Guns and Racism in America

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Guns and Racism in America

“We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages.” – William Golding, “Lord of the Flies,” 1954. Justice and accountability have

www.counterpunch.org

“We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages.”
– William Golding, “Lord of the Flies,” 1954.

Justice and accountability have prevailed in a fractured land with a long, tortured history of racism and too much fondness for guns. Disaster can strike when you put the two together.

A nearly all-White jury in Georgia convicted three White men of murder last week in the leaked videotaped chase and shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, 25, an unarmed Black man jogging through a mostly White suburban Brunswick neighborhood on Feb. 23, 2020.

The men claimed self-defense. If there had been no video, there probably never would have been a trial. It took 74 days before arrests were made, with the video reportedly in police hands.

“Let the word go forth all over the world that a jury of 11 Whites and one Black, in the Deep South, stood up in the courtroom and said that Black lives matter,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, told a news conference after the verdict.

“Brunswick, Georgia will go down in history as the place where criminal justice took place,” he said.

Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, also used self-defense in the shooting deaths of two men and the wounding of a third, all White, during a Black Lives Matter protest of the killing of Jacob Blake, a Black man. The jury in Kenosha, Wis., acquitted the young man. That led to concerns among Arbery’s family and friends that the same thing would happen to the three men. It didn’t.

“It happens too often that they get away with it,” Micaiah Stewart, 18, who is Black, told The New York Times.

“It’s good to see racism lose,” Warren Stewart Jr., a Black clergyman from Phoenix and Micaiah’s father, told the Times.

Hawk Newsome, the cofounder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, compared the verdict in Arbery’s trial with that of Rittenhouse’s, telling the paper they together sent a “mixed message.”

“You can’t outright chase down and murder Black people and those who support them,” he said. “But if you make it look like self-defense, you got a shot.”

The aftermath of the two verdicts reflected the stark divisions in the country, enshrined by the clear differences between the two major political parties, one mostly liberal and ethnically diverse, the other mostly conservative and White; they’re at each other’s throats.

The Rev. Lenny Duncan, 43, a Black pastor in Portland, Ore., contrasted the differences between the two verdicts in a comment to the Times about the impact they had on him: “The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict is the America I expect – the Arbery verdict is the America I fight for.”

Liberals cheered the results of the Georgia verdict. Conservatives literally embraced Rittenhouse as a hero, praised by Tucker Carlson as a “sweet kid” during a Fox News interview. “Imagine putting that kid in jail,” he said.

Two different verdicts, two different reactions to them, two different types of long-barrel guns, two different Americas. But remove the guns, and there wouldn’t have been deaths.

Trump, who met with Rittenhouse at Mar-a-Lago after the trial, told Fox News Friday that the acquittal “was a great decision. I was very happy to see it.”

Pro-Trump Republican officials competed to gain Rittenhouse’s attention, with Reps. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who was censured for tweeting an altered anime of him slaying a progressive Democratic congresswoman; Matt Gaetz of Florida; and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina offered internships to their new symbol of might makes right.

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was removed from committee assignments for embracing conspiracy theories, sponsored a House bill to award Rittenhouse a congressional gold medal for protecting Kenosha.

Then there’s the other view:

“Kyle Rittenhouse has become the poster child for a general feeling among some in this country that White America is under siege,” Eddie Glaude, chair of African-American studies at Princeton, wrote in The Washington Post. “Rittenhouse defended himself, this argument goes, and White America must do the same.”

“It’s very clear that they’re trying to make him their mascot,” Kurt Bardella, who advises the Democratic National Committee, told the Guardian, referring to Rittenhouse. “Any time that your mascot is someone who thought that it was an acceptable form of protest to show up at a political event with an AR-15, that is glorifying violence. And that’s a very dangerous thing to prop up and glorify.”

“We feel like justice was served and it was a relief to know the system actually worked in the case and they didn’t find a loophole,” Shawn Golden, 48, who is Black, told the Post.

At about the same time as these verdicts, a jury in a civil suit handed down a guilty verdict against the organizers of a violent far-right 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va., awarding the nine plaintiffs $25 million in damages. One woman was fatally hit by a car that rammed the crowd. Her killer, James Fields, is serving several life sentences.

This was the rally in which Trump said some “very fine people” took part.

There appeared to be little chance the defendants could pay such an enormous fine because one of the lawyers, Joshua Smith, told the Times they “are destitute, none of them have any money.”

Brunswick and Kenosha are very different places where juries handed down very different verdicts at trials in which the defendants pleaded self-defense. It remains to be seen what influence these will have on future political protests and rallies.

