When Black America Cringes: Why One Black Person Can Become Everybody’s Problem, but MAGA Gets to Walk Away

By Stacy M. Brown

Senior Global Correspondent

There is a prayer Black America knows that has never belonged in a church.

It is whispered in living rooms. Thought silently behind steering wheels. Felt in the stomach when a television anchor interrupts programming with breaking news. A shooting. A bombing. A spectacular crime. An act so ugly that within minutes the country will be searching for a face.

And somewhere, before the suspect has a name, a Black person thinks it.

Lord, please don’t let him be Black.

Not because Black Americans believe Black criminals deserve protection. Not because the crime becomes less horrible depending upon who committed it.

Because generations of experience have taught Black Americans that the moment one Black face appears beneath the word “suspect,” millions of innocent Black faces can be dragged into the defendant’s chair beside him.

“Black folks have lived with this strange burden for generations,” said Denise Carter, 62, a retired Philadelphia public-school teacher. “Something terrible happens somewhere in America, and before we even know who did it, there’s that quiet thought: ‘Please don’t let them be Black.’ Because we know one Black person’s crime can become an indictment of all of us.”

Carter put her finger on an American privilege rarely described as one: the privilege of being allowed to fail individually.

“When the person is white, nobody expects every white family in America to answer for him,” she said. “Nobody sits there saying, ‘Lord, please don’t let him be white.’ That freedom from collective blame is something Black people have rarely been given.”

One Black person, millions put on trial

The reflex did not materialize from thin air.

America spent centuries manufacturing stories about Black people as a group. Black criminality. Black laziness. Black intellectual inferiority. Black violence. Black irresponsibility. The individual could disappear beneath the stereotype so completely that the actions of somebody a Black family had never met, in a city they had never visited, could suddenly feel dangerously personal.

A white gunman could be a gunman.

A white thief could be a thief.

A white killer could be a killer.

A Black criminal has too often arrived carrying an invisible census form, his race entered into evidence along with his name.

Aaliyah Thompson, a 27-year-old graduate student and community volunteer, described the psychological absurdity of it.

“There is something deeply wrong with a country where a Black mother can watch breaking news about a crime committed by a complete stranger and find herself praying, ‘Please don’t let him be Black,’” Thompson said. “Think about what that says. She isn’t worried because she knows him. She’s worried because she knows America.”

“She knows that if he is Black, somebody somewhere will use what he did to say something about her son, her husband, her neighborhood or Black people generally,” Thompson said.

Then comes the question made particularly explosive by the Trump era.

Where is the MAGA version of that prayer?

‘How come it’s only two steps for us?’

President Donald Trump has provided his supporters no shortage of moments that might have produced that kind of collective embarrassment.

In February, a video shared on Trump’s Truth Social account depicted former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes, imagery carrying a long and vicious history of dehumanizing Black people. The White House initially dismissed the criticism as “fake outrage.” The video was later deleted, with a White House official saying it had been posted erroneously by a staff member. Trump said he had not watched the offending portion and resisted calls to apologize. Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina called it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

Yet there was no great public ritual of MAGA self-examination. No chorus of white Americans staring at their televisions and pleading, Please don’t let this man make people think this is who we are.

No widespread fear that the conduct of the movement’s most powerful figure would somehow be charged against every person wearing the hat.

That contradiction has been gnawing at Merrill Hanks, a retired accountant born in the Mississippi Delta who eventually made his way north to Philadelphia.

Hanks has lived long enough to remember when segregation was not a paragraph in a history book but part of the architecture of American life. He remembers an America in which the color line reached into schools, jobs, neighborhoods, and the ordinary places where people tried to build their lives.

In a recent conversation, Hanks reached for the sentence he has heard Black people utter when terrible news breaks.

“Lord, I hope the person is not Black, because it’s going to put us back two steps,” Hanks said.

Then he turned the question around.

“Well, how come it’s only two steps for us, and no steps for Trump?” he asked. “He’s supposed to go back 12 yards.”

Or more, he added.

The line carried humor, but Hanks was digging at something much older.

“Just calling somebody a racist is not enough,” he said. “There’s depth there.”

The history underneath the prayer

Hanks kept reaching backward.

He talked about segregated Black schools and the Black teachers who educated children in a country that simultaneously questioned their intelligence. He discussed historically Black colleges and universities, institutions that produced generations of scholars, professionals, scientists, artists, political leaders, and educators while routinely being treated as somehow academically lesser.

“For our schools that these people think are inferior,” Hanks asked, “my question is, how did they get to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton?”

He spoke about Black educators and students who refused to accept somebody else’s measurement of their intelligence.

“Our intelligence is really something that needs to be discovered,” Hanks said, along with “the resilience” of Black Americans.

His mind raced through names and history.

Booker T. Washington.

Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Benjamin Banneker.

Arthur Ashe.

Douglas Wilder.

