Ahmaud Arbery is dead because Americans think black men are criminals
What skin color are the bad guys in America’s fantasies of vigilantism? When the proverbial “fellas” get together to drink beers and talk about their newest guns and who they’d take down, what race are the “criminals” in the theater of their minds?
When Greg McMichael and his son, Travis, got the call from their neighbor that a “burglar” was running through their Brunswick, Georgia neighborhood that chilly February day, what color man do you think they imagined as they locked, loaded, and embarked on their “mission”?
Ahmaud Arbery is dead today because when Americans dream of vigilante justice, black men are the villains of their imaginations.
We as a nation are so comfortable with this baseline bigotry that our first assumption whenever we see videos of police brutality against or shootings of black men and women, the first thing we do is assume that the victims must have done something wrong to earn their own public execution.
This assumption is both a function of white America having a completely different experience with police officers than black America as well as the hundreds of years of vilifying blackness in media and American culture.
I will never forget the biggest and most uproarious applause during the theater debut of the lackluster 2007 vigilante film, Brave One, came when the protagonist Jodi Foster got her first vigilante kills of the movie – two threatening and scary black men. That theater filled with men the same age range as Greg and Travis McMichael erupted as if at that moment, all that they had ever imagined had been fulfilled on the big screen. Needless to say, I left that theater before the credits rolled.
Across the country, our political leaders hold these same bigoted beliefs which inevitably lead to policies that directly assume criminality based on skin color.
During his tenure as mayor of New York City, billionaire Michael Bloomberg made it explicitly clear why it was that he sent police officers into black and brown communities to “throw them” up against the wall. In his 2015 Aspen Institute speech he stated:
“People say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana who are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why’d we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids’ hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them.”
And it is for this reason that I do not distinguish between the violence committed by American citizens acting as vigilantes and the violence committed by so-called officers of the law when, in both cases, the working assumption and driving force behind that violence is the deeply bigoted and firmly American association between blackness and criminality.
For Ahmaud, that association not only led to his brutal killing, but it also initially meant his killer not being arrested. It took more than two months for the father and son duo to be arrested. When explaining why they were not charged immediately the district attorney, George Barnhill, immediately stated that the victim, Ahmaud Arbery, was, in fact, the “criminal suspect”.
“It appears that [Greg and Travis McMichael’s] intent was to stop and hold this criminal suspect until law enforcement arrived. Under Georgia Law [sic] this is perfectly legal.”
Even after viewing the video and with no evidence beyond Ahmaud’s skin color, the top cop in the institution designed to bring equal justice under the law concluded that Ahmaud was a criminal suspect when he was simply a black man taking a jog.
What are black Americans to do when justice is delayed or outright denied because of the assignment of innocence to vigilantes and police officers?
What are black Americans to do when the assumption of guilt because of our skin color is as American as the guns they use to kill us?
What are we to do when in our neighbors’ dreams and fantasies of cop-and-robber, the skin color of the bad guy matches our own?
The very first thing we are going to do is defend ourselves as if our lives depend on it because when Americans fantasize about killing, those fantasies become our living nightmares.
Benjamin Dixon is the host of the Benjamin Dixon show.
