In fact, the narrator and Sonny's father had seen his beloved brother being killed by a group of drunken white boys: “They were having fun, they just wanted to scare him like they do sometimes, You know." In this previous passage, saying “as they do sometimes” we see that whites terrorizing blacks was commonplace. Now, the white men who confronted the father's brother may not have had the intention of killing him , but they sure found it funny that two black men hurt him since they knew the "inferiority" they had over them at the time.