Reflections on Ahmaud Arbery

 

In the 1980s, when we began studying the history of lynching in the American South, we approached the subject as primarily an historical phenomenon. In one sense we were correct. We have never seen levels of lethal racial violence like those recorded for the late 19th and early 20th Centuries during subsequent decades. In a different sense we were wrong. In many ways, the social forces that produced the “lynching era” have endured, only to be manifest in different ways. The tragic killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia last year reminded us that racially motivated lynchings are not confined to the past. Under the right (wrong) circumstances, mobs of white people continue to attack, and occasionally kill, people of color in America.

 

In addition, other specters of our nation’s bleak history of racial oppression have reemerged in modern times. One of two major American political parties seeks to restrict voting, and thereby mute political voices, among minority populations—a tactic reminiscent of widespread political disenfranchisement that helped to motivate the Civil Rights Movement. In the spirit of Theodore Bilbo and James Vardaman, a modern political demagogue leverages a web of lies to provoke a mob of white supremacists to overturn a legitimate election. Through his policies and rhetoric the same demagogue legitimizes a return to more overt popular expressions of racism.

 

These are stark reminders that we must remain vigilant and committed in our nation’s long and difficult struggle to confront our ugly history of racism. And, even more urgently, to avoid repeating it.