The Normative State Was Never Neutral

David French wrote that one of the saddest aspects of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that they seemed to believe they were operating inside a “normative state,” a world where police usually respond with discipline and restraint.

That sentence does a lot of work. None of it neutral.

The problem isn’t that they failed to recognize danger in time. The problem is that the idea of a restrained, disciplined policing norm has never been universally true. It has always been conditional. It has always depended on who you are, where you stand, and how visible you are to power.

Men observe police scene through tape

For Black Americans, the normative state has historically included violence with limited consequence. From slave patrols to modern policing, enforcement has been uneven by design. Accountability has been selective. Discipline has been discretionary.

So, when public commentary frames police killings as a tragic deviation from the rules, it erases the historical pattern and recenters the expectations of those who usually benefit from the system’s restraint.

This isn’t a misunderstanding of history. It’s a narrowing of it.

There’s also a quiet moral hierarchy embedded in that framing. It suggests that the real tragedy is believing in order too long, rather than confronting the fact that order has always been enforced unevenly. It treats the system as broken instead of exposed.

Black communities haven’t been surprised by this reality. They have been naming it, documenting it, and surviving it for generations. What feels like collapse to some has always been continuity to others.

If we want honesty, we have to stop treating state violence as a malfunction and start acknowledging it as part of the design.

If this perspective resonates, follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Substack. I break down history, policy, and power in plain language, with receipts, context, and no patience for selective memory.

-Smart Brown Girl