It is hard to imagine the terror of the last few minutes of Ahmaud Arbery’s life. Three Georgia men formed a 21st century slave patrol to hunt the 25-year-old black jogger from trucks as though on safari for African game. They chased him down, ordered him to stop. He didn’t. (Would you?) And when Arbery could run no farther, Travis McMichael shot and killed him after a brief struggle for control of the muzzle of McMichael’s shotgun. On Wednesday, the three white men were convicted of murder and are headed to prison for life:
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The three Whitemen who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery in coastal Georgia last year were convicted of murder Wednesday in a case that many saw as a test of racial bias in the justice system.
Travis McMichael, his father, Greg McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were found guilty of felony murder in the shooting of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man. Travis McMichael was also convicted of malice murder, or intent to kill. All three men, who still face federal hate crime charges, will receive life in prison, potentially without parole.
A certain kind of man behaves like this. Racist, clearly. But with the racism is mixed what we see reflected in the figure men like the three above recently chose for president. Chronically (and culturally) insecure. Threatened by difference. Threatened by change beyond their control. Entitled to dominate and to enforce conformity, to veto change initiated by others. Not getting their world their way makes them angry and perhaps violent. Especially over violations of what they consider their turf.
I’ve been thinking about my own, less-deadly chance encounters with that kind of man since the Arbery verdict. I’m a white guy. I survived.
Once in high school, two men chased my cousin and me for miles. Two long-haired kids in a VW bus were an afront somehow to the cultural conformity they felt entitled to enforce. With beatings, if they’d caught us.
In college, I was headed to the farmer’s market for vegetables. Joe Cocker was blaring on my radio singing that old Dave Mason song, “Feeling alright.”
I’m not feeling too good myself, I sang along.
A car shot out of the market and I had to brake hard to miss it. I turned in and parked.
Suddenly, the car reappeared as I stepped out of mine. Some dude got out of his stomped up.
“What’d you say back there?!” he barked angrily.
I had no idea what he meant and said so.
He repeated himself, looking for a fight.
When I stood there dumbly for a few seconds, he returned to his car and his girlfriend and left. He’d seen me singing in my car and thought I was cussing him out, humiliating him in front of his girlfriend.
Another time (still pre-cell phones) I’d taken my car for repairs to an imports garage on the south end of the city. I decided to ride my bike home, about 16 miles along US-25 Bypass, a four-lane highway that ran, as Johnny Rivers sang, through the poor side of town. About halfway home, another of those men decided I was impeding his God-given right to drive with all the alacrity his steel steed could muster. He could have passed in the left lane. Instead, he laid on the horn behind me.
I veered left into the paved median to let him pass. Not good enough. He stopped his car in the right lane in traffic to lean out the window and scream at me over my offense.
“This is a U.S. highway,” I shot back, dumbfounded.
When I stepped back into the pedals to continue on, he pulled into a parking lot yards away and got out. He wanted to fight. I shot up the road, around a curve, and onto a side street out of sight to wait for him to pass. In a Peter Fonda/Dennis Hopper scenario, I might get shot.
Five miles farther on, there he is again, stopped in the right lane, in traffic, in broad daylight, shouting at me and waiting for the duel to which he felt entitled. I kept going, looking over my shoulder the rest of the way home.
Again, I’m a white guy. I survived. But the terror of Ahmaud Arbery’s hunting by armed white men in trucks has me revisiting my less-deadly encounters with certain kinds of men whose sense of self is so easily threatened that they feel the need to defend their honor or their turf with violence.
It’s pathological. As is their champion, the Doge of Mar-a-Lago. These damaged men think they own this country and, by god, there’s no way they’ll share it. Especially not with black men jogging through their neighborhoods.