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In many states, legal regimes sanction the predictable murder of innocent black men. Justice will not be served until the law changes.

In late February of this year, twenty-five-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was chased down, shot, and killed by white residents of Brunswick, Georgia, during a so-called citizens arrest. Four months later, after video of the murder surfaced, the assailants were indicted on murder charges. Protesters rightly link Arberys murder with that of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, who were murdered by the police. Taken together, the three killings illustrate some of the many ways African Americans experience racial violence at the hands of the state and private actors.

Lethal vigilantism is enabled by a legal regime that sanctions the predictable murder of innocent black men, so long as the community judges it reasonable.

But Arberys case presents a unique form of violencelethal vigilantismnot captured in conversations about police. It was enabled by a legal regime that sanctions the predictable murder of innocent black men, so long as the community judges it reasonable. This regime combines citizens arrest with permissive gun laws and stand your ground self-defense laws. It is the law that unleashed the vigilantism that cost Arbery his life, and we delude ourselves if we think the law will provide justice. We will not see justice until the law has been changed.

First, the facts as we know them. On February 23, 2020, at about 1:00 pm, Arbery went for a jog through a suburban neighborhood in southeast Georgia. Along the way, he saw a house under construction and stopped to wander through. This was apparently not unusual; surveillance video at the site confirms that a number of children and adults had previously walked through the unfinished shell. According to the letter of the law, Arberys detour was illegal, but so were the detours of the others who preceded him: all trespassed on private property. Yet the video does not show he committed a crime apart from the trespass, and it certainly does not show he committed a felony such as burglary. After a couple minutes, Arbery left the site and continued on his jog.

A neighbor across the street saw Arbery at the construction site and called 911 to reportmistakenlya burglary in progress. About two minutes later, while Arbery was jogging, two white men he didnt know, Greg McMichael and his son Travis, began to pursue him in a pick-up truck. Before his retirement in June 2019, the elder McMichael had had a long career in law enforcement, both as a police officer and as an investigator for the local district attorney, though his law enforcement certification was suspended and his gun taken away in February 2019 after repeatedly failing to complete mandatory training. After the shooting, Greg McMichael told police he and his son believedagain, mistakenlythat Arbery was a fleeing burglar.

I have not been able to determine how or whether the McMichaels learned of Arberys presence at the construction site. I dont know, for instance, whether they were alerted by the neighbor who called 911, or whether they were contacted by someone in the police department. It is quite possible they did not know about the trespass at all. The New York Times reported that Greg McMichael told police that Arbery looked like a person suspected in prior break-ins, and that he and his son grabbed two guns and followed him after he jogged by, suggesting they had no idea about the trespass.

We are schooled from an early age to revere the rule of law. But the murder of Ahmaud Arbery makes plain that in many states, the law is not part of the solution; it is part of the problem.

The McMichaels chased Arbery down and attempted to cut him off. Arbery turned around and fled in the other direction. A third person, William Bryan, then noticed the pursuit. An investigator with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation testified at a recent court hearing that Bryan was at his home, and allegedly called out to the McMichaels as they drove by, Do you got him? When he got no response, Bryan decided to get in his truck and join the chase. He too tried to block Arberys path.

Arbery continued to flee, and both trucks continued to pursue him through the suburb. Finally, as they chased him down, Travis McMichael leaped from the bed of the pick-up truck armed with a shotgun and confronted Arbery. Arbery stood his ground and defended himself, at one point grabbing the barrel of the shotgun. Travis shot him twice in the chest and killed him.

After the shooting, we learned that Greg McMichael had sent a text message in December 2019 to an officer with the Glynn County Police Department. In the message McMichael volunteered, apparently unsolicited, to be on the lookout for intruders at the construction site. He asked that the officer forward the text message to the family that owned the home, inviting them to call him day or night when you get action on your camera.

The police officer forwarded the text to the homeowner, who lived two hours away. But the homeowner did not see or open the text until after Arbery had been killed and never asked McMichael to take action on his behalf. Indeed, the homeowner did not learn of the trespass until long after the confrontation that resulted in Arberys death. The homeowner also reported that Arbery did not take anything from the site, confirming that Arberys only crime was the same trespass that many others had committed.

As the case began to be investigated, the first prosecutor recused herself because Greg McMichael had formerly been an investigator in her office. A second prosecutor from a neighboring judicial district also recused himself because his son had worked with McMichael. Despite his recusal, this prosecutor also took it upon himself to draft a letter taking the position that the McMichaels had acted in lawful self-defense. The case was then assigned to a third prosecutor, who passed the case to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) after a video of Arberys killing emerged. This video was taken by Bryan while he pursued Arbery. It captures part of the chase and shooting.

The GBI arrested the McMichaels and charged them with murder and aggravated assault. Chris Carr, the Republican Attorney General in Georgia, then assigned the case to a fourth prosecutor, Joyette Holmes, the elected district attorney in Cobb County, an Atlanta suburb. Carr has also asked for the Justice Department to begin an investigation into the case and for the GBI to examine whether the first two prosecutors engaged in any misconduct. Finally, in late May, the GBI arrested and charged Bryan with felony murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. At a recent court hearing, a GBI investigator testified that Bryan told him Travis McMichael used a racial epithet to refer to the slain Mr. Arbery while they were waiting for the police to arrive.

