Some people don’t think killing black people “if you’re scared” is a real crime, so they also don’t think threatening to summon the palace guards to perform a summary execution of a black person is serious transgression worthy of social stigma.

If wielding this kind of power is looked down upon, it raises the barrier to exercising the option for themselves if they so choose. They want to have the option because they can’t imagine themselves or their loved ones looking down a gun barrel because someone got annoyed.

She made it clear to him in the video she understood the police might take his life. That was the point of the threat and how she articulated it. If you think this is like dinging someone’s car and not leaving a note or cutting in line, you’re saying more than you know.

This is bigger than one person. It’s a system of belief that is embedded in the law everywhere in the country, in a “colorblind” way. But when so many share a belief of who is “scary” and what reactions to that fear are “reasonable,” then you don’t need to be explicit.

But just to be clear: This was not someone acting out of ignorance. It’s not a thing that can be fixed by “sensitivity training” or whatever. It was someone acting on an explicit ideological understand of how to exploit racial caste to her advantage in a trivial dispute.