the disenfranchisement of Black jurors undermines this right. Some may defend the use of an “all-white jury” because jurors are asked to swear to their impartiality, but this argument overlooks implicit racial bias, which people are often unaware of. Also, due to social desirability bias, many deny endorsing racist beliefs because they prefer to provide an answer that’s consistent with social norms. In the post-Civil Rights era, when explicit racism is less tolerated, prejudice is more frequently denied, a key limitation in any questionnaire that attempts to measure the phenomenon. While measures can be used to learn more about biases, we should consider their reliability and validity.

Researcher Hayley Roberts found that “in spite of their conscious feelings, white people with high levels of implicit racial bias show less warmth and welcoming behavior toward black people. They will sit further away, and their facial expressions will be cold and withdrawn.” Even judges have been found “to grant dark-skinned defendants sentences up to 8 months longer for identical offenses.” There is no way to know for sure whether bias plays a role, because this method of inquiry depends on the honest responses from participants. And in the case of white people serving on a jury, where the defendant is Black, there’s an actual incentive for those who are prejudiced to deny any ill-will — because they could be empowered to impact the outcome of their case. Since each measure of bias has its own strengths and limitations, it’s difficult to say with certainty that an all-white jury wouldn’t bring any biases into their deliberative process.

In an investigative report published by Emerald Pages, the authors addressed a question many in the public have: How a ‘Race-Neutral’ Jury System led to an All-White Jury for Karmelo Anthony. When we look at the racial makeup of Collin County, where approximately 10% of the population is Black, “pure mathematics confirms that an ‘all-white jury’ should not exist.” This is not a random outcome. “Legal scholars and civil rights advocates argue that it is the predictable product of a system that prioritizes procedural ‘race neutrality’ over actual demographic fairness.” How did they end up with a jury without any Black people in a diverse region? The jury selection process began with 600 county residents, who were summoned and asked to complete a questionnaire designed to dramatically limit the pool. “Jurors were disqualified if they admitted they had already watched viral news coverage,” which many had, or if they “made up their minds,” based on what they’d seen, reducing the number to 45.

Based on the county’s racial demographics, they would have expected a proportionate number of 4 or 5 Black jurors, at this point, but they ended up with three Black women jurors, who were stricken. Prosecutors argued they should be removed from the jury pool since they were educators, and the incident under review involved students at a high school event. The defense objected because a white woman juror who was an educator wasn’t removed. Still, the judge overruled because she didn’t work with young students, “allowing the all-white jury to be seated.” Authors of the article concluded that Karmelo Anthony’s trial serves “as a case study in how the American legal system uses race-neutral procedures to produce racially skewed outcomes.” While some would only consider the system racist if “whites-only” signs came back into vogue or if a law explicitly prohibited the inclusion of Black jurors, this stringent standard ignores disparate outcomes produced under seemingly colorblind methods.

Given the high-profile nature of the Karmelo Anthony murder case and the nation’s history of prejudice, it’s hard for some, particularly Black people, to trust that an all-white jury will deliver a fair and impartial verdict for a young Black defendant. While they may fulfill their duties honorably, regardless of race, it’s hard to believe bias won’t factor into their deliberations. Some may wonder how we got here, how a country that prided itself during the 1960s and 70s on putting Jim Crow in the rearview mirror could still be facing the problem of all-white juries deciding the fate of Black people. In The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel about women losing their civil rights and the government forcing fertile women to bear children for the elite, Margaret Atwood suggests that rights are lost in stages rather than all at once. “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you know it,” the protagonist, June Osborn, says, reflecting on how so many things changed gradually, with no alarm bells going off at each step until it was too late. With that in mind, when people pay attention only to instances of explicit racism, they fail to consider the factors that contribute to racial disparities.

As the trial of Karmelo Anthony continues, many are discussing whether an all-white jury is fair, especially in light of research indicating the racial makeup of jurors impacts trial outcomes. If you ask Black teenagers in Texas, few will consider white adults to be their peers. When seeing the coverage of this case, it’s hard not to be reminded of the 1944 trial of George Stinney, a 14-year-old Black teenager who was wrongfully executed for killing two white girls. An all-white jury in South Carolina declared him guilty after only 10 minutes of deliberations. And while the court exonerated him posthumously in 2014, this case is a reminder of the harmful impact of entrusting all-white juries to determine the trial outcome for Black defendants. If we want to live in a society where citizens are afforded equal rights and legal protections, we should consider how processes that seem neutral, such as jury selection methods that limit Black participation, have perpetuated racial disparities. We have to consider race, as long as racism persists in America, as long as those with darker skin are subjected to worse outcomes.