While these facts are shocking, the law in Georgia is forgivingindeed, it may make it difficult to bring the assailants to justice. The prosecution will turn narrowly on what the suspects knew, when they knew it, and whether their actions in light of this information were reasonable in the eyes of the local community.

Greg and Travis McMichael claim they were making a citizens arrest, the law of which has been with us for centuries. It has changed over the years, but by the eighteenth century it allowed a citizen who witnessed another person commit a crime to detain the suspect until the police arrived. Developed at a time when police were not ubiquitous, the law was intended to allow shop- and homeowners to seize and detain would-be thieves and to hold them until a constable could be summoned. Perhaps there was a time when such a law made sense, at least in limited circumstances. Now, however, it has been subject to withering criticism, especially after the Arbery murder.

The law of citizens arrest grants private citizens the authority to act on secondhand judgment and empowers their peers to determine whether that judgment was reasonable. Both decisions are apt to be dangerously unreliable.

Like many states, Georgia expanded the right of a citizen to arrest another person. The opening sentence of the Georgia statute authorizes a private person to arrest another for any offense committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge. That much is faithful to the traditional doctrine. But in the second sentence, Georgia allows a citizen to make an arrest even without direct knowledge, if he has reasonable and probable grounds to suspect the person committed a felony and is escaping or attempting to escape. Note the distinction. Absent direct knowledge, a private citizen can make an arrest only if he reasonably believed he was chasing a fleeing felon. At trial, then, Arberys case will turn on whether a jury concludes the McMichaels had good reason to suspect Arbery had committed a felony.

Therein lies the first failure of the law in cases such as this. It grants private citizens the authority to act on secondhand judgment and empowers their peers to determine whether that judgment was reasonable. Both decisions are apt to be dangerously unreliable.

To begin with, the line between lawful and unlawful behavior, or between misconduct that is a misdemeanor rather than a felony, is frequently unclear, especially at the scene, where information is incomplete and events are still unfolding. Even the police sometimes get this wrong, and private citizens are particularly unqualified to make this judgment, as demonstrated by another disastrous citizens arrest that took place in Georgia not long before Arberys.

In May last year, a twenty-two-year old white woman in an Atlanta suburb chased down a sixty-two-year old black man who had driven from the scene of a fender bender, apparently because he was having a diabetic attack. Because there were no injuries, leaving the scene was not a felony; if he was in fact having a medical crisis, he may not have committed any crime at all. But the young woman had not seen the crash and knew none of this. She chased the older man in her jeep, ordered him out of his car at gunpoint, and shot him before he could get out. He died at the scene. She has been charged with murder. Her lawyer said he was just trying to be helpful.

This points to another reason why we ought not vest private citizens with the power to act on secondhand judgments about criminality. As we have known for many years, whites in this country associate blackness with crime and crime with blackness. The stereotypical association that pairs violence to young black men is particularly strong. Indeed, we saw this at work in the Arbery case. A number of children and adults had trespassed at the construction sitejust like Arberybut apparently none was, in the words of a lawyer for the Arbery family, presumed to be a criminal.

So much for the right the McMichaels have claimed to make a citizens arrest. What about the shooting that followed? Two other Georgia laws cover that situation: one that protects the right to carry a gun, and another the right to stand your ground.

Like every jurisdiction in the country, Georgia law allows private citizens to use deadly force if they reasonably believe it is necessary to prevent death or great bodily injury. Theres that word againreasonably. Deciding whether defendants reasonably needed to use deadly force, just like whether they reasonably believed a person was an escaping felon, is a question for a jury.

For many years the law of self-defense was subject to an important qualification: outside of their home, people who could safely retreat from conflict had no right to take the life of another. Today, however, the duty to retreat has been replaced in most U.S. jurisdictions by the right to stand your ground (SYG).

Citizens arrest, stand-your-ground, and permissive right-to-carry laws respond to the imagined decline of whiteness in American life.

The history of SYG is the story of an unholy alliance between the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the less well-known American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC bills itself as Americas largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism. Its membership includes thousands of conservative state and federal legislators, as well as representatives from hundreds of the largest corporations in the country. Together they serve on various task forces that draft and circulate model legislation to advance the interests of its conservative and neoliberal supporters. As the Center for Constitutional Rights described it, state and local lawmakers meet with conservative, right-wing activists and corporate executives (who pay tens of thousands of dollars for access), and together design model legislation that is then shipped out to state legislatures across the country and passed into law with alarming efficiency. Almost 90 percent of ALECs funding comes from corporate membership dues and grants from conservative foundations.

ALEC boasts that states pass hundreds of its model bills every year, which prompted the Center for Media and Democracy to denounce it as a corporate bill mill. Over the years it has promoted legislation that would dismantle protection for workers, privatize public education, and impose mandatory minimum prison sentences of up to three years for possession of marijuana by a first-time offender. ALEC has been behind some of the most socially conservative and controversial legislation in recent U.S. history, including voter ID laws that suppress minority voting, anti-BDS laws that punish support for Palestinian rights, and anti-protest laws that criminalize water and climate activism of the sort that took place at Standing Rock in North Dakota.

