When Iryna Zarutska took the train home on that fateful Friday last month, it appeared to be a night like any other. The 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee had wrapped up her shift at the Charlotte pizzeria where she worked and was on her way home. Footage from the train shows her engrossed in her phone, clicking and swiping to pass the time. One imagines she is tired or perhaps a bit bored. But it wasn’t a night like any other, for just minutes later, she was dead. 

Iryna Zarutska was murdered by Decarlos Brown, Jr., a 34-year-old black man who, by all objective measures, contributed nothing to the world—nothing positive, at least. In terms of criminality, Brown had unfortunately much to offer. His career in crime resulted in convictions for breaking and entering, armed robbery, and felony larceny. He spent eight years in prison. Now he is charged with first-degree murder for senselessly slashing Iryna’s throat, the culmination of his wretched life’s work.

Simply put, Decarlos Brown, Jr. is an animal who had no business being on that train. In a better world—one without crippling white guilt, woke prosecutors, and a mainstream media that seems to exist for no other purpose than to inspire anti-white hatred—Iryna would still be alive. The fact that she is not is an indictment against the state of America. But above all, the murder of Iryna Zarutska illustrates the necessity of discussing black crime.

One might ask why it is important to discuss black crime and not, say, white crime, or something more palatable to our supposedly colorblind conservatives. There are two reasons. One is the sheer scale of black crime. That blacks commit over half of all homicides despite constituting a mere 13 percent of the population is so well known in right-wing circles that it has become a meme: 13/50. It is so popular a meme that the Anti-Defamation League created a webpage to warn of its dangers. But while the ADL refers to the 50 percent figure as “alleged” —leaving its accuracy ambiguous, though not debunked—it is a statistical reality. According to FBI data, 51.3 percent of all homicides in 2019 were committed by blacks. How’s that for “alleged”?

That same year, blacks committed 26.7 percent of all rapes, 52.7 percent of all robberies, 33.2 percent of all aggravated assaults, 28.8 percent of all burglaries, 41.8 percent of all weapons charges, and 42.2 percent of all prostitution charges. Stunningly, when you account for blacks being roughly 13 percent of the population, there isn’t a single crime category in which they are not overrepresented.

The high rates of black crime are not the only reason it exists as something worthy of discussion. The other reason pertains to the central role blackness plays in woke racial ideology.

For the left, black people can do no wrong—except for voting Republican. The American black suffers to this day from the legacy of slavery, making him a perennial victim, shorn of all agency and responsibility, whose dysfunction is ultimately to be blamed on non-progressive whites. This powerful narrative is the driving force behind white guilt, which serves as a profoundly motivating factor in the decision for many white people to support the left’s radically anti-white platform of race preferences, wealth redistribution, open borders, and cultural erasure.

Every so often, this black victimhood narrative inspires spasms of racial insanity throughout the country. Following the release of footage of George Floyd’s death, America underwent a bout of particularly egregious racial insanity. Cities burned, set ablaze by predominantly black mobs, while those who expressed concern suffered personal and professional consequences. 

It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that the left, by forcing its near-religious obsessions with black people onto the rest of us, would invite heightened scrutiny on its favorite group. We’ve all seen the viral videos of black people attacking white people in public. These encounters are rarely one-on-one; they’re more likely to be 10-on-one. And although most violence is indeed intraracial, as liberals love to claim, interracial violence involving blacks and whites is overwhelmingly black-on-white.

Because the left shields America’s most criminally inclined population from criticism—and bends over backward to excuse, deny, or at times glorify its dysfunction—discussions about crime in America are difficult. But there’s a more insidious angle. In the name of anti-racism, the left has become anti-crime enforcement. As they see it, any policy or law that affects some groups more than others must be racist. This is known as disparate impact, and it’s the impetus behind many anarchic policies.

Given that the left wants not only to stifle honest discussion of crime in America but also to ensure that black criminals are allowed to roam free, discussing black crime as a distinct phenomenon is not only justified, it is necessary. The purpose isn’t to unfairly punish or demonize blacks, nor is it to run cover for white criminals—of which there are plenty. Instead, it is to ensure that the law is equally applied and that public order is maintained.

As such, the solution to black crime is simply to be tough on crime overall, and to stop paying regard to disparate impact or minority victimization narratives. But given that the left radically opposes such policies, creating a more orderly country will require a fight—not just nationally, but at the state and local levels as well.