Author: Coleman Hughes
The views of the Authors are not necessarily the views of Enigmose
The shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man from Georgia, has reignited the national debate about racial profiling. On February 23, Arbery entered an empty construction site in the city of Brunswick, lingering for several minutes before leaving. Shortly afterward, Gregory McMichael, a white ex-cop who lived down the street, noticed Arbery running. He grabbed his gun, enlisted his son Travis, and pursued.
After he and his father had chased Arbery in a truck for four minutes, Travis exited the driver’s side and confronted Arbery, shotgun in hand. The video of what followed, captured by William Bryan Jr., a neighbor aiding in the chase, leaves much to be desired. The beginning of the confrontation, when Travis fires his first shot, is completely obscured by the truck. When the camera picks them up again, they are fighting over the shotgun; Arbery must have grabbed it, either just before or just after the first gunshot. As they continue struggling over the gun, Travis fires twice more, and Arbery goes down.
For two months, Arbery’s death garnered no national attention, and no arrests were made. But in early May, Gregory McMichael released Bryan’s video of the incident, apparently hoping to dispel two false rumors: that the truck had a Confederate flag on it, and that Arbery was shot in the back. The video sparked a national outcry, leading prosecutors to charge both McMichaels with felony murder and aggravated assault, and Bryan with felony murder and false imprisonment.
Clearly, something went wrong in the ten minutes leading up to Arbery’s death, and for many, that something is racism. Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden condemned the “brutal murder,” reminiscent of the “darkest chapters of our history.” Comedian Ellen DeGeneres wrote that Arbery was “hunted down and killed for no reason other than the color of his skin.” Others have likened the incident to a lynching.
While it’s tempting to assume that the McMichaels were motivated by racism, the only intellectually honest position is to admit that we do not know what motivated them—at least, not yet. On the one hand, it’s certainly possible that the McMichaels would not have pursued a white suspect under the same circumstances. On the other, contextual facts make the allegation of racism less compelling.
To start, there is a plausible, non-racist explanation for why the McMichaels pursued Arbery. An unidentified black man (it’s unclear if it was Arbery) had trespassed on the same construction site four times—once in October, November, December, and early February. The absentee homeowner caught these incidents on his motion-activated security camera. After the December incident, Gregory McMichael offered to help catch the serial trespasser. Local police subsequently texted the homeowner, advising him to reach out to McMichael “day or night” if he picked up motion on his security camera—the implication being that McMichael could respond faster than they could. Full Article @ City Journal
Related:
Would Democrats give a damn about Amhaud Arbery if he had not been killed by a white man?
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The Republican party was founded to counter Democrat attempts to expand slavery in the United States. Historical facts clearly demonstrate that the infamous Ku Klux Klan was once the terrorist arm of the Democrat Party.
In the 1960s with the success of the Civil Rights movement forced Democrats to seek a new strategy to keep the Negroes as well as poor whites 'on the plantation'. Lyndon Johnson initiated that new strategy, and explained it to his Democrat co-conspirators when discussing the Republican Civil Rights Act of 1957.
'These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now, we've got to do something about this; we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. for if we don't move at all, then their allies [The Republicans] will line up against us and there will be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there will be no way of putting the brake on all sorts of wild legislation, it'll be reconstruction all over again' - Lyndon Johnson [ Inside the White House ]
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