After an extended four years of tRump, the sound of his name yet makes my skin crawl.  The rise of the new RepubliKKKlan party would be funny if ole school insanity were not so frightening.  The worship of guns—increasingly by those unfit to carry them or appreciate the consequences of violence— should cause us all to cringe.

This week, a country whose face is always ready for the world camera, showed the boils festering on its belly.  She showed her sickness, the cancer of racism coursing both the body and the blood.  This week, the Divided States of AmeriKKKa showed her pimply white ass.

The Divided States of AmeriKKKa showed us there was something rotten in America’s courthouses besides a fat-faced, juvenile delinquent by the name of Kyle Rittenhouse, chasing social media fantasies.  The Divided States of AmeriKKKa showed us that what little our parents have, they pass on to us.  Not just their Double Wides and poor upbringings.  But their backwoods gewgaws of ignorance.  Their termite-ravaged books of judgment—if they own any books at all.  Their buckshot moonshine bottles, empty of compassion.  And their broken compasses of morality.

Watching any trial means enduring a long, drawn-out melodrama told without the tightness and clarity editing brings.  We were once told a picture’s worth a thousand words.  We are now told; if there’s no picture, nothing happened.  And if there’s a video, don’t believe your eyes.

If you have spent the past two weeks pondering the pieces of two stories, trying to stitch together a quilt of truth, you may be feeling stuck by your own needle.  You may feel drugged.  You may feel your eyes and ears playing tricks on you.  If you believe the prosecution’s case, Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black male, is only guilty of stopping by a home under construction while on a jog through the community of Satilla Shores.  If you believe the video, you watched “men” hunt down and entrap Ahmaud Arbery, a human being, and kill him (like the rabid animals they were) under the lushness of Spanish moss swinging from oaks and cypress trees.

The defense in The Jogger Murder Trial employs the usual tried and true tactics.  Play racist stereotypes and tropes about black men.  Press repeat.   The defense painted an ugly picture of Ahmaud Arbery as “creeping,” “lurking around trees in the dark,” and being a “threat.”  Travis McMichael, the murderer himself, testified that something was “not right” about Ahmaud Arbery.  Travis McMichael, wannabe cop, testified that when he pulled up next to Ahmaud Arbery in his pickup truck, Ahmaud Arbery scowled.  As if . . . he didn’t want to be . . . picked up?  Ahmaud Arbery’s “face looked angry” when all his would-be murderer wanted to do was “talk to the guy and find out what was going on . . . with him.”

According to Law, Power and Justice(dot)com, one defense attorney pointed out that Larry English’s 15-year-old daughter had been on his vacant property.  What if, the lawyer exclaimed, she had run across Arbery?  While we may never know what would’ve happened to her, we do know what happened to a black man encountering racists, brandishing guns, in pickup trucks with confederate flags, don’t we?

Just for kicks, pun intended, one of the defense attorneys strolled up to the podium and, having mustered up the audacity, asked the medical examiner about Ahmaud Arbery’s toenails.  Under oath and forced to respond, the M.E. replied, “long and dirty.”

“What’s more disgusting than unkempt feet is when desperate attorneys disrespect victims by shaming them in death and disregarding the pain of the blow to his living loved ones.  But the filthy ways of race baiters are no accident.  Putting sweaty pigs on a pedestal while dragging the victim—by his feet—through the mud is what they do.  It’s all they ever do.” –Blackbiter.com

That brings us to the Twilight Zone that is Satilla Shores.  According to the defense, the appearance of a black man “bold, brazen, and lurking” on camera in a house under construction struck the men, women, and young’uns with fear.  So much so, the neighborly clique of armed psychopaths, “under siege and attack,” worked themselves up into a frenzy by their own paranoia.  But after cooler heads sifted through the incidents of theft rousing the still sleepy town, quieter minds, including cop minds, discovered purses left in cars left unlocked; and guns left in trucks left unlocked; and CDs and chump change left in cars left unlocked for random neighbor teens to possibly plunder at random when (like Kyle Rittenhouse) not on lockdown.  After some self-reflecting, boat owner Larry English, who had driven his boat hither and yon, in a more lucid moment admitted himself—not to an asylum.  He admitted himself to NOT knowing where the expensive equipment stolen from his boat was actually stolen!  Oh, my!

