Dappled sunlight shone through the expansive emerald leaves which extended like a protective canopy over Satilla Drive. Between the white-paneled houses of south Georgian suburbia, Ahmaud Arbery was on his daily midday jog. He did not know that on the side of the street, two White men watched him. To them, Arbery — a Black man in a white t-shirt “hauling ass” through a mostly-White neighborhood — looked just like the man recently suspected of multiple nearby burglaries. Travis McMichael and his father Gregory McMichael must not have taken long to make their decision: They grabbed their shotgun and .357 Magnum revolver, hopped into their white pickup truck, hunted Arbery down the street, and shot him three times until he fell, unarmed, onto the sunlit pavement.
The question now is how the United States responds. “This incident is reminiscent of an atrocious era of hate and domestic terrorism,” said Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP, in a statement on Arbery’s death, “where police officers and white protesters routinely brutalized African-Americans.” Legal experts can determine whether the McMichaels’ “modern lynching in the middle of the day” is, formally, terrorism — defined by most scholars as violence or the threat of violence by non-state actors against noncombatants to provoke widespread fear in pursuit of a political goal. Already certain, however, is that this “atrocious era” lives on. Dr. Cornel West once said that responders to racial domination tend to “reduce the catastrophic to the problematic”; White supremacist terrorism is an ongoing American catastrophe that requires an adequately proportioned response.
What are White supremacist groups doing these days? Among other things: blaming COVID-19 on non-White immigrants, lamenting shelter-in-place orders, and encouraging deliberate spread of the virus to cops and Jews. And they’re growing: Membership in one messaging channel expanded eight-fold in March, while the number of Facebook groups for “accelerationists,” a White supremacist subculture devoted to toppling the federal government through a race war called “the boogaloo,” doubled. They’re murdering too: 2019 marked the sixth deadliest year since 1970 for domestic extremist-related killings. All but one perpetrator had ties to right-wing extremism.
Counterterrorism studies tend to classify terror through a timeline of major attacks; White supremacy, however, has evolved into a complex web infiltrating every part of American society. Perpetrators of violence, even those like the McMichaels without an obvious connection to a larger network, do not act alone as if in a vacuum — their ideologies are shaped by the history they read, the news they watch, and the White-dominated American culture they have likely always lived in. This may be in part why “lone wolf” terrorists are more common among far-right extremists than their jihadi counterparts. But by mostly associating “Muslim” or “foreign” people with increased likelihood of terrorism, the U.S. public stands idle while our White supremacist pandemic rapidly spreads.
For the McMichaels, the consequences have been totally inadequate. After this past Tuesday’s release of a video documenting their attack, marches of over a hundred local protesters demanding justice, and national media-fueled pressure on Georgia police, the two were arrested on Thursday. Two and a half months after Arbery’s murder. As presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden tweeted before the arrest, “Ahmaud Arbery was killed in cold blood. … It is time for a swift, full, and transparent investigation into his murder.” This did not happen, and petitions now circulating demand the immediate resignations of District Attorneys George Barnhill and Jackie Johnson for their inaction.
But cold blood flows beyond Georgia, too. Federal leaders like Biden and President Donald Trump — who once defended neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as “very fine people” — also play a role in fighting or fanning the flames of White supremacy. The United States has been avoiding a fight: When the Department of Homeland Security announced in 2009 that right-wing terrorism was the “greatest threat” to the United States, then DHS-Secretary Janet Napolitano was forced to retract the report, disband the office responsible for its publication, and apologize amid conservative pressure. This April marked the first time the United States classified any White supremacist group as a terrorist organization. That group was the Russian Imperial Movement. In Russia. Forget the Ku Klux Klan or the 940 U.S. hate groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center tracked in 2019. The United States has held none of them accountable for their terror.
Understandably, the issue is close to home: for centuries, the United States has not only failed to suppress domestic terror groups, but arguably sustained its own project of state terrorism too. Consider the news this past week alone. 35 of the 40 people arrested by the New York Police Department for violating social distancing rules are Black. Prisoners, who are disproportionately Black and Latinx, remain crowded into quarters too close to prevent rapid COVID-19 spread. And an Indianapolis police officer shot a Black man named Sean Reed over a dozen times, after which another detective laughed, saying, “Think it’s gonna be a closed casket, homie.” Instead of spending nearly $3 trillion between 2001-2017 to conduct its “global war on terror,” or warning citizens of the growing terrorist threat posed by “Black identity extremists,” perhaps the United States could do better to recognize its own pattern of racist state violence.
Facing our White supremacy as terrorism is not only an argument of language — in praxis, it suggests a life-or-death necessity for stricter gun laws, which may have prevented the McMichaels’ senseless violence. For mass-scale decarceration, which for decades has unjustly criminalized Black people like Arbery. For the passage of an anti-lynching bill like H.R. 35, which would be the first to designate lynching as a federal crime. For required racial and intersectional literacy in our schools, which would teach younger generations to love rather than hate. Such policy reforms should include formal recognition that White supremacist terrorism is one of our nation’s greatest threats.
Ahmaud Arbery should have celebrated his 26th birthday this Friday. If we keep speaking Ahmaud Arbery’s name, as well as the truth of White supremacy, perhaps the U.S. government and citizens alike may at last understand the magnitude of response needed for this tragedy to never happen again. For those who would prefer to imagine White supremacy as the ink printed in our high school textbooks — see it today instead as Ahmaud Arbery’s blood, running down the streets of Satilla Drive. Ahmaud Arbery, may you rest in peace.
Image Credit: OpenPhoto / Haley