White Girl Mistakes #3

Ahmaud Arbery’s Murder Trial

“Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails,”  Defense Attorney Laura Hogue said in her closing arguments.

Though Hogue has been a lawyer for 30 years, she is still too young to remember Frank Zappa’s 1968 song for the Mothers of Invention, “What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?”

As Zappa’s lyrics pointed out, there are differing opinions:

Some say your nose (hey)
Some say your toes

Hogue is in the latter camp, apparently. She may be relatively young, but her thinking is old school. She found a way to slip in the term “dirty” to describe a black man, what she apparently thought would be a comforting throw back for the jury. But the racism didn’t start with her closing remarks. As most everyone knows, the jury was nearly all white, the original prosecutor forbade the arrest of one of the defendants (he had worked for her), and none of the defendants was arrested until a video surfaced a full two months after the incident.

Maybe out of a desire to start rewriting Georgia’s ground rules, the men who hunted Arbery down and shot him were all found guilty of their crimes.

Georgia needed this verdict. We all needed it. What is the ugliest part of your body? While some say it’s those little parts that sort of stick out, Zappa asserts,

“But I think it’s your mind.”

Gregory McMichael reported to the 911 operator that his emergency was “a black male running down the street.”

How many of us have cringed when we see a Black male jogger coming at us? I have, then felt like an idiot because I’d spent a decade in an interracial marriage. In my defense, I can say that I was nervous, on a city sidewalk I’d never been on before. And I hope that the jogger had seen enough purse-clutching White women that my fear hardly registered.

Cleaning racism out of our minds is almost impossible. That’s why we should work on it every day.