If this were a slasher film, one of the teenage protagonists, most likely a young girl running from a masked assailant who knew what she did last summer, would slip in the buffed and shiny halls of Main Street High, the camera zooming in on her screaming face as we brace for the inevitability of what will happen to her.

We know it’s coming because we’ve seen this film before, and we’ve watched it happen to lots of other people. But in the very last second, the camera fixated on the young girl’s pupils, she is rescued by the teenage boy protagonist who drags her to safety in one of the classrooms. Inside with the door locked, they use their fully charged iPhones to call the police who arrive almost instantly and who apprehend the serial killer. Yanking off his mask, the creepy, dark-haired neighbor is revealed. “If only it weren’t for you meddling kids,” he says. In the end, the two survivors, having evaded the killer with their wit and their clear skin, attend homecoming with each other where they are crowned King and Queen of Main Street High. It is a perfectly predictable forecast of their future life together.

But this is not a slasher film.

It is another ordinary day in a Spring Valley High classroom in South Carolina where men and boys watch the villain assault the young girl protagonist. No one saves her; she does not escape. The villain gets away.

It was also an ordinary day in Prairie View, Texas when Sandra Bland was stopped, accosted, and incarcerated by the villain. It was an ordinary day when she died while jailed in Waller County three days later. It was just an ordinary day on Chicago’s West Side when Rekia Boyd was shot and killed.

In both instances the villain got away.

But these, too, were not slasher films.

If they were, these young women would have been saved. The villains wouldn’t have gotten away with it. These young women would have survived, if only to spend the whole movie futilely begging white folks not to follow the suspicious sounds.

Slasher films, like most genre films, are fantasies with clear, predictable conventions. So, too, though, are our lives in a racially unequal and anti-black misogynist society. When an act of violence we should all find unjust and implausible occurs against a black person, we offer our same collective incredulous query, out loud and on social media and across dinner tables and in the quiet: “Would this have happened this way or that way if such-and-such were white?”

Despite the raucous to the contrary, the answer for most of us, most of the time, is “of course not,” either with some indignation, or resignation, or whatever we can muster in the moment. This is a common routine—this query, its response, and the uncomfortable veracity of the unchanging process—meant to shine the light on persistent racial inequality. But it does so through a post-racial sensibility, one outside the conventions of how our society operates, that assumes that all people are equal and are treated as such because of their statuses as human beings. What if, rather than seeing these moments when black citizens, even children—even girl children—are mistreated as out of the ordinary, we saw them instead as part of the normal conventions of an anti-black society, like the inexplicable but obligatory fall for a teenage girl protagonist in a slasher film?

Conventionally, the status of womanhood was explicitly reserved for white women, and that of ladyhood for those white women wealthy enough to own and oversee slaves through whatever means. Enslaved black women wrested as much of the trappings of ladyhood and womanhood as they could from the conventions of 19th century slave society, resisting and refusing, when prudent, treatment they knew was not befitting a woman or lady. Still, the kinds of labor in which they were forced to engage—their status as property and unfree—and the physical and sexual assault to which they were subjected at random and with impunity were constant reminders of their standing as non-women/girls and non-citizens.

After slavery, behind the paper-thin curtain that separated the South from the North, the convention was for white men, sometimes in groups, to kidnap and rape black girls and women, in addition to lynching them, threatening them, and otherwise violating their rights as citizens. White women, in closer proximity with black women in homes and kitchens, would mete out other kinds of daily violence while professing a kind of love for their domestic laborers. None of this was right or normal. But it was our convention.

In the context of a significant amount of gendered and racialized violence against black women from slavery to present, a most pernicious kind of ire and spite, one that holds them and their wombs or possible wombs responsible for all that is wrong in our nation, emerged. Disobedient enslaved women enraged exasperated mistresses to the point of necessary violence. Prostitute blues temptresses roamed rural roads thrusting themselves upon unsuspecting groups of white men. Welfare queens and baby mamas made new little inevitable welfare queens and baby mamas, so we are told to believe, that sat in Spring Valley High classrooms squandering our tax dollars and disrespecting authority with audacity and smartphones they haven’t earned. A black first “lady” wears her arms out and has an attitude and eyes people to her left and right without turning her head.

As particular manifestations of our convention—that of routine anti-black violence in general and a gendered anti-black misogynist violence in particular—slavery and Jim Crow have ended. But the metaphor of slavery and Jim Crow persist because the convention is rather stable. Whether we explain it with the empathy gap, social psychological difficulties in interracial interaction, the school-to-prison pipeline, or call it the “new” version of previous manifestations, the outcomes are consistent because the convention is.

Authoring a new convention for a nation built and still thriving upon this bloody and robust one is difficult work, but it is being done. One day, no one falls, the villain doesn’t get away, we save each other, and everyone makes it to the sequel.

Zandria F. Robinson is a writer and blogs at New South Negress. She is author of This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South.