Ahmaud Arbery: Jogging while black
When Ahmaud Arbery went for a run, the 25-year-old black man became the target of “a suburban game hunt,” said Jelani Cobb in New Yorker.com. A “horrific” video released last week shows Arbery jogging on a sunny day in Satilla Shores, Ga., when he was cut off in the street by two white men in a pickup truck. Retired detective Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis, 34, told police they grabbed a .357 Magnum and a shotgun and pursued Arbery after spotting him “hauling ass” and suspecting he was a burglar. In the video, Arbery can be seen “weaving” to avoid them, then fighting with Travis over his shotgun, before three shots are fired and Arbery “collapses in the street, his limbs arrayed in a terrible, deathly sprawl.” This “lynching” happened on Feb. 23, yet the McMichaels were arrested only last week, after the public release of the video ignited a national furor.
“A bad law” led to Arbery’s death, said Dana Mulhauser in WashingtonPost.com. Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law authorizes a “private person” to make an arrest “if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.” A local prosecutor cited that law in explaining why he failed to file charges against the McMichaels before recusing himself, even though the duo said they only suspected that Arbery was committing burglaries in the neighborhood. Arbery did have a record of minor crimes, said David Harsanyi in NationalReview .com, but “you don’t lose your right to life and liberty because you have a record.” Defenders of the McMichaels found a video of Arbery poking around an unattended construction site before his death and say he was wrong to get into a struggle with the armed younger McMichael. Why? “Arbery, an unarmed man, had zero reason to take orders” from “menacing strangers.” Clearly, he was the one acting “in self-defense.”
The similarities to Trayvon Martin’s death are “uncanny,” said Charles Blow in The New York Times. Martin, killed “eight years to the month” earlier, was walking in a suburban Florida neighborhood when a self-appointed neighborhood watchman pursued him, felt threatened, and fatally shot the teen. George Zimmerman was found not guilty. The “terrifying” reality for black men like me is that we’re seen as “the embodiment of danger” no matter what we do, said Ibram Kendi in TheAtlantic.com. “The black man can’t escape the fear of the black man.”