Yet its most dangerous model legislation may have been SYG. Florida adopted the first SYG law in April 2005. According to the Center on Media and Democracy, the bill was drafted in part by Marion Hammer, the former head of the NRA who was recently and rightly described as the most influential gun lobbyist in the United States. When the time came for the Florida legislature to vote on the bill, Hammer stared down legislators as they voted, and few had the courage to oppose her. Within months of the success in Florida, Hammerpresented the billto the ALEC criminal justice task force, which voted unanimously to approve SYG as an ALEC model bill.

ALEC and the NRA quickly began pushing SYG in state houses across the country, and Georgia was among the first states to sign on. The Georgia bill was sponsored by Republican State Senator Greg Goggans, of Douglas, Georgia, a little town about 100 miles from Brunswick, where Arbery was killed. Like the law in Florida, it allows a person to use lethal force to resist the threat of death or great bodily injury, regardless of where the threat occurs and with no duty to retreat. The bill passed the Georgia House by a vote of 115-42, and the Senate by 40-13. When Governor Sonny Perdue signed it into law in April 2006, the NRA released a celebratory statement thanking Senator Goggans and all the NRA members and lawful gun owners who pushed for the bill, proclaiming that now Georgians can defend themselves without fear of being prosecuted. Before long, support for SYG became a totem of conservative fealty to the gun lobby. Today twenty-seven states have SYG laws on the books, and court decisions have eliminated the duty to retreat in another seven.

SYG laws increase the risk of lethal violence by authorizing the use of deadly force where it was previously disallowed. And in fact, this risk has been realized; research finds that the laws are associated with more homicides and more firearm injuries. Yet SYG does not operate in a vacuum; the risk of lethal violence is amplified by permissive right-to-carry gun laws. Every state in the country, as well as the District of Columbia, authorizes at least some residents to carry a concealed firearm in public. In thirty-five states, the resident must first get a permit, but in the remaining fifteen (Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming), no permit is necessary. Meanwhile, in all but three states and the District of Columbia, residents may also carry a firearm openly (sometimes with a permit, sometimes without). Georgia allows open carry.

For many years the law of self-defense was subject to an important qualification: outside of their home, people who could safely retreat from conflict had no right to take the life of another. Today, however, the duty to retreat has been replaced in most U.S. jurisdictions by the right to stand your ground.

Like SYG and citizens arrest, the specifics of these gun laws vary modestly from state to state. Some states allow residents to openly carry handguns but not long guns, while some allow the reverse. Some allow certain weapons to be carried but only if they are unloaded. Many require a prospective gun owner to demonstrate proficiency with a firearm; most exclude weapons from specified locations, such as schools, hospitals, and places of worship. But in general, ever since the Supreme Court decision in Heller v. District of Columbia in 2008, which upheld the right of private gun ownership under the Second Amendment, it has become dramatically easier for people to travel the streets of this country armed. Research shows that violent crime went up when states adopted right-to-carry laws.

Taken together, these laws form a dangerous legal regime in Georgia. Any Georgia resident with a permit can carry a firearm. Thus armed, he may chase after and seize anyone he reasonably suspects of fleeing from a felony. If the person resists, SYG relieves him of the duty to retreat and allows him to use lethal force if reasonably necessary. The trilogy of permissive gun laws, SYG, and citizens arrest authorize not merely armed pursuit, but lethal force, with all questions about the limits of the law left to the local communitys sense of what is reasonable. And therein lies the second failure of the law: it tolerates lethal vigilantism so long as the community agrees with the defendants that their actions were reasonable.

And who is this community? Bryan and the McMichaels are now pending trial in the Superior Court of Glynn County, Georgia. According to the Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2019, Glynn County was 69 percent white. It is part of a judicial circuit that also includes four other counties that range from 75 to 82 percent white. In each county, the percentage of whites corresponds almost exactly to the percentage of voters who cast their ballot for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The lethal violence that Georgia law predictably unleashed on Arbery will be approved, then, so long as this community judges it reasonable. And if the defendants are acquitted, it will not be because the law has failed to achieve its purpose. Quite the contrary, it will be because the law has worked precisely as it was designed. That, in fact, is the lesson of George Zimmermans acquittal. Zimmerman was part of a neighborhood watch group in an area that had experienced a string of burglaries. He spied an innocent Trayvon Martin in the neighborhood, pursued and confronted him, and shot him during an altercation.

At Zimmermans trial, the jury was instructed on Floridas SYG law:

If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in any place where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another.

In an interview after the verdict, a juror in the Zimmerman case told Anderson Cooper of CNN that the jury voted to acquit because of the heat of the moment and the Stand Your Ground. He had a right to defend himself. If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right. She added that, at least in her mind, Zimmermans heart was in the right place, but just got displaced by the vandalism in the neighborhood. He went above and beyond what he should have done. But I think his heart was in the right place. It just went terribly wrong.

In other words, she thought George Zimmerman could hardly be blamed for killing Martin. He acted as a reasonable, well-intended white man who was suddenly presented with an unknown black man in an oft-burgled neighborhood. Things just went terribly wrong. Greg and Travis McMichael will no doubt say the same thing.

It is worth noting that the Zimmerman case sparked a backlash against SYG and ALEC, and dozens of corporate members responded to the uproar by allowing their membership in the organization to lapse. This triggered a funding crisis within ALEC, which then withdrew its support for SYG. ALEC has never clarified whether its decision was motivated by Martins murder, or to stanch the flow of money from its corporate members; to date, it has never advocated for any state to repeal the SYG laws. (Goggans, the state senator who had sponsored the Georgia bill, also announced his retirement from politics two days after the shooting. At the time, he said he wanted to devote himself fulltime to his orthodontic practice.)

