Freedom?

May 6, 2020

      After weeks of watching white men draped with Nazi and Confederate regalia, armed to the teeth march on state capitols and emerge unharmed and unmolested, we understood the message.  After seeing them get so close to state troopers that you could see the spittle in the corners of their snarling mouths, we hardly needed a reminder of the gulf between what passes for lawful behavior for white people vs. lawful behavior by Black people.  After one after another Republican governor defied science and ignored escalating infection rates to “open up their states,” knowing full well that it would be Black and Brown people forced to choose between their lives and their livelihood, we didn’t need to be told that, to them, our safety doesn’t matter and our deaths don’t even register.

     Even here, in supposedly progressive New York, we see the hypocrisy.  Cops act like concierges to the young white people crowded cheek by jowl in Manhattan parks, smilingly handing out masks, while in the Bronx and Brooklyn, failure to stand six feet from the next person merits a beat down and an arrest, (Source:  “Violent arrest in New York sparks anger over police enforcement of social distance order,” by Kim Bellware, The Washington Post, 5/5/20). 

     So no sentient Black person could be confused.  Every day, in a thousand ways, large and small, this country tells us that our lives don’t matter, our losses don’t matter, our dignity doesn’t matter.  Still, after all of this, the story of Ahmaud Arbery hit us like a gut punch.

     Ahmaud was murdered in cold blood by a father-son team of vigilantes who murdered him on a Sunday afternoon as he jogged in their Santilla Shores, Georgia neighborhood. The McMichaels decided that Arbery “fit the description” of a burglar that they had never seen.  They jumped in their pick up truck with their guns (a .357 Magnum and a shotgun) and hunted him down.  The police credulously accepted their assertion that Arbery “confronted them,” and the McNeils were not arrested. Instead, the D.A., George Barnhill, who recused himself, resorted to the timeworn playbook used whenever a Black person is killed, trotting out old arrest records to criminalize Ahmaud after the fact, (Source:  “Two Weapons, a Chase, a Killing and No Charges,” by Richard Fausset, The New York Times, 4/26/20).

     Then yesterday, the sickening video emerged of the moment that Ahmaud Arbery was murdered.  It was immediately clear that the McMichaels cornered Ahmaud for no reason and shot him like an animal.  Tom Durden, the prosecutor handling the case, has referred it to a grand jury and everyone from the NAACP and the ACLU toJoe Biden  called for justice for Ahmaud.  In an instant, Ahmad Arbery’s name was burned in our conscience.  He  joins Tamir and Trayvon and Jordan and Sandra – the roster of names that serve as a grim reminder of the price that far too many Black people pay for thinking we’re free. Keep that in mind as you watch the accusations of tyranny and the demands for “freedom.”  As Ibram Kendi writes, when certain white men talk about freedom, it means the freedom to do whatever they want to us. It always has.

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