Letter from America: The killing of Brother Arbery showcases the rotten side of US justice for blacks!

As I write, 25 November, the fact that the three white racists have been found guilty in the willful murder of Brother Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia does not bring comfort to blacks.

It also does not exonerate the justice system in the US from its biases against blacks. In fact, it has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the system is complicit in the oppression of blacks.

The fact that the three racists are sleeping in a jailhouse, as we go to press, came as a shock to the themselves, who expected, as their right, to be set free from all blame. Killing a black has never been a big deal, and the arguments used in the exoneration of white supremacists are so common that I can repeat them in my sleep.

Here is the real story behind the story.

Below is a transcript from the courthouse. “Travis McMichael is guilty on all charges, malice murder, four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit a felony.”

We accept and give credit to the prosecution in their description of what happened to brother Ahmaud.

Ahmaud was jogging along a certain street in New Brunswick, Georgia, when three white men who objected to his presence there accosted him. Terry McMichael was armed with a long hunting rifle and his father was there to back him up in case Brother Ahmaud tried to escape. His father Gregory, was a 22 year veteran of law enforcement and should have known better.

The standard argument was that Ahmaud had no reasonable cause to be there and that they had already identified him as a suspect in a previous robbery case in the area. That robbery was never certified and anyhow, any black is enough provocation to suspect an intention to commit a crime.

Surely., Gregory with his long association with the police, had schooled his son in this dastardly racist theory. This is important because one shudders to think that such men are in charge of the police.

In addition, Gregory should have known that one does not cock a rifle unless one hopes to use in the present moment. Accidents can happen.

A neighbor, William Bryan followed the twosome in his truck recording the event, an event, described later, very casually as “a shooting accident” in the neighborhood of New Brunswick.

The neighbor who joined the melee once Ahmaud had been stopped was found guilty of guilty of three counts of “felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit a crime.”

Apparently, these three musketeers, having cornered Ahmaud and blocked his passage with their truck and rifle, went on to assault him “heavily” (Zimbabwe English. Imagine a citizen is jogging, three fellow citizens start assaulting him heavily. He has not been informed as to why he deserves the assault.

To even think that black needs to be informed of the reason why he is being assaulted is to be utterly ignorant of the racist history of the US. In their defense, before a jury of 11 men and one black, the McMichaels and Bryan said that they were afraid of Ahmaud and that they had reasonable cause that he was in the process of doing bodily harm to them.

Please don’t laugh. This is a standard argument. Blackness itself is a heavy threat to a white racist. The fact that the black man is the one who has suffered from slavery and oppression makes the argument even the more compelling. The black harbors evil thoughts in his mind. Therefore, he must be subdued as quickly as is possible.

These thoughts are found in their legal systems. In the story of Scott versus Sanford (1857) the Chief Justice Roger Taney said that a black man could never pass “the perpetual barrier (of race) which reduced the black man to slavery. Therefore, Tanney insinuated, a white man has no obligation to consider the words of a black man in the witness box.

Here are three white men armed with hunting rifles, arguing that they were afraid of one black man who was trying to run away from them. Blacks have been shot in the back by white police officers who swore that they were afraid of them.

It is needful to shoot them to death so that they cannot testify.

However, in the comfort of their stupidity, Bryan wanted the record of this “killing of a black man” to be in the book of records.

McMichael, Sr., informed District Attorney in New Brunswick and was told not to mind too much. A 50 words press release said that a shooting incident had occurred in the city. The matter would have rested there had Bryan not posted the shooting on Facebook.

This brought the matter to the attention of Black Lives Matter and the Reverend Al Sharpton of New York.

Up to this point, the history and racial structures of society were still in their favor. The three were arrested.

In court, the McMichaels said that Ahmaud fitted the description of a thief who had been sported in their neighborhood. Since all blacks look alike, and blackness itself is a well-founded threat in their eyes.

The judge was apparently on their side, since the courthouse crowd is a cabal, sworn to “meata” (silence). The judge rejected to the availability of a pair of jogging tennis shoes. If Ahmaud was not a jogger, an obvious assumption can be deduced that he was an intentional criminal pest scouting a white neighborhood for goods.

What finally worked against the three racists is that the US Generation X (yuppies below age 40) has changed. Having been to school with blacks since their births, the old arguments that blacks are a pestilent race no longer hold water. Being generally secular, they hold their religious forebears as spiritually corrupt hypocrites who pronounced righteous words from the Bible while owning slaves and doing malicious acts to them.

The presence of Black Lives Matter and video availability makes it harder, but not impossible for blacks to show in pictures the brutality they have always complained about. That, alone is not enough because judges very often refuse to accept video evidence, considering it as edited versions.

Blacks are not yet out the woods yet. There is a long way to go. In Georgia, there is no law against racial hatred, and in any case, hatred is hidden in a man’s heart. Had Bryan not published his own video, the three racists would have been walking the streets to this day.

Ken Mufuka is a Zimbabwean patriot. His books can be accessed from kenmufukabooks.com.