Why Black People Are Always the Target: The Hard Truth
Over the past few months, a question has quietly taken over the Internet. It is the same question I’ve been asked by Black students in my Philosophy of Race class who see what is happening and are trying to make sense of it. It’s the same question that made Marvin Gaye ask, ‘What’s Goin On?’ Put simply: Why Are Black people always the target? Why us?
It seems like we can’t catch a break. Slavery. Jim Crow. And even now, in the year of our Lord 2026, DEI has all but been eliminated, and despite the Black Lives Matter movement, the police are still killing us in the streets and blantant racism is cool.
The question is a good one. Are we cosmically cursed, as many white supremacists believe? Or are we God’s strongest soldiers, and that is why He keeps sending us His greatest battles?
I don’t presume to have all the answers to that question. But I do have one.
There is no black cat crossing our paths and giving us bad luck. We are not singled out by the divine like God did Job in the Old Testament. Really, it has very little to do with us at all.
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Anti-Blackness didn’t survive for more than 400 years because it was inevitable. It endured because it was useful to the people and institutions that benefited from keeping it alive.
European nations wanted to build wealth, and the easiest way they could see to do that was through slavery and colonialism. They needed to justify treating millions of Africans like animals, so they invented a racial hierarchy that placed white people on top and Black folks at the bottom.
Slavery eventually ended. That hierarchy never really did. But since it was already built and believed by many, it became useful to those in power.
Every group needs someone to look down on, someone to be beneath them. Every society needs someone to blame when things go wrong. Poverty. Crime. Economic hardship. Instead of confronting the people responsible for those problems, it is so much easier to just blame us. Hell, we were already at the bottom.
That is how you get everything that followed. The Red Summer of 1919. The isolation and punishment of Black folks on Hispaniola after the Haitian Revolution. Time and again, whenever Black people built wealth or political power, the response was always pushback. Sometimes it was violent. Other times, it came through laws and policy. Either way, the message was the same: Black progress was tolerated only so long as it never threatened those who were already at the top.
I wish it were a curse. Because if it were, we could find a way to break it. If we had somehow angered God, and that is why suffering is always at our doorstep, then there could be a way to lessen God’s wrath. But the answer is not mystical. It is practical.
We were never the disease. We were the diagnosis that was handed to everyone else. Once you understand that, you stop asking why Black people have always been targeted. You start asking why anti-Blackness has always been so profitable.
