The Runner on 2/23: Running While Black in Shotgun Suburbia
In the wrong part of suburbia, when black folk dare to feel too relaxed and free for living in their own skin, a hunting posse can-and will- gather and conspire to reclaim their perceived sense of normality. It is a normality that often comes with blood and bullets as Ahmaud Arbery found out to his peril. No, it’s not 1920, it’s 2020, and the only difference is that today some folk don’t need to wear a mask with peepholes to teach a black man a lesson.
Something wicked and inhumane descended upon a leafy street in Satilla Shores, a neighbourhood in Georgia, in the early afternoon of Feb.23. White power brokers arrogated to themselves the right to criminalize blackness and saw fit to crush a potential threat that they sought to inflate and personalise, determined in their own minds that running while black must mean that a predator is on the prowl.
Do you talk and reason with this running man? Do you call the police or make enquiries? No, you grab your guns and a pickup and you chase him down.
By now we’ve all seen the ugly shaken video footage, seen evidence of a man who looks like Arbery pausing in a construction site mid-way through a run moments before his slaughter, crying inside as we see him struggle for his life after three shotgun blasts, failing to overcome a two man posse of spite, malice and ugly confrontation that sought to challenge him simply because he didn’t have the luxury of looking like the right kind of person jogging through their little slice of white heaven.
Black men are often criminalized in public spaces, and Arbery shouldn’t have felt that it was inevitable he would be hassled when he left his home for his run that day.
What this inhumane case has so far shown is that you can be adjudged guilty on the basis of zero evidence, hunted down like cattle simply because some people with a gun and little sense feel emboldened to punish and persecute because they can, and where even the sister of the killer, and the man who filmed the infamous footage in untroubled fashion, seemingly derive voyeuristic pleasure in watching terror unfold before their eyes, and in the sister’s grisly case, sharing its bloody aftermath on Snapchat, just because that’s what you do when your brother just gunned down an unarmed black man in broad daylight and you’re a ‘true crime fan’ as she pathetically explained.
Arbery, 25, died Feb. 23 after he was shot, allegedly by father and son Travis and Greg McMichael. The McMichaels have said they believed Arbery was a suspect in a string of break-ins; The two men chased Arbery, 25, for more than 4 minutes after he was spotted poking around a construction site on the block. The two finally confronted Arbery, who was shot three times with a shotgun at close range during a struggle with Travis McMichael.
The McMichaels were not charged in the case until earlier this month when a video of the fatal encounter was made public and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the state’s law enforcement agency, took over the case.
The current uproar-and arrests-come about because of the release of the video. Not before. For when Arbery is shot down there is no accountability. The murderers, and the police, go home and sleep in their beds at night. And it takes 74 days before there is an arrest. And the arrest was not because the police or the law enforcement individuals saw the video, because they had it on day one, in February. It’s because we as an outraged world of humanity saw the video.
Arbery has no criminal record, and was gainfully employed. He’s not a gangbanger, or a thug.
For his sins he merely went onto a piece of land where a house was being constructed (which would be trespassing), but it was an action more out of curiosity than anything, not a desire to attempt theft. An error in judgement, but hardly qualifying why the McMichaels were hassling him.
For jogging on public land is not illegal. It’s not Arbery’s fault that he was jogging through a neighborhood two miles from his home in broad daylight when he was savagely attacked by white, armed racists in trucks.
Ahmaud Arbery was killed because he was a black kid running in a white neighbourhood and two people, a father and son, found that suspicious.
I can’t speak for the neighbourhood, I can speak for the murderers though, that they believed they knew the law, and tried claiming to make a “citizen’s arrest” when in fact they tried to kidnap Ahmaud, and when Ahmaud began to struggle, they killed him.
This was a modern-day lynching, and I am adamant about that conclusion of mine. You don’t need ropes, kidnappings in the night, burned crosses, veiled threats, or an overseer’s whip, to get the point across today. In 1920 the weapons of evil were more brazen and manifold, in 2020 you just need an assumption, a gun, a superiority complex, and a deep distrust for uppity black men running down your street like they own the damn place.
Yes, I’ve watched the videos.
Yes, I’ve read the context.
Yes, I’ve seen as much evidence as I can.
These guys could have confronted Ahmaud respectfully without guns and asked what he was doing in the neighbourhood. What purpose was served by pointing guns at him? But they were bullies doing what bullies do. They were being big tough guys intimidating someone weaker than themselves. Their assumptions were wrong, and they were out of line.
We don’t know what was said but I bet their demeanour and tone were threatening and insolent. What they didn’t expect was their black victim stood up for himself.
Innocent lives are at risk as the mood, sobriety, prejudice and judgement of the armed person may determine life or death. Police and soldiers have strict rules of engagement to govern their use of lethal force. Armed civilians have no such limitations and things like running in a neighbourhood can result in a death sentence. This is a tragedy and a clear case of vigilantes, one of whom had law enforcement experience, taking the law in their own hands and taking the life of a man guilty only of jogging while black.
Whether the victim had committed a crime or not is irrelevant to the murder question, because at the time the McMichael brothers caught up with him, Arbery was not committing a crime, was not on private property, and was not brandishing or threatening to use a lethal weapon.
Then there’s the whitewashing after the slaughter. Like Georgia prosecutor George Barnhill telling the police that the Feb. 23 shooting of the unarmed Ahmaud Arbery was “justifiable homicide”.
No one has the right to pull a gun on somebody jogging down the road because they think they might have been a burglar at some point in the recent past (and there is minimal burglary crime reported in that area).
Also interesting are the 911 recordings as other people called about a black man jogging down the street. And so it seems clear that the killers were not the only racists in the neighbourhood.
Nothing justifies the broad daylight murder of Ahmaud for not committing a single crime, and trust me to heaven and back when I say nothing justifies the fact that it took public attention for this case to actually allow for the arrest of the murderers.
You do not legally get to kill someone because you concluded on your own that they were a threat, when you yourself run up on them in a truck with your son, both armed, in broad daylight, confront the man and try to force him into your truck, and then kill him.
Whether in 1820, 1920, or today’s grim 2020, we call that murder.
. #JusticeForAhmaud 🙏
#JusticeForAhmaudArbery 🙏
#IRunWithMaud 🙏
#AhmaudArbery 🙏
Saurav Dutt is an Author, Political Columnist and Human Rights Campaigner.
