Sarah Blake/AP Photo
Ahmaud Arbery mural in Brunswick, Georgia, May 17, 2020
If the casual brutality heaped on enslaved people is so much ancient history that it numbs the mind, reflect for a minute on what Ahmaud Arbery suffered in his last moments: horrific chest, armpit wounds, and a detached wrist. Three white men pleaded self-defense as they tried to make a so-called “citizen’s arrest,” for what they perceived to be the crime of roaming around a partially built house. A jury of their peers, who were all white, save one, disagreed. “The spirit of Ahmaud defeated the lynch mob,” his mother said after the surprising guilty verdicts, which were announced last Wednesday in a Brunswick, Georgia, courtroom.
What are the solons who write the laws doing to protect the next African American or Latino or Native American from lynch mobs, to shield the next adult or child from being killed because a white person alleges that they were up to no good? Because there’s always a next time.
The answer is one that most white people do not want to contemplate. The attitudes that compel some whites to harass or kill other men or women or children with more than a hint of melanin for perceived crimes are hard-wired into the American psyche. Too many Americans are stubbornly unaware and unwilling to come to grips with what slavery wrought and how its legacy persists. They would much rather that the country be allowed to cast off its mantle once and for all. They do not want to learn more about how slavery and the sufferings of enslaved people reverberate through the 21st century—and as we’ve seen all year, they certainly don’t want their children to deal with that history either.
But locking white people of any age in a room with hours of speeches intoned by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will not change anything. It’s deeper than that.
Ahmaud Arbery is a linear descendent of the men who ran for their lives when confronted by the slave patrols that were empowered to indiscriminately kill enslaved people. An 1855 Louisiana law allowed that “any white who found a slave away from his usual residence who resisted arrest might ‘make use of arms’ to seize and subdue him”—with “subdue” meaning death in many, many cases. The difference between the antebellum South and pandemic America is that African Americans are now citizens with rights to be upheld (except when they aren’t), and bystanders have phones to record what an IRL lynching looks like.
The differences between Karens and killers are impossible to calibrate in real time when split-second decisions are made.
To deter other vigilantes, Georgia repealed its 1863 citizen’s arrest law earlier this year, much too late for one mother’s son. If anything, states and individuals have hardened their stances on self-defense and bearing arms, as the Kyle Rittenhouse case demonstrates. More than 30 states have implemented stand your ground laws. When George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, Florida had a stand your ground law that had been crafted with assistance from the NRA and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), as a template for other states.
In the ten years since Martin’s death, Florida continues to parse whether an individual has a duty to retreat if possible before using deadly force. Open-carry laws also dial up how people perceive threats. Only three states—California, Florida, Illinois, and the District of Columbia—prohibit open carry in public places. Texas allows adults to conceal or openly carry handguns in a holster without a permit. And the Supreme Court just heard arguments earlier this month in a case that will likely strike down laws in New York and California prohibiting concealed carry of firearms.
Even if they were strong, laws on the books are small comfort if you are a Black person dealing with a white person in the heat of the moment, who is convinced that you are a hardened criminal in action. There are people like Amy Cooper, who confronted Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper (no relation) in Central Park, who froth at the mouth, and then there are Travis and Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan. The differences between Karens and killers are impossible to calibrate in real time when split-second decisions are made.
The spirit of Ahmaud Arbery did defeat the lynch mob. It is right and proper to sing hosannas about justice done. But as pockets of white America retreat ever deeper into their segregated lives, histories, and points of view, Black and brown people become that much more mysterious and despised. They morph into the primeval threat of the white imagination. Being the object of such profound fear is a consequence whose possible outcomes are never far from the surface for people of color in their interactions with whites, yet the questions are always the same: When will you let us be? When will these killings stop?