Zimmermans acquittal, though notorious, was hardly unique. A careful study of six years of SYG homicides in the United States found that white-on-black killings were nearly three times more likely to be found justified than white-on-white homicides. The disparity is even more pronounced in the fact pattern presented in the Martin and Arbery cases: one victim, one shooter, both male, strangers to each other, using a firearm. Forty-two percent of the white-on-black shootings presenting that profile were found to be justified, but only 8.6 percent of the black-on-white.

Why do we create a legal regime that produces this result? Perhaps as importantly, why, knowing it produces this result, do we allow it to endure?

To understand the cultural impetus behind this regime we have to understand the moment in which it emerged. In their current configuration, citizens arrest, stand-your-ground, and permissive right-to-carry laws respond to the imagined decline of whiteness in American lifethe supposed emasculation of white men, in particular. The aggrieved point to a range of evidence, beginning with the brute fact that before mid-century, the country will be majority minority. Indeed, in the youngest demographic groups, this is already the case. Fewer than half the children under age 15 in this country are non-Hispanic whites. Demographers project that by 2024 death rates will exceed birth rates for non-Hispanic whites, which means the total number of whites in the country will begin to fall.

It is the law that unleashed the vigilantism that cost Arbery his life, and we delude ourselves if we think the law will provide justice. We will not see justice until the law has been changed.

But the transition taking place is not simply a passive shift in majority status. To those who fear it, the change is an affirmative assault on whiteness and its longstanding hegemony on the exercise of power. From inside this besieged white mentality, reinforced in daily rants by the president and broadcast widely by the likes of Fox News, the threats seem everywhere, including the nations inability to seal its borders from a flood of brown bodies who steal jobs, depress wages, and debase the culture; the ascendance of Black Lives Matter, the so-called terrorist organization that has cowed law enforcement; the assault of Confederate statutes and other enduring symbols of white supremacy; the literally unprecedented increase in mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites, especially those with lower education levels; and of course, perhaps most importantly, the election of a black president. To aggrieved whites, such developments are fashioned into a narrative that foretells doom for whites in general and white men in particular.

Like any mobilizing narrative, this one is designed to bring order to a fractious world, create a sense of urgency, and reveal a path forward. The laws operating in Georgia are part of a cultural call to rescue an endangered whiteness from a state of siege. They are meant to appeal to the conservative, white men who form the group most likely to own a gun in this country. They gave Greg and Travis McMichael a purpose and imbued them with a high sense of moral legitimacy. This legal regime is allowed to endure because the thought of abandoning it is too terrifying for many whites to contemplate. Though any thoughtful observer can safely predict that the regime will lead to the murder of innocent black men, and that their murders will go unpunished because the community considers them reasonable, this is but the cost to defend whiteness.

In this country we are schooled from an early age to revere the rule of law. But the murder of Ahmaud Arbery makes plain that in many states, the law is not part of the solution; it is part of the problem. Until we reckon with this fact, black men will continue to be hunted and killed by reasonable white men.

See the article here:
How the Law Killed Ahmaud Arbery - Boston Review

George Floyds death brought the Black Lives Matters movement back into the media spotlight, causing a sudden influx of Black allies advocating for equality and posting on social media that Black lives matter. I also saw many Black people on social media sharing ways that allies can make an impact and promote change through petitions, donations and protests. While it's good that Black people are educating new allies, it is not an entire race's job to teach others how to have empathy for the Black experience.

With this newfound online advocacy, white people are still asking Black people to teach them how to empathize and understand white privilege and racism. The information and statistics about these issues arent new; theyve been there all along. If you simply open your eyes you can see the disparity. Black people have lived so long in this oppressive, violent system that having a white person ask you how they can care now is almost offensive.

Black people have been protesting the unfair system and racial violence for centuries, but many people are just now opening their eyes as a result of the brutal killing of George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Elijah McClain all died violent and unnecessary deaths. Why did it take a man dying with a police officer kneeling on the back of his neck for you to think that this needs to stop?

Asking a Black person how can I care about the Black experience? or how can I understand Black people? makes it seem like you are having difficulty viewing Black people as human or viewing them as equal to yourself. Because someone has brown skin does not make them less than.

Asking a Black person how can I care? also makes it seem as if you don't really understand the magnitude of racism in America or the lasting impact that it has on Black people. The question how can I care? displays the privilege and supremacy that white people have had over Black people for centuries.

If you finally are able to see the injustice, then I believe that the greatest way to help is to actually live your life as a Black ally. Speak out when you see something wrong, even if it feels uncomfortable, because Black people have been uncomfortable their entire lives.

Being anti-racist is work that will have to be done for the rest of your life. It's not a social media campaign or about donating to prove youre a good person. Its about your actions in everything that you do. It needs to become a part of you.

Acknowledging that as a white person you are privileged is the second best thing that you can do. Look at your life and think about how the color of your skin opens so many doors for you that are shut to people of color. Even more than this, use the privilege and power that comes with the color of your skin to advocate for the rights and lives of Black people. This can be monumental to changing the system.

