It always enrages me how when white people engage in criminal activity, other white people look for the social or systemic reasons to “explain” why a white person did a bad thing and why it’s not really their fault.

Yet, these same individuals cast aspersions on the entire Black race when one Black person commits a crime. There’s no systemic or social analysis for Black people, no. Instead they make crimes committed by Black people pathological, a virtue of our very Blackness.

Whiteness affords itself the privilege of individualism such that when white people commit crimes, the entire white race isn’t implicated. When a white person commits a crime, they “strayed from their true nature.” When a Black person commits a crime, “it is our true nature.”

That’s because in the white racial imagination, whiteness is a state of pure and unassailable innocence, and it can only be imagined as such if it casts Blackness in the role of pure and immutable evil.

This explains why laws and all other institutional rules, customs, traditions, and practices are applied differently based on race—negatively impacting, stigmatizing, traumatizing, and killing Black people.