I don’t think most blacks will mind if I share one of their innermost secrets with the public. Each time an especially horrendous crime occurs in America, most blacks whisper a common prayer: “I hope the perpetrator isn’t black.”

That initial response occurs because many believe ” with good reason ” that most people will see such behavior as one more reason to be suspicious of blacks.

I first noticed this dynamic when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. Whenever there is a notorious crime in America, blacks wince ” worrying that they can ill afford to bear another burden based on color.

But the irony is this: To see blacks as fully human, we have to see them as fully capable of the whole range of evil as well as good. Not as either more or less prone to either than whites or any other group. Otherwise, we are refusing to see them clearly, to accord them full humanity.

We are now faced with a real test case: the two suspects in the D.C. sniper case, who are both black men. Many people were surprised. They did not expect John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, to fit the profile of serial killers in America.

The myth is that serial killers are almost exclusively white. Yet data suggest that between 12 percent and 20 percent of serial murderers in America come from among minorities. Still, the image we have of the serial killer is that of a malevolent, disaffected white loner.

Certainly, white serial killers have made gory headlines in horrific cases. John Wayne Gacy, who performed as a clown at children’s parties in Chicago, is believed to have killed at least 33 young men. Jeffrey L. Dahmer was accused of cannibalism and the deaths of 17. David Berkowitz (Son of Sam) caused terror in New York City in 1976 and 1977 as he murdered six and wounded seven. It’s hard to say the media “sensationalized” such cases, but in their own ways, the media made the most of them.

Hollywood and TV have, in turn, picked up on a sure-fire formula. So you have many films and TV shows that sensationalize mass murderers, portraying them as tormented lone white men.

For some reason, serial killings by minorities don’t stick in the public mind as much. Maybe you could see it as an example of racial profiling of whites. Yet, a black named Wayne Williams was accused in several serial murders of children in Atlanta in 1980, and Colin Ferguson, who may not fit the classic definition of a serial killer, murdered six and injured 15 when he opened fire in a train car on the Long Island railroad in 1993. Others found guilty of serial murders come from various backgrounds, such as Juan Corona, a Mexican migrant farm worker who killed 25 men by hacking them to death.

(And although horrific violence is, very predominantly, a male province, there have been female serial killers. Aileen Wuornos, a woman, shot to death six men in a string of murders in Central Florida during 1989 and 1990.)

Yet so ingrained is the image of the white serial killer that even professionals can be misled. Candice Skrapec, an assistant professor of criminology at Fresno State University, recently made the rounds profiling the sniper near Washington. She warns that profilers like her must be careful not to mislead viewers whom the police are relying on for tips.

For the most part, she insisted, “My profiles were very accurate ” except for race.”

Such mistakes can be costly. They can hurt the effort to capture a person with murder in mind. We all have to be ready for him or her to be any color at all.

Just at random, I called an acquaintance, Beverly Wilson, a businesswoman in Delran. Like most Americans, Wilson once believed that serial killers came in just one color: white. “It just didn’t occur to me that blacks would be guilty of this type of crime,” she said.

“When I learned the sniper suspects were black,” she said, “I felt ashamed, but at least Chief Charles Moose, who is black and who was out in front of the investigation, provided some balance.”

Balance. An ironic balance. We hope violence like this never happens. We hope nobody does it. But we have to be ready and willing to accept that it could be anyone, any gender, any color.

” Claude Lewis is a retired columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.