Systematic racism and police brutality aren't trends, they are everyday experiences for Black people. The Black Lives Matter movement began in 2013 after the fatal shooting of the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his killer George Zimmerman. In 2014, Michael Brown was killed by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer named Darren Willson. The killing sparked outrage and demonstrations from the community. The police response to the protests was extremely aggressive, which stunned activists.

Just because systemic racism and police brutality are suddenly trending on Twitter and Instagram doesnt mean that when it stops trending it's not relevant anymore. Being a true Black ally is understanding the plight of Black people, scrutinizing how white privilege and supremacy affect Black lives daily and advocating for equality in whatever way you can, even when it makes you uneasy.

Continue reading here:
OPINION: Black people shouldn't have to educate white people on racism - Red and Black

For thirteen years, Francine Hughess husband, James (Mickey) Hughes, beat her routinely. Something as small as the inflection of a word would set him off: hed pin her down in a chair and pummel her. They divorced in 1971, but, later that same year, he moved back in. She did try to get away, her son, James Hughes, remembers in The Burning Bed, a new short documentary from Retro Report. But he would also tell her, There is nowhere you can go, bitch, that I wont find you.

One night, in 1977, Mickey subjected Hughes to a particularly humiliating beating. Smashing food in the kitchen, dumping out the garbage, rubbing it into my hair, hitting me, Hughes recalled in a television interview, years later. I thought, Im never coming back, never, and then I thought, Because there wont be anything to come back to. Thats when I decided I would burn everything. When Mickey fell asleep, drunk, that night, Hughes doused his bed in gasoline, lit it on fire, packed her four children into her car, and drove away as flames engulfed the house. Hughes was then charged with the murder of her ex-husband.

Hughess story has been told beforethe new Burning Bed documentary borrows its title from the journalist Faith McNultys 1980 book about the Hugheses and from the 1984 TV-movie adaptation, starring Farrah Fawcett. The documentary emphasizes how groundbreaking Hughess case was. Lee Atkinson, who was an assistant prosecutor in her case, says that, at the time, police officers would not arrest someone for a misdemeanor unless they saw the crime committed. For Hughes, this policy meant that the police came to her house repeatedly and did not arrest Mickey. Does she have bruises? Yes. Does she look like shes been abused? Yes. The police will take a report, but they wouldnt make an arrest, he says. At a time when the criminal-justice system failed to deal with domestic violence becauseas an Evening News broadcast put ittraditionally, wife-beating has been considered a family affair, Hughess case initiated a sea change, forcing a long-suppressed conversation about domestic violence in America.

In interviews for the film, Hughess lawyer recalls that, because Mickey had been asleep, I did not think that I could convince the jury necessarily that she was not guilty because she was defending herself. So I used the temporary-insanity hook. He invoked an idea that would come to be known as battered-woman syndrome, a term coined by the psychologist Lenore Walker, based on her research with abused women in the U.S. and the U.K. Walker identified an assemblage of psychological symptomsfear, guilt, and denialthat occurs in victims of intimate-partner abuse. This combination, which has since been classed as a form of P.T.S.D., can make discerning the level of risk in a given moment amid an ongoing pattern of trauma difficult. The defense worked: Hughes was acquitted, in an unexpected victory for her and for the feminist movement.

The film follows the legacy of Hughess case, focussing on the ways that, despite changing the national conversation about domestic violence, her acquittal is still very much an outlierthe vast majority of women who kill their abusive partners are not acquitted. The documentary moves forward to 2005, when a Black Ohio woman, Thomia Hunter, was charged with the murder of her boyfriend. (Black women are abusedand incarceratedat higher rates than white women, and those who fight back against their abusers face an uphill battle in the courts.) Hunter pleaded self-defense, having stabbed her boyfriend while he was choking her. But she was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison, her history of abuse hardly addressed at the trial.

In interviews for the film, the prosecutors in the two casesboth white menmake similar arguments: abuse is horrible, but women have options. This claim reflects the view that people in abusive relationships can simply leave. The truth is more complicated, and the perspective of Hunters lawyer, Tiffanny Smith, who represents ten women who are incarcerated survivors of domestic violence, offers a corrective: A woman doesnt go on a first date, get punched in the face, and stay with this person. What happens is very calculating, very slow. For many women, the decision not to leave is another, paradoxical form of self-defense, Smith points out, and evidence shows that women leaving an abusive partner are more likely to be killed immediately upon leaving than any other time.

Last year, Hunter was granted clemency and released, after serving fifteen years. Since the late nineteen-seventies, the number of women in the prison system has grown by more than eight hundred per centtwice the rate of increase for menand a majority of them have been victims of domestic violence. Yet the options available to women for legally defending themselves remain dismally limited: as Elizabeth Flock demonstrated in this magazine earlier in the year (How Far Can Abused Women Go to Protect Themselves?), Stand Your Ground laws should, in theory, apply to women who kill their abusers; in practice, however, such cases are far more difficult for women to win than men. Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law, argues in a paper titled Real Men Advance, Real Women Retreat that Stand Your Ground laws mostly benefit white males with guns (as in the case of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin). Men are seen as acting courageously and rationally when they use force. Womens self-defense, on the other hand, remains reliant for justification on the battered-woman syndrome that saved Hughes four decades ago. Women who defend themselves, Franks says, are still treated as if there is something wrong with their brains.

