Why was Crooks scaring Lennie into thinking George wasn’t coming back?

In the beginning of the chapter Lennie goes into Crooks room to talk.  He then starts to ask Lennie, "'S'pose George don't come back no more'"(71) This scared Lennie and made him worry a lot.  It made me wonder why was Crooks doing this, at first I thought he might have been doing this just to be mean but then I realized it wasn’t to be mean.  Crooks soon realizes when talking to Lennie his intellectually disability, as a result, Lennie really didn’t know the "rules" of segregation.  Then treating Crooks as an equal which other men on the farm did not.  Crooks was trying to get Lennie to understand his situation, and how lonely it can be on the farm, with him being an African-American.  Crooks recognizes that Lennie cannot put himself in that situation because of the disability so he stops trying.  Steinbeck was trying to show us how lonely Crooks was on the farm and how desperately he wanted someone to understand.