On Ahmaud Arbery and the myth of the violent black man
I wanted to share with you a composite of some words I strung together in the middle of a discussion on social media with an old friend of mine who is now a conservative campaign strategist. After seeing video evidence surfaced concerning the horrific lynching of Ahmaud Arbery by two or maybe three white men while he was out jogging, he was calling for spiritual renewal among Christian Americans. Following here is a verbal collage of my responses in conversation with him, written in anger but also in hope and desire for a better, more empathic country.
We need more than renewing. We need some scorched-earth reconsideration of our history and its relationship to our present. People say slavery ended after the Civil War, but years of convict leasing, Jim Crow, and now mass incarceration have led us to a place where these two men, the elder of whom is a retired investigator for the DA's office who spent 7 years on the police force, in 2020 saw the stalking and murder of a young black man they'd racially profiled as their civic duty.
I don't think spiritual renewal and communal self-reflection need be in separate chambers. Christianity has been both a tool of and against oppression since the dawning of American democracy. I think it's important for Christians in particular to be sure they're on the right side of that fence.
There are the easy examples of crosses burning and "they killed Jesus" excuses for anti-semitism. But more times than not, when someone says this is a Christian nation, they are using Christianity as a tool for oppression - saying, in other words, that a majority (if practicing Christians are even a majority anymore) has a moral imperative to dictate beliefs, morals, and laws to a minority.
I'm not trying to attack Christianity - I used to be a Christian, and many of my friends, colleagues, and allies are Christian. But I don't believe Christianity (or American exceptionalism) is immune to being used as a tool of oppression by totalitarians. Honestly, we're witnessing it daily: a hateful President with totalitarian instincts using professions of Christian faith against obvious evidence (just ask the 2 Corinthians) and white American identity politics to get people to abide his oppression of immigrants, muslims, and any individual or group he decides he doesn't like.
Nowadays Christians (or Jews like Stephen Miller, or capitalist grifters like our current president) with totalitarian instincts use fear and hatred of black and brown people, immigrants, Muslims, socialists, and other non-dominant American cultural groups to similar ends. I'm not saying you or even anyone you know fits into this group, but in this cultural moment you're supporting these totalitarian practices by abiding them. We've (perhaps) gotten to the point where we see a lynching like this and are appalled, but I'm still surprised that so many Americans abide the gross double standard that allows them to judge this act but not the automatic tendency to assume violence in Black men that governs our criminal justice system. And honestly, I believe what we abide to be a much more valid standard for judgment than what we believe.