These country folk, with their sweet tea and cans of Bud in hand, got off on scrolling the community Facebook page for the latest gossip and unconfirmed crimes and imaginary sleights committed against their ability to enjoy a neighborhood free of Negroes.  As such, by any given nightfall, newly purchased cameras rose above porches, surveilling in 140 degree increments, the “mean” streets of Satilla Shores.

One stay-at-home mother, Brooke Perez, spent her days and nights fixated on surveillance monitors.  If the fingers of the stay-at-home mother were not flying, texting husband-less working mothers to “get the boys inside” because that intruder’s black—uh, back, she was running armed and alarmed into her front yard for a bird’s eye view of perceived suspicious happenings.  Especially since she always sent her husband, Diego Perez, in harm’s way—as if grabbing Similac and nappies from a store.  When Brooke Perez testified she feared the McMichaels would pop her husband inside the vacant house after Larry English called in the McMichaels to investigate the intruder but not the po-po, no wonder Diego Perez told Larry English to lose all ten of his numbers.

Overdosing on adrenaline and cortisol derived from overblown danger stories of their own creation, these neighbors ran amuck rallying around a false narrative, even when some “intruders” turned out to be unfamiliar kinfolk simply rolling in cars unfamiliar to them.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, these so-called alarming reports were as weak as a stream of geriatric piss.  Groundless.

Satilla Shores had become one collective idle mind, with the devil’s misguided children at play.  Although they convinced themselves they were heroes protecting helpless babes, inconsistencies cropped up to the contrary.  Remember the blackish neighbor, Sube Lawrence, who was also husband-less?  If you recall, Ms. Lawrence cried on the stand about the neighborhood turning into something it wasn’t when she grew up there.

Didn’t it strike you as odd when she testified about cozying up to murderer Travis McMichael?  Travis McMichael, the murderer himself, asked Sube Lawrence to “share” his side of the story.  Didn’t it strike you as faux news that she would be more afraid of Ahmaud Arbery, the jogger slaughtered and bleeding out in the street, than the murderer up to his elbows in his innocent blood?

It’s no surprise that Sube Lawrence, so oblivious to the darkness of her skin that she, like a black fool, couldn’t grasp the shady nuances of agreeing to help a murderer, at his prompting, to paint and then leak a false picture of an upstanding citizen as rosy-cheeked as Santa Clause.  It’s no surprise that Sube Lawrence couldn’t see the sweaty, red-faced McMichaels for the racist-pot-bellied vigilantes they were—and still are.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone then that poor blackish Sube, with arms and hands open to all acts of charity, GUH-LADLY, accepted an invitation from the gracious Perezes, those pale Hispanics, on a boat ride with a self-righteous murderer?!  Without fear.

“People of less color—desperate to shed the scourge of their own blackness to elevate themselves above Blacks in the eyes of whites—buy-in to stereotypes about Blacks.” –Blackbiter.com

That’s why, of all the potential suspects available, all Satilla Shores neighbors overlooked a white couple, white contractors, white children, a white homeless person, and dismissed a white man arrested in the neighborhood by federal police.  Instead, they focused their scopes and aimed at the sole specter of danger living rent-free in their twisted minds.  A young black man, a hand resting on his hipbone, taking a peek around an open structure on its way to becoming a home.

As so many others had.

To paraphrase Law, Power and Justice(dot)com, ‘The belief that neighborly gossip and Facebook postings are reality; the willingness of people to share speculations as fact; the willingness of these people to run into the streets armed with guns willing to shoot somebody (anybody as long as they’re black); and the belief—to this day!—that they did nothing wrong just astounds and depresses me.’

It should astound and depress you, too.

***

This post was damn-near plagiarized but mostly inspired by an article entitled,

“It Astounds and Depresses Me: Ahmaud Arbery,” by Dr. Christine Johns

of Law, Power and Justice(dot)com on November 19, 2021.

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