One of the critical scenes in Walter Mosley's Little Scarlet is the discussion Easy Rawlins and the nurse Tina have over breakfast. Tina retells the story of Geneva Landry's abuse as a child. Geneva's family worked on a southern plantation, where the plantation owner repeatedly abused her since she was 12. After listening to the story, Easy reaches out to comfort Tina and Tina latches on to him. "Tina felt the pain of her charge," the narration states. The vague wording of the following paragraph further serves to imply a connection between Geneva's past and Tina, suggesting that Tina herself has been abused in some way. This also directly links back to something Easy himself described, when explaining the reasons behind the Watts riot: pain never truly goes away. There is always a lingering sense of hurt after violence, especially violence along sectarian lines such as race. Widespread or systemic violence results in entire classes of people who have been abused and will instantly connect with each other because of it. An identity is formed because of the violence, instead of the inverse.

This fear of white males abusing their power and assaulting black women is also a deeply seated issue itself. The dehumanization of black men as horrible raping monsters lusting after white women was nothing more than projection from white men who feared their own attraction towards black women. This sort of defense mechanism provides an easy way to pretend to excise what is undesired in oneself and destroy what is supposed to be a representation of that evil. It is exactly this manifestation of guilt and paranoia that leads to the oppression of scapegoated communities and the conditions that breed riots.