Yet we know how to prevent murders like the one in Charlotte; it doesn’t involve another national conversation.

T he cold-blooded and utterly chilling murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska has inspired some conservatives to demand an accounting: call it a racial reckoning for the right.

They want payback for the racial reckoning of 2020. They are understandably angry that the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police was taken to be a definitive and representative statement of racial relations in America and used to justify not just demonstrations and rioting in many cities but a suite of disastrous anti-policing actions and policies. This resulted in insane experiments such as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, which led to a rash of mob-like business intimidation and the shootings of two teenagers. The fact is that deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police are rare. Statistically, black-on-white violence is far more common, some conservatives point out, and they want a national conversation.

This pool of emotional magma is roiling underneath the right, seeking volcanic exit into the general atmosphere. Matt Walsh, of the Daily Wire, is representative:

Walsh is perhaps the calmest exponent for the right’s demand for a racial reckoning. He wants us to talk more honestly about the truths we would discover if we looked at the crime statistics. Speaking for his audience, he says that the time for tolerating disorder must come to an end, but he doesn’t exactly lay out what he proposes that we do.

Another set of voices, farther out on the margins but not so far out that it can’t be heard on X, says that if only Iryna Zarutska had been more “racist,” she’d still be alive. That’s the message of far-right influencer Nick Fuentes and many others online.

But I don’t think any such racial reckoning is coming, nor would it help us solve our problems. While Decarlos Brown Jr., the man filmed stabbing Zarutska, seems to mention her race while babbling to himself before the attack, the other facts of his case make race almost incidental. This is a man who has compiled a long rap sheet that includes violent offenses. He was cast out of his home by a mother who had sought to get him involuntarily committed for his schizophrenia, which is evident not only in the video but also in his record of interaction with authorities.

Unlike what Fuentes and others suggest, a far more direct route to preventing this tragedy would have been a firm policy of isolating and institutionalizing violent schizophrenics, giving them the “wraparound” care that ensures their compliance with antipsychotic-drug prescriptions and other psychiatric treatments.

It’s true that anti-racist dogmas can sometimes get in the way of the authorities’ enforcing laws vigorously for fear that doing so might have a disparate impact on minority communities. We’ve seen that under radical district attorneys. But in most cases, this is not how the American system works. The same statistics that show black-on-white crime to be far more prevalent than the reverse, on an absolute basis and per capita, also show that we incarcerate black people at a similarly disproportionate rate.

There is another, more immediate problem that a right-wing racial reckoning brings up. A significant proportion of those who want to have this conversation do so because the only point they want to make is that they believe the problem is congenital and irremediable. That is, they think little can be done about black lawlessness beyond the stiff application of the law. But they would like to posit a public recognition of black inferiority that would instantly unsettle not just civil rights law but also the entire liberal inheritance that rests on a doctrine of man’s equality before the law.

Other may simply hold out that, at least, the false narratives about white menace should be repudiated or reversed. But while the mainstream media do engage in mythmaking and moralizing, what other evidence is there that the public is ignorant about patterns of crime? Racial and class segregation, patterns of internal migration, and real estate values all testify that very few people are under delusions about where in America crime and disorder are prevalent. Americans may be polite, even to a point that looks misleading, but they are not fools.

The radical extension of civil rights laws and logic through our institutions was born out of the scandal that the condition of black America did not improve sufficiently after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During the crack epidemic, it was arguable that things had worsened. Wealth, achievement, and education gaps still persist — and the debate about these will remain with us for decades. In the meantime, we know how to prevent murders like the one that occurred in Charlotte last month. The solution isn’t to give refugees instruction in “street knowledge”; it’s to protect the public from those who have proved themselves violent and insane.