I generally try to play devil’s advocate.  But when two white men in Georgia in a pickup truck pursue a black man on foot (and a third man follows in another vehicle, whom I haven’t seen, but I assume he is also white), and the two white men have shotguns and approach the black man aggressively because they think he looks like a burglar and they feel authorized to make a citizens’ arrest, even though one of them was former law enforcement and should have known a myriad of better ways to handle the situation, there is no defense for this.  It reeks of every bit of redneck racism I have spent my whole life as a white southerner trying not to represent.  And it has bothered me since the moment I heard about it – nearly three months after it happened.  Nearly three months after Ahmaud Arbery was killed and should have been planning his 26^th birthday and how to celebrate his mother on Mother’s Day.

I am generally of the impression that white people are regarded skeptically, at best, when we opine about race relations.  Yet I also see posts saying that we need to be talking about this, and I think the need to talk about this is more important than worrying how I will be lambasted for my ignorance in this writing.  White people being quiet about things like the death of Ahmaud Arbery, which SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED, is not helpful in the fight against racism, prejudice, bigotry, and white supremacy.  Have I left out some names by which it is called?  So many forms, so many names.

I have lived my entire life in North Carolina, which is part of the American south, the part that is associated with slavery and the rebel flag.  I, too, thought of the rebel flag only as a symbol of my southern history until someone compared the Confederate flag to the Nazi flag as in, both represent organizations that no longer exist.  To be clear, I never had a Confederate flag, but that comparison struck a chord with me and I can’t look at the Confederate flag the same way anymore.  Do you want to tell me about the good things it represents?  Stop it.  Move forward.  The war is over.  Do you also want to tell me about the citizens’ arrest “defense” in the pursuit of Ahmaud Arbery?

When I thought that citizens’ arrest was legally permitted in Georgia, I argued that the law should be changed if not repealed altogether, and I asked people who argued that the McMichaelses had the right to pursue Ahmaud, “Is this the standard you want for yourself and your loved ones?  If someone thinks you MIGHT have committed a crime, you wish for armed strangers to pursue you and take you against your will?” What a terrifying world that would be.  Even the law doesn’t get it right all the time.  Now we let ordinary citizens give it a go without any training?

There is an article (https://thedispatch.com/p/a-vigilante-killing-in-georgia) that attacks the arguments that have followed since Ahmaud Arbery’s death that his pursuers were legally entitled to citizens’ arrest him.  I am grateful for people who have done a better job than most of us at playing Georgia lawyer.

That article further attacks claims people have made about a string of burglaries that Ahmaud Arbery may have committed, which defenders also say are videotaped.  Let it be known:

1. If you google “Ahmaud Arbery video” and even add words related to burglary or burglar, you will not find a video other than the one that shows him being pursued and killed by men who should not have pursued him. You will now also find several references to the lack of burglaries that have been alleged by supporters of his killers.
2. I assume that Ahmaud Arbery did not commit the one burglary that happened before he died, or we would have heard it about it by now from someone other than people attempting to defend his killers. The Georgia DA’s office should make a statement clearing his name about that.  If they have, I missed it.
3. I don’t care if Ahmaud Arbery committed any crime, ever. Even when I was under the impression that citizens’ arrest was legal in GA, I 100% disagree with what happened.  If you think you see a criminal, call the police and let them handle it.  If you have issues with the police, that will have to be another discussion, but you don’t grab weapons and pursue someone on your own.

Unless, maybe, you hope you can be justified in killing that person.  Because you think you are superior to him in some way.

There is video of what happened.  There are phone calls from the killers explaining why there were doing it.  It is 2020 and I thought we were so far beyond these kind of things, and then this happens and jars me awake and reminds me that even if racism and white supremacy don’t exist in my life, in my relationships, in my heart, they are very alive and real, and they must be fought – although they may never be ended – because they could hurt someone I love, and they could hurt someone else who just went for a run one day.  Just left the safety of his home and went outside and was seen by someone who literally thought he looked a certain way.

I have a good friend who used to patiently listen to me at dinner when I would ask her why race relations still seemed so tense.  I thought things were so much better, right?  We’re having dinner and we’re friends (one black, one white) and both of us seem to have pretty great lives, and I thought the world had advanced so much.  She and I were both paralegals, worked at the same place, we both have moms named Betty . . . our country elected a black President . . . from my perspective, I could go on and on about how things seemed so good now – the sky’s the limit! – so why are things still apparently so bad?

