Ipso facto

I have a point to make here, dear Reader, and I have to tell a couple of stories to get to those points, so I hope you will bear with me if this post seems a bit lengthy. I would say, “I’ll try to keep it short,” but doing so would be a disservice to the man whose untimely death I am mourning.

In 1994, I bought my first home in Rancho Cucamonga, and before your brain tells you, “Ooooh, nice,” it was a repo that had been sitting vacant for a year and had been vandalized multiple times. Definitely a fixer, but it was mine. The boys and I moved into our own home, the married daughter lived just up the road, and from my bedroom window, I could see all the way to I-10 and beyond the freeway to watch planes take off from Ontario Airport.

Between my home and those planes, there was nothing but vineyards and long lines of towering eucalyptus trees, planted as windbreaks, as far as the eye could see. We quickly collected a few geriatric dogs in the years after we moved in, and every weekend I would take them for long, early morning walks over there.

Then the property was sold, the new owners tore out all the grape vines, yanked out all the trees, and began leveling those acres for a huge housing development with large, two-story homes—as far as the eye could see.

While they were building them, there was no fence around the property, so I still walked across the road of an evening to stroll along the unpaved streets with the dogs, hating the fact that the homes were going up but curious about the process, the floor plans, etc. On occasion, I would follow the dogs up onto one of the pads and poke my head in the framed doorway, or walk in a few feet to determine where the kitchen would be or how big the living room was. I did this with no malice, no ill intent. I just walked in, looked around, and left.

Fast forward to a few years later when the completed development loomed just yards from my bedroom window. It was now a gated community, and my then teenage son made the acquaintance of a young lady who lived there. I have to state here that my boys are bi-racial. That shouldn’t matter to anyone at any time, but it does, which is why this story must be told.

One warm summer night, he drove across the way in his newly acquired car, a buddy in the passenger seat, to visit this young woman. She’d given him an access code for the gate, so he drove in, but didn’t go straight to her house. He doesn’t remember now why they pulled over; he thinks maybe to listen to a favorite rap song. But minutes later there was a spotlight shining through the windshield of his car, blinding them, and they were given commands through a loudspeaker to step out of the car. They assumed it was police; they couldn’t see anything beyond the glare of the spotlight. The two were placed in handcuffs and made to sit on the curb—for all the world to see. His car was searched (with his permission), his license run for warrants, while they sat, saying no more than “Yes sir” or “No sir” in answer to most of their questions, except when they were asked why they were in this neighborhood, one officer remarking that they didn’t look like they belonged there.

Finally, when they had detained them long enough to publicly humiliate them and make them wonder if they would actually end up in jail for some unknown reason or someone else’s crime, they were let go with the explanation that they “fit the description” of someone who had “recently committed a burglary in that area.”

All of the aforementioned that happened long ago in my life has to do with this story that happened three months ago:

On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man, left his home to go for a run. Along the way, he stopped at a construction site where a home was being built and stepped inside for a few minutes. Conjecture now is that he was stopping to get a drink of water from a functioning sink in the building. He is seen on a security camera walking out of sight, then back into view, wiping his mouth. He leaves then, having disturbed nothing.

Several minutes later he is shot dead after being confronted by two white men who chased him down in a pick-up truck and tried to stop him. When he resisted, they killed him.

When I say to people, “This could have been my son,” I feel those words all the way down to my heart and soul. I wish I could say that what happened to my own son was an isolated incident. Sadly, both my boys in their younger years had to endure similar fear and humiliation after being pulled over for contrived reasons. “You fit the description….” “You were weaving….” “You failed to stop completely.” I know how these things go. I was a police chaplain once, and I rode with an officer who told me that if a person “looked suspicious,” all he had to do was follow him long enough to make him nervous, get him to make the slightest error, and then he “had cause,” and he delighted in that. He was a white officer working in a primarily Latinx community.

I digress.

I stopped writing here for a moment because I couldn’t think of a gentle way to express what I need to say next, and that is this:

If you find yourself feeling even slightly less horrified by the modern-day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery because you found out that, ‘Oh look! He was snooping around at that construction site first!’ then you’re part of the problem. Because it doesn’t matter if he did. People do that sort of thing all the time. I keep telling my own story of doing the same thing, and those who hear it keep saying, “So have I!”

Ahmaud Arbery wasn’t guilty of any wrongdoing. But let me just say this: Even if he was, even if he took a piss on the dirt floor or picked up a power tool and shoved it in his cargo pants on the way out, those two men are not excused from chasing him down and killing him.

Because this is not about what Ahmaud Arbery did or did not do. This is about what Gregory McMichael and his son, Travis McMichael did. They chased a man down, confronted him, and when he refused to comply with what they demanded and he attempted to defend himself, Travis McMichael shot him multiple times point blank with a shotgun. Arbery didn’t even have a fighting chance of survival.

I don’t care what Ahmaud Arbery did in the moments before his execution. I don’t care that the autopsy report shows he had “no drugs or alcohol in his system” when he was murdered. None of that matters, because that’s not what this case should be about, but that’s all I keep hearing about in the news. We seem to be focusing primarily on the victim here, instead of on the man who committed the heinous crime.

The same was true in the case of Emmett Till, a young black teenager who, in 1955, was dragged out of his uncle’s home in the middle of the night by several white men, beaten, tortured, and finally drowned. They did unspeakable things to him. He was 14 years old. The men who lynched him were acquitted of their crimes by an all-white jury. One year later, in an interview for Look magazine, two of the men admitted to killing Till, and they felt justified in doing so because he had allegedly flirted with a married white woman.

The entire focus of the case in 1955 was on what Emmett Till may or may not have done, not on what was done to him, nor on the individuals who perpetrated those acts.

Do you see my point here? I pray that you see my point here. In the case of an unarmed black man who is clearly chased down by two white men and then killed, it is not necessary to “wait until we have all the facts” before we make a judgment. A gross and tragic injustice has been done here. Nothing we learn about what Arbery did or did not do in the moments or days or weeks before it happened is going to justify what was done to him.