 

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Ahmaud Arbery murderers sentenced to life in prison: 4 essential reads on the case

Experts help explain the context around the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, and subsequent trial and convictions of Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael and William Bryan.

theconversation.com

Ahmaud Arbery murderers sentenced to life in prison: 4 essential reads on the case

Two of the three men convicted of murdering unarmed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery learned on Jan. 7, 2021, that they will likely die behind bars.

Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael were sentenced to life in prison without parole at a hearing in Glynn County, Georgia. A third man, William Bryan, was sentenced to life in prison with parole. He must serve a minimum of 30 years behind bars before he is eligible.

All three were found guilty on Nov. 24, 2021, of murder in a case that gained widespread attention during a national reckoning over the killing of unarmed Black men in the U.S.

Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was killed on Feb. 23, 2020, after being pursued through the predominantly white suburban neighborhood of Satilla Shores, near Brunswick in Georgia.

For many, the manner of his death raised questions over the role race played in the killing, evoking a U.S. past in which gangs of white men killed Black men and boys with impunity. But race played a backseat role in the trial, being brought up only in the prosecutor’s closing argument. Instead, the nearly all-white jury – 11 of the 12 jurors were white – was invited to focus more on whether the defendants were justified in trying to apprehend Arbery as he jogged down the road.

The Conversation U.S.‘s authors have explored how race and law intertwine in the following stories related to Arbery’s murder.

1. The use and abuse of citizen’s arrest

In the course of a two-week trial, jurors heard evidence from more than two dozen witnesses. At the heart of the defense was a claim that the three men accused were protected by the state’s citizen’s arrest law.

Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley made a point of explaining the law in his final instructions before the jury retired to consider its verdict. He told them citizen’s arrests can be made only if a crime has taken place in the presence of the person making the arrest, “or within his immediate knowledge.”

The verdict in the case suggests jurors sided with the prosecution’s view that the citizen’s arrest defense did not hold water.

Following the death of Arbery, Georgia weakened its 150-year-old citizen’s arrest law. But as explained by Seth Stoughton, professor of law at University of South Carolina, many states retain similar legislation. In fact, citizen’s arrest laws have been around for centuries – but they have often been open to abuse. Such laws can be “badly misused by those who believe their higher social status gives them authority over someone they perceive as having lower status.”

“Frequently, this falls along racial lines,” Stoughton adds.

2. Criminalizing Black joggers

Lawyers for the three defendants claimed in the trial that the accused men were within their right to conduct a citizen’s arrest because they believed Arbery had committed a burglary despite there being no evidence to suggest that the 25-year-old had stolen anything.

Sociologist Rashawn Ray focused on the setting and circumstances surrounding the shooting – that the victim was a Black man jogging in a white suburban neighborhood.

In Ray’s study of race and physical exercise, he found that Black men living in white neighborhoods were far less likely to go for a run in the areas surrounding their home than were white men, white women or Black women. The reason? “Black men are often criminalized in public spaces – that means they are perceived as potential threats and predators,” Ray writes.

Black joggers interviewed as part of Ray’s research reported having the police called on them, seeing neighbors cross the street as they approached and shutting screen doors as they passed.

“For Black men, this means that negative perceptions about their propensity to commit crime, emotional stability, aggressiveness and strength can be used as justification for others to enact physical force upon them,” Ray concludes.

3. Cellphone footage: Evidence or exploitation?

During the trial, jurors were shown the graphic footage depicting the last moments of Arbery’s life. For some, it may not have been the first time they were seeing the grainy images.

Such videos have emerged in several recent deaths of Black men at the hands of police officers – or, in Arbery’s case, citizens.

To Allissa Richardson at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the images that circulate are the modern-day equivalent of the grotesque photographs that accompanied the lynchings of the Jim Crow era.

Just as these images from the past serve a purpose today – to educate America about race relations in the U.S. – so too can the video images shot on bystanders’ cellphones. For example, they can be used as evidence in court.

But Richardson cautions that casual viewing of Black people dying online and on TV can become exploitative.

“Likening the fatal footage of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd to lynching photographs invites us to treat them more thoughtfully. We can respect these images. We can handle them with care. In the quiet, final frames, we can share their last moments with them, if we choose to. We do not let them die alone.”

4. Lessons

In all likelihood, Arbery would not be dead – and his murderers not facing life behind the bars – if it were not for the presence of a shotgun in the confrontation. That is one of the main lessons that Stanford law professor John Donohue draws from the Arbery murder and subsequent trial.

Donohue also notes that during the trial, Travis McMichael testified that before the deadly confrontation with Arbery, there had been a number of burglaries in the area, and a Smith & Wesson pistol he owned was stolen from a truck in front of his house. “That gun and other guns stolen outside the home abundantly arm American criminals – to the tune of roughly 100,000 guns per year. Even before McMichael murdered Arbery, he was already contributing to violent crime indirectly,” Donohue notes.