But awareness of how abuse can escalate is not pathological: three women in America are killed by a partner every day, and male partners are responsible for nearly half of the murders of women in the United States. With these figures in mind, it is safe to assume that, for many women who kill their abusers, the alternative was to be killed themselves. Toward the end of The Burning Bed, Hunter tells the filmmakers that she is sure that this would have been her fate had she not picked up a knife off the countertop and used it against her alleged abuser: I definitely take full responsibility for my actions, she says. The only thing that I do know is that if I didnt defend myself that night, it would have been me, not him.

See more here:
The Burning Bed Recalls the Case That Changed How Law Enforcement Treats Domestic Violence - The New Yorker

There are certain defining moments in life that show not only who you are but also how the world will see you. For me, like for many Black boys, one such moment came when I was just 16. That's when I received The Talk.

Rites of passage exist in communities around the world, from the quinceaera to the Maasai lion hunt to the classic American prom. The Talk is an initiation for African-Americans. Our mothers and fathers all know The Talk, as do our children, especially the sons. No, it's not the birds-and-the-bees talk known to other teenagers, but rather a conversationtips, suggestions, warningsabout how to act as a Black person: in the face of a world that may be afraid of you, in the face of those who might want to harm you, in the face of law enforcement when one small action or gesture might save your life.

When I turned 16, I got my drivers license. Excited and relishing my newfound freedom, I brought it home to show my family. My mother's face betrayed her horror; we argued, she cried, I am not ready for him to go.

It's true, I wasn't the best at driving. I had a lead foot, but I got my license and I was ready to go wherever I wanted, when I wanted. I didn't understand why my mom made such a big deal about it. But The Talk came a day or two later, and my mother was serious. "Look, as a Black teenager, there are some things you need to know when you are out there driving."

She spoke for what felt like hours with warning after warning about how to avoid trouble. Be home before the streetlights turn on. Don't attract attention by playing the music too loud. Be careful in "those little towns."

But her disposition became grave as she explained what I would need to do when, not if, I was pulled over by the cops. Keep your hands on the steering wheel at 10 and two. Do not make any sudden movements. Be polite, say ma'am or sir. Put them at ease, show that you're not a threat. She made it clear: Upon all of this my life depended.

"You aren't doing anything wrong. You're just Black," said the author to his 13-year-old mentee who had been harassed by the police while walking to school in San Francisco.(Photo by Kay on Unsplash)

The first time I was pulled over, I was in midtown Kansas City, Missouri. I was driving maybe 10 miles over the speed limit (remember my lead foot). When I heard the siren and saw the flashing lights behind me, I immediately froze. I breathed rapidly and gripped the steering wheel tight, trying to catch my breath. When the officer approached my car, I made eye contact, studying his face, eyes, ears, and uniform. I waited for him to speak, and replied, my clutch on the wheel loosening only to hand over my license and registration, both ready on the passenger seat. My eyes locked on the rearview mirror while I waited for him to run my license before he came back to my car, handed me my license, registration, and a speeding ticket, and drove off. The whole stop took maybe 20 minutes, but it felt like hours.

In the seven or eight times I have been pulled over by the police, I have always had the same reaction: tense, nervous, and scared. I wonder will this be it? I've felt fortunate to drive away from police encounters physically unscathed, but I have friends and family members who cannot say the same. They get pulled over for having new cars or for driving in predominantly white neighborhoods. One friend of mine was threatened, another was roughed up. I was lucky. To be honest, one reason I moved to San Francisco is because I do not have to driveanything to reduce my interactions with police.

When I relocated to SF in 2013, I set a goal to become a mentor for a Black child. I had many great people in my life and felt that I owed it to help someone else. My mentee was Brandon, a young kid living in the Tenderloin. We would often hang out and talk about teen stuffvideo games, sports, the girls he liked. One day as we were walking down Polk Street to Bob's Donuts, the conversation turned to Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old Black kid who had been fatally shot in 2012; his killer, George Zimmerman, had just been acquitted.

Brandon, 13 at the time, told me he and his friends had been harassed by a police officer on their way to school. He said the cop began to question them in a very harsh tone, asking what were they up to and where were they going. "We were just going to school. We weren't doing nothing," Brandon told me.

I sighed, recognizing his situation all too well. I have been followed around in stores as though I was expected to steal, I have been asked do you belong here? I have been stopped by the police simply for being Black. There's no other culture I know of where The Talk is so common and requisite, that moment when we must tell our kids that life isn't fair, that the cards we've been dealt, that who we are is a setup for injustice. "You aren't doing anything wrong. You're just Black," I told him.

"It's not fair," Brandon said, and of course it isn't. We stood on the street in silence for a couple of minutes before walking on from that sad, important moment. Brandon needed to be prepared for what he will experience in life. Our talk was a rite of passage for him to receive, as well as for me to give.

Since that day, Brandon has grown in size and mind. He is more weary of the police and realizes that, as a Black man, he inhabits a different space than his white friends. And just because I gave him The Talk, it does not guarantee his safety.

As I write this, I think about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and even more recently Rayshard Brooks, an unarmed 27-year-old Black man who was fatally shot by an Atlanta police officer. There are few things to make a person feel more helpless than being pulled over for driving while Black. When I hear those sirens, I know that whether I drive away or don't is a game of chance. I just hope luck falls my way.

