Would they have killed him if he were a black American?
I thought they had let him go. As it turns out, he escaped. I'm not so sure that they wouldn't have killed him. They might have temporarily needed a driver and a hostage. With him driving, they had two guns available to blaze away at any opposition, and a human shield.
I believe they would have killed the Chinese carjack victim eventually ...he just happened to escape. At times carjackers and other kidnapper/abductor/hostage types will tell their victim a lie to placate them until the moment they are ready to terminate them. All abductors want the victim to comply as fully as possible, and telling a lie is one of the easiest ways to do so.
Come think of it I believe in one of the 9/11 planes the terrorists who hijacked it had informed the passengers that they would be ok once certain demands were met. In a pre-9/11 environment it was a good strategy, since in all but one plane the passengers were compliant, and in the single plane where the passengers rose up and fought the terrorists that was only after some of the passengers had received information (when they called home on the plane's credit-card phone system) that other planes had also been hijacked and had crashed into buildings. Without that information the passengers in the fourth plane would have also remained docile, and the plane would have been crashed into either the White House or the Capitol Building.
I believe the terrorists would have killed the Chinese victim had he not escaped. In the same vein, they would also have killed an African American victim, had the driver been one, and they would have also told him a lie that he was safe because he was a minority. Same with virtually any other combination they would have nabbed, including a white male ...who would probably have been told that, as long as he cooperated, they would let him go once they were safely out of the area.
All potential victims would have ended up dead.
Good question..probably.
I don’t think they got the “racist” memo.