Indeed, the narrator and Sonny's father had seen his beloved brother killed by a group of drunken white boys: "They were having fun, they just wanted to make him scared like they sometimes do. , You know". In this previous passage, saying "like they sometimes do", we see that white people terrorizing black people was commonplace. Now, the white men who rammed the father's brother may not have did not intend to kill him, but they certainly found it amusing to mark two black men at him, because they knew the "inferiority" they had at that time.