Today there is a national outcry about the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The public condemnation has forced a belated response. Those accused of his murder finally have been arrested. His murder has become a global embarrassment for whites. For blacks, however, it is another humiliation, a continuing terror. It is the normal silence, however, that condemns thousands of African Americans to unjust deaths and millions to shattered lives. When the camera turns away, the savage injustice that embarrasses us becomes simply business as usual. The horror of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder is now well known. The 25-year-old black man went for a jog down the middle of the street in the middle of the day on Feb. 23. Two white men decided he was suspicious, hunted him down and shot him point blank in the middle of the street at 1 p.m. Local law enforcement had video evidence of the crime. Yet no arrest was made until 74 days later, two months and two weeks after the murder. Local authorities chose not to act.
Two U.S. senators said nothing. The white church —that had
blessed slavery, segregation, apartheid in South Africa —was silent.
Why did the arrests finally take place? Because an intrepid reporter from the
New York Times investigated the story and made it public; the murder video
was leaked to the public on the 72nd day after Ahmaud’s murder. As the
public outrage grew, the arrests were made. Never forget, as one commentator
noted, they did not make the arrests because THEY saw the incriminating
video. They made the arrests because WE saw the video. Embarrassed, faced
with an aroused community and an international scandal, they finally
acted. So it goes. African Americans suffer in silence the savage injuries of
institutionalized racism. We live in northern ghettos —driven there in the
early part of the last century by terrorism —most strikingly the Ku Klux
Klan and their signature lynchings. The Equal Justice Initiative reports
there were 4,084 lynchings of blacks in the South from 1877 to 1950. The
Klan, embraced by and often made up of the white gentry of the South, often
gathered at their churches to organize the public lynchings. They
terrorized blacks to end the fusion multiracial coalitions that grew up in
the Reconstruction, and to take back control of their states. The
lynchings and violence were greeted with silence, if not approval. White
authorities, white churches, white society turned their heads, if they
weren’t applauding in approval. Fleeing north, Blacks were red lined into
ghettos, with jobs hard to get, and discrimination closing doors.
To this day, African-Americans are last hired and first fired. We suffer the worst poverty, the highest unemployment, the highest childhood hunger and malnutrition, the most inadequate health care. This reality is sustained by the silence of white elites, the silence of the White church, the silence of the evangelicals, the silence of the best minded citizens. Then, the virus hits, and its most lethal effect is on those who are vulnerable: the elderly, the sick, the hungry, those with asthma and obesity. It hits hardest among the suddenly proclaimed “essential workers” who do the work that previously was largely “invisible: the bus drivers, the grocery clerks, the nurses and medical aides. Not surprisingly, African Americans make up a disproportionate number of those killed or infected by the virus.
The racial disparities are so stark that they gain national and international attention. Pundits express shock and outrage at the reports, as if they were surprised by the results. Editorials demand reform. Politicians call for action. The informed public is embarrassed. But little happens: the rescue packages passed by Congress send most of the money to the biggest companies and the most affluent investors. Banks are saved; the post office —with a largely minority workforce —is starved. Hunger spreads. Any expansion of food stamps is blocked. Arrested for leading nonviolent protests against segregation, Dr. Martin Luther King penned his letter from the Birmingham jail expressing his grave disappointment with the “white moderate” and the “White church.” He suggested that the “great stumbling block” for African Americans seeking their freedom is “not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate “who is more devoted to order than to justice.” He decried a religious community “largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail-light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.” The virus didn’t discriminate. The society enforced the discrimination; the virus just preyed upon its victims. We have gone too long, struggled too hard to adjust to the reality that it is dangerous to be black while jogging or to be black in a pandemic. It isn’t enough to express dismay when the newspapers highlight the horrors. We need leaders and citizens of conscience who will act and not rest until justice is done.