The Black women immortalized in Hidden Figures, whose mathematical brilliance helped send Americans into space while segregation still dictated where Black people could sit, work, eat, and use a restroom.

“There’s all kinds of stuff in our history that’s just wonderful,” Hanks said.

For Hanks, that history helps explain the enormous weight contained in six little words: Please don’t let him be Black.

Black achievement has so often been required to serve as a rebuttal.

A Black student could not simply ace the examination. His success could become evidence against the assumption that Black students were inferior.

A Black professional walking into a room where nobody looked like her could find herself carrying qualifications in one hand and the burden of proving she belonged in the other.

A Black “first” could spend a career knowing that failure might be remembered as more than just personal failure.

Then a complete stranger could commit a crime hundreds of miles away, and suddenly Black people who had nothing whatsoever to do with him could feel themselves bracing for impact.

The MAGA exemption

Marcus Reed, 41, a union electrician and father of three, sees the old bargain operating in modern political life.

“What gets me is the double standard,” Reed said. “Black people have been conditioned to brace themselves when somebody commits some horrible crime because we know how quickly that person’s race can become part of the story.”

Reed looks at Trump’s political movement and sees something very different.

“After years of ugly behavior by some people wearing MAGA hats or waving Trump flags, you don’t hear conservatives saying, ‘God, I hope this wasn’t one of ours,’” he said. “They get to separate themselves from the individual.”

That is the luxury.

Individuality.

A Trump supporter can decide another Trump supporter is a fool, a criminal, a racist, an extremist, or simply an embarrassment and walk away without wondering whether the stranger’s behavior has somehow damaged the standing of every conservative in America.

A white American can watch another white American commit an atrocity without fearing that the evening news will convene a national discussion about what is wrong with white culture.

Nobody demands that an innocent white accountant in Pittsburgh explain a white criminal in Phoenix.

Nobody asks a white mother whether she has had “the conversation” with her children because of the latest white suspect.

Nobody turns to the nearest white politician and demands that he answer for whiteness.

Black Americans know a different inheritance.

It helped create the old parental command to be twice as good. It helped turn respectability into armor. It meant accomplishment could carry the extra weight of racial vindication.

Jackie Robinson could not merely play baseball. Black children integrating white schools walked through screaming mobs, knowing that someone was watching their every movement. Black professionals entering previously closed workplaces understood that a mistake might be treated as more than just a mistake.

The person had to carry the weight of their race.

It is an exhausting way to belong to a country.

‘One person gets to be one person.'

Hanks sees the Trump era through the long lens of American history.

He pointed to Trump’s admiration for President Andrew Jackson, whose administration carried out the forced removal of Native Americans following passage of the Indian Removal Act. Hanks also spoke about Thomas Jefferson, slavery, and Jefferson’s dismissal of the literary ability of Phillis Wheatley, the formerly enslaved Black poet whose work challenged assumptions about Black intellectual inferiority in the 18th century.

For Hanks, those pieces belong to a much larger American argument about race, power, who gets judged as an individual, and who is made to answer for an entire people.

“The beauty of where we are now is MAGA is still with this guy,” Hanks said.

His question is not whether every Trump supporter agrees with everything Trump says or does. Millions obviously have their own reasons for supporting him, from immigration and taxes to abortion, the courts, cultural issues, and party loyalty.

The harder question is why the collective burden appears to operate so differently.

Why does a Black stranger have to worry that another Black stranger has disgraced him?

Why can someone else simply say, "That wasn’t me?"

Why can political supporters disown the conduct of the worst person in their movement without fearing that his actions will become a character reference for all of them?

And why have Black Americans had to fight so long for precisely that separation?

Thompson believes that is the heart of it.

“White Americans don’t carry that same reflex,” she said. “MAGA supporters don’t seem to carry it either.”

Then she landed on the privilege hidden inside those words.

“One person gets to be one person for them.”

That may be the entire argument in eight words.

One person gets to be one person.

One criminal is one criminal.

One racist is one racist.

One fool is one fool.

One person’s disgrace belongs to the person who earned it.

Reed said Black Americans are not asking for absolution, special treatment, or a different standard of right and wrong.

They are asking for something considerably more ordinary.

“Black people have spent generations fighting for that same basic courtesy.”

Carter, the retired teacher, knows the old reflex has survived because the fear behind it has survived.

One person commits the crime. One person says the ugly thing. One person disgraces himself.

But somewhere in Black America, when the bulletin flashes across the television, and authorities have not yet released the photograph, somebody still feels that familiar knot tightening in the stomach.

And the prayer comes.

Lord, please don’t let him be Black.

Not because Black people fear knowing who committed the crime.

Because they know how quickly America can turn one Black person into a verdict on millions.

And after generations of carrying strangers on their backs, they are still demanding a freedom other Americans barely have to consider:

The right for one Black person’s worst act to belong to that person alone.