American racial animus laid bare
Run, Ahmaud, run.
Because that is what a Black man jogging through a white south Georgia neighbourhood, being chased by three white men in two trucks, one of the pickups emblazoned with a Confederate decal, would do.
Ahmaud Arbery ran away for five minutes on that Sunday afternoon in February 2020. He didn’t speak a word, uttered no threats.
The vehicles boxed their prey in, “trapped him in a ditch,” as one of the pursuers would tell police. What a video shows is ex-cop Gregory McMichael in the truck’s bed, holding a handgun, and his son Travis McMichael standing by the open driver’s-side door armed with a shotgun. Confronted, Arbery runs around to the passenger side, then cuts back in front of it.
There’s the sound of a gunshot and Arbery can be seen grappling with Travis McMichael for his weapon, followed by a second shot. Arbery punches Travis McMichael and a third shot is fired at point-blank range — within three to 20 inches, a pathologist would testify. Arbery staggers and falls face down.
What the video does not show is when Arbery and Travis McMichael first made contact; the truck blocks that view. They’re out of camera view again when the second shot is fired.
But nobody has disputed that the McMichaels and their neighbour, William Bryan, chased Arbery down, or that Travis McMichael fired the three shots that killed the 25year-old jogger, a former high school football standout, some two miles from his mother’s house in the small coastal city of Brunswick.
What’s heavily disputed and has been counter-argued in court is whether the three defendants, in trying to perform a citizen’s arrest, convinced Arbery had committed a burglary — though they had no evidence of such a crime — acted in selfdefence, with Travis McMichael fearing for his life.
The only guns in that tragically orchestrated encounter were wielded by the McMichaels. Arbery was not armed.
Yet Arbery is the one portrayed as the instigator, essentially responsible for his own death, in defence closing arguments this week, in a hideous and shrill dog whistle of racial profiling.
“Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores,” proclaimed defence attorney Laura Hogue, referencing the leafy suburban community where he was killed. “In his khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”
Which brought a gasp from the Atlanta courthouse and sent his mother fleeing from the room.
My God, what has become of the American justice system when such flagrant racist comments can come out of a lawyer’s mouth, even given that defence attorneys will say just about anything to absolve a client, including turning the evidence inside out, bait-andswitching so that a dead victim is the wrongdoer and the accused the righteous parties?
It worked earlier this week when white teenager Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murdering two white men and wounding another during a protest against police brutality in Wisconsin — to which he’d brought a semi-automatic rifle — thereby entrenching self-defence as a legal exculpation, despite creating the scenario of lethal consequences.
Arbery “chose to fight,” Hogue asserted — not remotely clear on any of the video footage that was actually shot by Bryan — and what if he did, stalked as he had been by armed men? So therefore he must have committed some crime. “Instead of facing the consequences,” Hogue continued. Consequences of what, jogging while Black? There had been thefts in the area and security video showed Arbery on several occasions going in and out of property under development. The defendants had never seen that footage, however, and Arbery never stole anything.
But the outrageous exploitation of racial animus — which, oddly, has scarcely been mentioned by the prosecution even though bigotry sits right on the surface of the case — didn’t stop at sliming Arbery. Bryan’s lawyer appropriated the language of slavery, the terrorizing of Black people, when he objected to Black pastors supporting Arbery’s mother in the courtroom and later praying on the courthouse steps.
“This is what a public lynching looks like in the 21st century,” Kevin Gough complained to the judge, as he demanded a mistrial on the grounds that his client’s right to a fair trial had been violated by a “left woke mob.” (Mistrial denied.)
In her rebuttal to Hogue on Tuesday, before the jury filed out at 11:30 a.m. to begin deliberations, lead senior district attorney Linda Dunikoski laid into the defence’s craven dog whistle.
The defendants had nothing but speculation, no immediate knowledge of a crime or “reasonable grounds” to detain Arbery and make a citizen’s arrest under a Civil War-era Georgia law that, in fact, was crafted for white people to help catch escaping slaves. (The legislation, slammed for promoting vigilante justice, was largely dismantled last spring.)
“All three defendants made assumptions about what was going on that day,” said Dunikoski. And they made their decision to attack Ahmaud Arbery … because he was a Black man running down the street.”
This was three months before the killing of George Floyd. Seventy-four days passed before charges were laid in Arbery’s death, and only after video had been leaked to a TV station, triggering nationwide demonstrations. Dunikoski was brought in as a special prosecutor when the county district attorney recused herself, admitting she knew the McMichaels; Gregory is a former investigator for the local DA’s office. In September, she was indicted by a grand jury for “showing favour and affection” to the McMichaels, charged with violating her oath of office and obstructing a law enforcement officer.
Yet Dunikoski has also been criticized by trial observers for not more aggressively exploring the racial context. It is believed the prosecution settled on that strategy so as not to antagonize a jury composed of 11 white people and one Black person — drawn from a county that is 27 per cent Black.
I want to say that America is running out of chances to bring vigilantes to heel in the court system and secure justice for Black victims. But it’s a turnstile that never stops spinning. In 2020, at least 8,600 Black people were murdered, according to the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. A running database by the Washington Post records that 111 of those killed last year were killed by police officers.
The defendants in the Arbery killing have pleaded not guilty to aggravated assault, false imprisonment and two kinds of murder: malice murder, which involves intent to kill, and felony murder, which involves a felony that causes someone’s death. Those are state-prosecuted crimes.
Regardless of the verdicts, all three will face hate-crime charges in federal court in February, indicted for intimidating the victim “because of Arbery’s race and colour.”