Excerpt from:
He got "The Talk" at 16. The author passes down what it means to be Black in the face of the police - 7x7

The National Rifle Association has been conspicuously silent on police violence amid weeks of nationwide demonstrations, despite calling itself the "America's longest-standing civil rights organization."

The NRA's leaders and social media accounts have made no mentionof the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, the protests, or the police violence against peaceful protesters.

"The NRA loves to talk about liberty, self-defense, and resisting 'tyranny,'but their actions suggest that they believe these concerns apply only to white people," Kelly Sampson, the constitutional litigation and racial justice counsel at Brady: United Against Gun Violence, said in a statement to Salon."When armed vigilantes and law enforcement infringe on Black and brown Americans' civil rights the NRA is silent."

This is nothing new. Despite NRA chief Wayne LaPierre's famous warningof "jack-booted government thugs" who want to "take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us," the group said nothing when Louisville police broke into Breonna Taylor's apartmentand fatally shot her in bed afterher boyfriend, a legal gun owner, fired a warning shot to prevent what he thought was a home invasion. It similarly stayed silent on the killing of Botham Jean, who was killed when an off-duty police officer mistook his apartment for her own, other than to suggest he might still be alive if he had beenarmed himself.

Despite LaPierre's warning that "if you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens," the group has stayed silent as federal, stateand local authorities led an unprecedented and violent crackdownagainstpeaceful protests against police brutality.

Despite the group's claim to defend legal gun owners, the NRA stayed silent when Philando Castile, a legal gun owner, was shot to death by police in Minnesota, before using his death to sellits ill-fated Carry Guard "murder insurance."

"Wayne LaPierre and his acolytes long ago embraced an alt-right version of America where more guns is the answer to every societal challenge, unless of course it is Black Americans with the guns," said Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, the anti-gun-violence group foundedby former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz.

The NRA's silence dates back years. The group said nothingwhen John Crawford was shot by police in Ohio while holding a pellet gun, nor when 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by police in Cleveland while holding a BB gun. It stayed silent when Jason Washington, a Navy veteran, was killed after he tried to pick up a licensed handgun that he had dropped on the ground.

The NRA made no mentionof Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr., a Black man shot three times in the back by police while carrying a legally-owned gun. The NRA was likewise silenton the police killing of Atatiana Jefferson, a Black woman shot inside her home through a window while holding a legally-owned gun. The group said nothingof the police killing of Harith Augustus, who was killed by Chicago police while legally carrying a concealed gun.

Though the NRA defended George Zimmerman's right to stand his groundafter the killing of Trayvon Martin, the group had nothing to sayafter Siwatu-Salama Ra, a pregnant Black gun owner, was sentenced to two years in prison for defending her mother and two-year-old daughter from a woman who tried to ram them with her car.

Not only has the country's self-proclaimed oldest "civil rights organization" remained on the sidelines amid a mass outcry over police abuses, but many of its prominent officials, board members, spokespeopleand members have also attacked Black victims of police violence and protesters calling for reform.

"The NRA uses rhetoric steeped in racism. You only have to look at their Twitter feed to see this," Sampson told Salon. "On June 2, the NRA tweeted about apparent looting in Minneapolis and about reports thatBlack residents werepurchasing firearms, calling the Second Amendment a 'great equalizer.'But the feed madeno mention of the violence perpetrated against protesters or against Black Americans across the country. The NRA has used this tactic for decades and has created a culture of fear and paranoia that not only ignores the suffering of people of color but also actively threatens them. We see this in the NRA's unremitting defense of Stand Your Ground laws, which are proven to be more likely to be used to justify the murder of a Black man by a white man."

NRA board member Dean Cain, the actor who played Superman in the TV series "Lois & Clark," shared a video on Twitter that called protesters "rioting thugs."

"You do not have a right to be offended by stereotypes that say Black people are inherently violent, when that is exactly the way you act when given the first opportunity," Cain's video informed viewers. "Your conduct is trash ... I have a right to call you out for the warped, hateful, animalistic, shameful, thuggish, self-serving, rabid, counterproductive hypocrites that you are."

Cain also argued that the officers involved in Rayshard Brooks' killing in Atlanta were "unlawfully charged"and shared a tweet complaining that the treatment of Minneapolis police after Floyd's murder was "shameful" and "unfair."

Guy Phillips, an NRA member and a city councilman in Scottsdale, Arizona, mockingly said "I can't breathe,"the words spoke by Floyd before he died weeks earlier, to refer to his opposition to face masks amid the coronavirus pandemic.

NRA board member and former Georgia Republican congressmanBob Barrargued that the "riots"had"nothing to do with the death of George Floyd," insistingthat if they did, protesters "would have backed down as soon as the indictment of former police officer Derek Chauvin was announced."

Barr said he didn't sympathize with protesters because they were not themselves "victims of individual or group injustice of the sort that befell Floyd" and argued that antifaactivists had "hijacked the George Floyd murder for purposes having nothing whatsoever to do with seeking justice for his death."

President Trump and other conservatives have pushed the discredited claim that antifa was responsible for violence around the protests, but federal and local charges show no signs of any antifa involvement.

Barr penned another op-edsuggesting that Black Lives Matter was a front group for Marxism that has "little, if anything, to do with racial justice."

The protests, he argued on Twitter, are "nothing more than finding an excuse for stealing and vandalism."

