Is the Black man still being accused of everything?

Until this past weekend, that’s who Kashif Paraiz was blaming for his act of murder.

On Friday, Paraiz admitted he and his mistress orchestrated the killing of his wife, Nazish Noorani. Originally, Paraiz told police he was the victim of a hate crime when three Black men shot him and his wife while yelling “terrorist.”

Paraiz is not the first, however, to wrongfully blame the Black man. In 1980 Charles Stuart, who later committed suicide, lied and said that a Black robber shot him and his pregnant wife. And who can forget Susan Smith, who drowned her children in South Carolina in 1993 but said that a Black man had stolen her car and kidnapped her children.

Smith was convicted, and after Paraiz confessed that he “contracted” with a friend to kill his wife and wound himself in hopes of fooling investigators, he too will be found guilty.

It almost makes one simply question the progress of our communities, however. Have we not grown as a society where we can take the blame for our own wrongdoings? Perhaps Paraiz thought he could get away with blaming the race that has been wrongly accused and convicted for years, or he thought he could get away with it by playing the victim, being called a terrorist. Either way it’s saddening to hear that people are still willing to go as far as blaming a Black man, or any other man for that matter, for his own dirty work.

Paraiz and his wife lived in a growing town 30 miles from Manhattan in a middle-class Pakistani community. Now, however, he no longer has the luxury of going home. His bail is set at $5 million.

Paraiz says that he “did not want to be the person to look at his children and tell them that he took their mother away,” but perhaps he should have thought about that before he killed her and blamed another man.

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(Photo: The Plain Dealer/Landov)