From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, April 21st.

It's another Friday in America when if you're black and minding your own business, you don't know if some white person will think

you're going to hurt them and shoot you. You've probably heard by now that that's what happened

to 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, an honor student, no less, in Kansas City, Missouri, after he rang the

doorbell of the wrong house by mistake as he attempted to pick up his brother to drive him home.

Yarl reportedly thought he was at an address on northeast 115th terrace, but he was really one block over

on northeast 115th street. Now it probably doesn't make it any better that the white guy who fired the gun acted alone and has been criminally charged, because what's the definition of acted alone?

The shooter's grandson described him as, quote, down the right wing rabbit hole, fully buying into the Fox News O-A-N kind of line, a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia, unquote.

A column in the Kansas City Star today argues that Fox News is complicit in the crime.

And it probably doesn't make it any better that a 20-year-old white woman was also shot.

She was killed.

Also, after driving accidentally to the wrong house. That was in Hebron, New York, north of Albany the other day. A New York Times

headline today says, in a nation armed to the teeth, these tiny missteps led to tragedy,

missteps, plural.

But we know these kinds of horrors are not distributed evenly by race.

And with us now, Princeton Professor of African American Studies, Amani Perry.

She is author of the 2019 book that is sadly relevant to this moment called Breathe,

a letter to my sons. And she has an article in the Atlantic now

following the Ralph Yarl shooting called This Country Will Break Our Hearts Again. Professor Perry was last on

this show last year for her most recent book, South to America, a Journey Below the Mason-Dixon

Line to Understand the soul of a nation.

Professor Perry, thanks for coming on again, and I'm sorry it's under these circumstances, of course,

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