Lynching Is Not OK

 The guilty verdicts for the three men who lynched Ahmaud Arbery have drawn a contrast between a rural Georgia county and the decision to exonerate Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people on the mean streets of small town Wisconsin. 

There are two parts to the Arbery case that bear scrutiny, and they are contradictory so unlikely to get much play in the Hot Take Hothouse of American Discourse in 2021. 

First, Arbery's murderers were almost never charged. The implicit and explicit racism at play in the initial decision not to charge the McMichaels and Bryan is part of the Good Ole Boy South. Charges were only brought when video leaked out. This is the Bad Old South and America.

Second, once the broader public became aware of what happened, there have been and potentially will be consequences for both the murderers and the law enforcement personnel who abetted the cover-up of their lynching.

On the one hand, this is a stark demonstration of the "Two Americas" dynamic. There were the people who killed Arbery and those who were OK with that. The subsequent elections of new DAs and the conduct o the judge and the jury stand in contrast with the judge in Wisconsin and those who tried to hide Arbery's murder. The judge in Rittenhouse's case was such a buffoon, that it almost seems incumbent on the DOJ to file weapons charges against Rittenhouse. 

But we also need to appreciate that what we saw in the case is that - to survive - racism has to remain in the shadows in 2021. As I mentioned the other day, racism and prejudice usually declines the more you interact with people different than you. The South is increasingly a tri-racial society, but has always been biracial. Even in the height of Jim Crow, virulent hatred of Black people was rarer than we tend to appreciate. By 1900, the brutalization of Black people in the South creating a self-replicating apartheid state that required fewer exemplary killings. As long as Blacks "knew their place" everything hummed along. I was always struck by the vehemence of racism when I came North in 1982.

Racism in the South is very real, but it's way more complicated than Hollywood films about Mississippi Burning portray it. The Arbery case showed that racist actions in the deepest South have to be hidden from public view to survive. 

It's not enough, but I think it's important to recognize progress where it exists. If you don't, what's the point of fighting for progress at all? To recognize the progress in the South - while also recognizing that absent the video evidence, those three men go free - is to turn away from despair and take renewed purpose to the fight.