After a Ukrainian woman who fled war in her home country was stabbed to death on a commuter train in North Carolina, the alarming act of violence ignited bitter racial and political rhetoric about crime victims and perpetrators in America.
The fatal attack last month, in which the alleged perpetrator was identified as a Black man, evoked such visceral reactions partly because it was caught on surveillance video that went viral online. On Tuesday, North Carolina’s Legislature passed a criminal justice package named after the victim to limit defendants’ eligibility for bail and to encourage them to undergo mental health evaluations.
Rhetoric about the attack, including claims about “Black-on-white-crime,” has spread from social media and broadcast airwaves to the halls of Congress and the White House. Some of it leverages cherry-picked cases and ill-framed crime statistics to reproduce age-old harmful narratives about Black criminality and threats to white populations.
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