Right now, Ahmaud Arbery should be wondering if his parents got him anything for his 26th birthday tomorrow. What with the corona virus and the recent lifting of the lockdown policies in his home state of Georgia and the general nervousness about social distancing, maybe his mother and father would not have had the time or the willingness to venture out into the world to find their son a present.
Ahmaud should be having these thoughts as he himself ventures out and takes a run from his home in Brunswick, Georgia, through Satilla Hills, and back to Brunswick. These runs give him time to think. They also keep him in shape for that day when (maybe) he finally takes the last step and becomes a boxer.
Tragically---criminally—Ahmaud Arbery is not wondering anything today.
Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by a father and son who saw him jogging through Satilla Hills, assumed he was a burglar, chased him down in their truck, and shot him. This happened almost three months ago: A black man went for a jog and was killed by two white men who assumed he was a thief.
This happened back on February 23, 2020---roughly 75 days ago. Most of us are just hearing about this now for one reason: there is video of the shooting. And that video was leaked in the past few days. The video has since gone viral and the murder has received national and international coverage. Before the video came out the killing had not made much of an impression beyond Georgia.
This is 2020, not 1897. Black men and women were lynched in the past under all sorts of pretenses. According to the American Social History Project, “Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such alleged crimes as ‘stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of stealing cattle, boastful remarks’ or ‘trying to act like a white man.’ One was killed for stealing seventy-five cents.”
Ahmaud Arbery was lynched because two white men with deep ties to local law enforcement decided on the spot to grab their guns and be judge, jury, and executioner---all in the span of just a few minutes.
And those two white men? Surely they were charged with murder, right? Or at the very least arrested?
Nope. Not one thing has happened to them yet. The local prosecutor has finally recommended that a grand jury be given the evidence and asked to approve charges. Due to the corona virus, a grand jury cannot be convened until June 12. By then, the murderers will have been walking around free for almost four months AFTER killing a man in cold blood.
If I were a black man, I imagine I would live my life full of fear and anger about a culture and a system where shocking injustices like this happen far too often. How many times do they happen but there is no video so nobody ever hears about them? It took almost three months for this video to come out, even though the local police had it since the day Ahmaud Arbery was murdered.
This is America.
When will it stop? When will White America stand up and say “Enough is enough”? Black Americans are not the problem here. The problem is a deeply-entrenched system with the wrong priorities. Protecting the status quo should not be Job One of law enforcement and the criminal justice system, yet far too often that is the case.
And since the status quo benefits White America far more than Black America, very little changes. Things will not change until White America refuses to go along with the system that leads to such skewed enforcement of the law. The White people of Brunswick and the rest of Georgia need to join the Black people already gathering to make it clear this is not about Black people venting anger---it’s about citizens finally getting mad enough to demand changes.
Far too often, people protesting racism in America are described as anti-American. (see: Colin Kaepernick) Do the people who use that term even get the meaning of what they are saying? They are saying “How dare you protest racism, since racism IS America.” In other words, to be against racism is to be against America.
White America, can we please just stand up and say “Enough. No more profiling and beating and killing in my name.”
I am going to run 2.23 miles tomorrow to celebrate the life and birthday of Ahmaud Arbery. It’s a mostly-meaningless gesture in the end, but it’s a thing I can do with my anger right now. And then I have committed to being more brave and outspoken about calling out racism when I see it in my own self, my own friends, and my own town. Asking Black Americans to end racism is like asking women to end sexism. It has to be White Americans that finally make a reckoning with this country’s deep-seated issues with race and demand changes from each other.
I will not mention the killers by name here. They do not deserve to be known. They deserve to be arrested and jailed.
Update: the father and son were arrested on Thursday, May 7, 2020. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/07/nation/arrests-made-shooting-death-black-man-after-outcry/
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