My friend never answered me, just listened.  I remember many nights going home and wondering why she never answered me, never said anything.  I wasn’t being rhetorical.  I was genuinely asking.  And all this time later, I wonder if my friend was thinking, “Um, sure.  Things are better.  Better than when we were slaves, and then freed to an uncertain future where we weren’t allowed to vote or attend the same schools as white people, and it was illegal for black and white people to be married, and black people couldn’t use white people’s water fountains or bathrooms or entrances to buildings, and even some deeds said the property couldn’t be owned by a black person, and we couldn’t sit at the lunch counter and had to give up our seat on buses, and the list goes on, but yeah, I suppose it’s better than those things other than the things going on still today that are making you ask this question.”

My friend and I simply don’t have, and never will have, the same experiences.  And no matter how much love I have for her, or she for me, the beautiful bubble of our friendship is not large and protective enough to erase the prejudice and hate that remains in some other people’s minds and hearts.  What I see when I look at my friend is not what everyone else sees when they look at her.  And I don’t know how to change that.  I don’t know that I can change it.  A person on social media, when I asked that question about if citizens’ arrest was a standard he wanted for himself and his loved ones?  He said yes.

But just because change isn’t easy doesn’t mean we don’t try.  I wasn’t raised in a magical world where I was never taught to discriminate against other people.  I rejected that instruction.  No one is worth more or less because of their skin color, their income, their religion, their gender – the list goes on.  But sometimes, I still need other people – as we all do – to show us yet another perspective.  It’s often difficult to understand experiences we haven’t had and to see perspectives we haven’t known.  For a modern-day example, tune in to Keeping Up With the Kardashians sometime.  I haven’t seen it in a while, but what looks to us like absurdity to most of us is just the life they have.  They don’t know any different.  We could try to bring them down to reality like they did with Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton in The Simple Life, but Nicole and Paris always knew they were going to get to leave those lower- and middle-class American lives and go back to luxury, so how seriously did they really have to take it?

I think that might be a good comparison to white privilege.  We can care and talk and write and fight, but at the end of the day, being black is a not a reality we know.  We need to listen more than we talk – but we still need to talk.  We need to not laugh politely at bigoted jokes.  We need to speak up when someone uses the N-word, even if they’re “just repeating it”.  And we need to quit being defensive in the wake of things like the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.  You didn’t do it.  You wouldn’t do it.  But did you know there were people who would?  That’s a real problem.  Let’s think about how it feels – how very real it is – for black people who might just be jogging one day when someone decides they look like a criminal and try to “talk to them.”  That should not be today’s world.  It really should not ever have been the world, but we can only deal with today forward.

Sometimes we hear, or maybe even say, things like, “Wow, I didn’t know this was [insert some other year from another decade here] anymore.”  And in conversations with my husband, we discussed that some of the progress that’s been made has only been within our lifetimes, or the lifetimes of people just a couple of generation back.  In other words, you can talk to grandparents who lived through civil rights riots, had fire hoses and police dogs turned on them, and were refused seating.  There’s a movie called Green Book set in 1962 that depicts, among other things, black lodging versus white lodging, black people not being allowed out after sunset, and a black performer (Don Shirley) not being allowed to eat in the main dining room of an establishment where he was expected to perform later for the other (white) diners, and being given a dressing room in a broom closet for that concert.  That’s only 58 years ago.  And we can now just go back a few months to cite another senseless, hate-motivated killing of a black man.  Wow, I didn’t know it was 2020 anymore.   Chances are, someone else has died and we just don’t know about it.  Without a doubt, the McMichaelses only got arrested this month because of the national attention Ahmaud Arbery’s death finally received.

I’m angry.  I’m angry that people of my own color represented white people in a way that I detest, that I disapprove of, in a way that I disavow.  I’m sad for Ahmaud Arbery and his loved ones.  I’m sad for people who see themselves in him and in their loved ones and now feel more worry and sadness.  Every time something like this happens, it sets us back.  Sometimes I feel we’ve had so many setbacks, we have not moved forward at all.