For Arbery, a chance at justice
The trial over Ahmaud Arbery’s killing promises to be yet another high-stakes test of the proposition that such a thing as colorblind justice can exist in these United States.
Arbery, an unarmed Black man — where have we heard that before? — was chased down, accosted and killed near Brunswick, Ga., by white vigilantes in February 2020 for the offense of running for exercise through a white neighborhood. The vigilantes say they thought he looked like a burglar, having come to that conclusion even though Arbery, 25, was not carrying anything when they confronted him.
We must be shocked and appalled that "jogging while Black" is a capital crime in this country. But at this point, sadly, we can’t be surprised.
The only reason we know about the circumstances of Arbery’s killing, and the only reason his three accused killers are on trial for murder, is that one of them recorded the whole thing on his smartphone. The man who made the video, William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, claims he did nothing but use his truck to help chase down Arbery. The other two defendants — Greg Mcmichael, 67, and his son Travis Mcmichael, 35 — are seen confronting Arbery, attempting to “arrest” him in an encounter that ends with Arbery dead after three gunshots.
Incredibly, local prosecutors initially took no action at all against the Mcmichaels and Bryan — a decision that may or may not have something to do with the fact that Greg Mcmichael is a former county police officer and a former investigator for the district attorney’s office. Authorities deemed the white men’s actions justified under a Georgia law permitting citizen’s arrests, although the Mcmichaels saw Arbery do nothing suspicious except jog past their house. While being Black, of course.
At this point, I need to remind you that all of this took place in 2020, not 1920. I’m tempted to paraphrase The Who: Meet the New South, same as the Old South. But the unacceptable truth is that this sort of thing — the killing of unarmed Black people who are just minding their own business — happens in other parts of the country as well.
The wheels of justice creaked into motion only after Bryan’s video went viral, more than two months after the slaying — and just weeks before the nation erupted in turmoil over the killing of another unarmed Black man, George Floyd. If there had been no video, there would almost surely be no accountability whatsoever for Arbery’s death.
The difficulty now, as jury selection in the trial of Bryan and the Mcmichaels enters its second week, is that so many potential jurors have seen the video — and, like me, have formed strong opinions about the case. As one told Chatham County Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley, “Some things you can’t just unsee.”
The video shows Arbery jogging along a tree-lined road when he comes upon the Mcmichaels’ truck, where Travis Mcmichael stood beside the driver’s side door with a shotgun and Greg Mcmichael was in the pickup’s bed with a handgun. Arbery tries to run around the truck and is hidden from view for several seconds. Then he and Travis Mcmichael come back into view, engaged in a struggle, and we