The young man pictured at left is Ahmaud Arbery. On February 23rd, he was innocently jogging through a neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. He was accosted by two white men -- a retired police officer and his son. They shot and killed Arbery.The two men claimed they thought Arbery was the individual who had committed some neighborhood break-ins, and they were just trying to make a citizen's arrest. They claimed to have shot Arbery in self-defense.
Those are ludicrous claims. Arbery was unarmed, while the two men were armed -- one with a shotgun and the other with a pistol. They had no reason to fear Arbery, and were not in any danger from him. They were the ones to initiate the incident.
Also, Georgia law says "A private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge". But neither man had seen (or had knowledge of) Arbery committing any crime at all. His only "crime" was being a Black man who was jogging.
Neither of the men has been arrested or charged. The police did not arrest them, and a prosecutor and a District Attorney have recused themselves after failing to file charges. The D.A. said he thought the shooting was justified. He is wrong. This was not a justified citizen's arrest or shooting. It was the murder of an innocent man.
The following is just a small part of an excellent op-ed by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times:
This form of anti-blackness marks black masculinity as menacing, and state laws protect the vigilantes’ rights to involve their weapons and their power to end lives.
The most infuriating part of most of the cases in which unarmed black men are killed, either by the police or vigilantes, is the lack of arrest, prosecution or conviction. It is not any suggestion that the killers were right, morally, but rather that in most cases it could be reasonably argued that the killings were legal.
As has too often been the case in this country, the law works to black people’s detriment and sometimes their demise.
Slavery was legal. The Black Codes were legal. Sundown towns were legal. Sharecropping was legal. Jim Crow was legal. Racial covenants were legal. Mass incarceration is legal. Chasing a black man or boy with your gun because you suspect him a criminal is legal. Using lethal force as an act of self-defense in a physical dispute that you provoke and could easily have avoided is, often, legal.
It is men like these, with hot heads and cold steel, these with yearnings of heroism, the vigilantes who mask vengeance as valor, who cross their social anxiety with racial anxiety and the two spark like battery cables.
Arbery was enjoying a nice run on a beautiful day when he began to be stalked by armed men.
What must that have felt like?
What must he have felt when he approached the truck and saw that one of the stalkers was brandishing a shotgun?
What must he have thought when he fought for the gun?
What must he have thought when he took the first bullet?
Or the second?
What must he have thought as he collapsed to the ground and could feel the life leaving his body?
Ahmaud Arbery was a human being, a person, a man with a family and a future, who loved and was loved. The McMichaels took all of that away on a glorious Sunday afternoon in February. Who knows what Arbery could have become. He was young, his life a buffet of possibilities. Friday would have been his 26th birthday.