NRA board member Allen West, a former Florida congressman,responded to questions about how to prevent killings like Floyd's from happening by suggesting that the military should be sent into suppress Black Lives Matter protesters and antifa,labeling them "enemies" of America.

West argued that Black Lives Matter was "no different" from the Nazi "Brown Shirts that used to roam the streets."

"I'm tired of this Black Lives Matter organization. They don't care about Black lives," West claimed.

NRA board member Mark Geist called Black Lives Matter a "rancid evil trying to take over our country."

NRA board member Ted Nugent has long been one of the most avowed opponents of the Black Lives Matter movement, comparing it to ISIS and comparing Minneapolis to the war zone in Iraq.

Nugent's social media posts have complained that Black Americans have never said "thank you" to white people for, as he put it, freeing them from slavery. He has falsely disputed that Black people are disproportionately shot by police and has defended Confederate monuments.

"The NRA claims to be a 'civil rights' organization, but their officials have spent the last month defending Confederate monuments while comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to the Nazi Party and ISIS," John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement to Salon. "That tells you everything you need to know about whose 'civil rights' the NRA really cares about."

"The National Rifle Association of today is a hollowed-out, paranoid and extremist version of the organization that once wielded so much power in Washington. Racism is business as usual for NRA leaders, who no longer speak for the majority of responsible gun owners," added Ambler. "Their extreme agenda is out of step with the mainstream and is fueling their descent into irrelevance."

The NRA did not respond to questions from Salon. The organization's recent comments show that the NRA has largely stuck with the same talking points it had after past police shootings, even as public opinion has dramatically shifted. A New York Times analysis found that Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement by a 28-point margin. A Pew poll found that the majority of every racial and ethnic group supports the Black Lives Matter movement.

But the NRA has continued to recycle years-old talking points.

Nugent said last year that Michael Brown, the unarmed Black teenager gunned down by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in 2014, was no better than "mass shooters and criminal thugs." Former NRATV host and spokeswoman Dana Loesch suggested that Castile was not, in fact, a legal gun owner because he was carrying marijuana "simultaneously," while fellow host Grant Stinchfield suggested that Castile was a "gun-toting thug."

Colion Noir, another former NRATV host, wrote an op-ed last year downplaying the role race plays in police shootings.

"I know that's not a popular thing to say as a black man in today's political climate, but that's why these cases are such a big deal when they do occur. And even then, the motivations behind the shootings are never clear-cut at least not clear-cut enough to say that a cop shot a black guy with a gun just because he was a black guy with a gun, and not for some other reason, justified or not," he wrote. "However, I know one thing is for sure: It has never been safer to be black and armed in this country than it is right now."

Loesch has similarly argued that "there is absolutely no statistics, no evidence at all that support thepremise that there is this open warfare by cops on black Americans. There's nothing to support this."

There is in factample evidenceto support this.

Going back even further in history, the NRA actively supported gun control measures when they were intended to disarm Black people.

The group supported the 1967 Mulford Actin California, a law aimed at disarming Black Americans amid the rise of the Black Panther Party. The group also supported the repeal of California's open carry lawafter Black Panthers members b began carrying rifles in public, disconcerting then-governor Ronald Reagan.

"The police kiIIings of legally armed Black citizens, and the refusal of leading gun-rights proponents to sincerely defend the victims, raises the same troubling question that both Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panther Party also confronted when they tried to exercise their rights to bear arms: In practice, do Second Amendment rights protect only white gun owners?" the Milwaukee Independentasked in 2018.

The NAACP called out the NRA over its silence after the killings of legal Black gun owners after Bradford's death.

"The silence from the NRA has confirmed that the 2nd amendment does not apply to legally licensed Black gun owners," the organization said in a statement. "Instead of standing by their principles, the NRA continues to demonize and alienate people of color who are gunned downand blamed for exercising their right to own and brandish firearms. This narrative is just as old and tired as this organization and it's time for them to stop this hypocrisy and finally come to terms with this racist rhetoric. The target on the backs of Black and brown lives is getting larger and unlike the NRA, we will do all we can to stop this."

Sampson argued that the NRA stays silent on racist violence because "advocating for Black Americans' safety does not sell guns."

"The truth is that the NRA peddles paranoia to fuel gun sales: the notion is, its members are constantly under threat from a dangerous world of 'others'and from politicians, then prescribes guns as the only solution," she said. "Aside from occasionally tokenizing Black people who espouse the NRA's dangerous, false, dog-whistle talking points, the NRA doesn't bother."

If the NRA truly stood up for constitutional rights for Black people, it would not have stayed on the sidelines after Castile was gunned down, Sampson said.

"While the NRA continues to tout guns as effective self-defense, we marked the fourth anniversary of Philando Castile's murder on July 6. Castile, murdered in his car by police, was the sort of lawfully armed citizen the NRA would ordinarily praise, but he was also Black,"she said. "Sorather than focusing on how the police infringed on his life and liberty, the NRA instead emphasized that one of the officers smelled marijuana. To be clear, drug use does not excuse murder. The NRA has likewise been silent on the murders of Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks, both killed by police this year. The NRA claims that it supports 'life and liberty,'but clearly only for some."

Originally posted here:
NRA silence on police violence is deafening -- its members' attacks on Black victims are even worse - Salon