When a
predominately white jury found the McMichaels and Bryan guilty of
felony murder among other charges in the Ahmaud Arbery case, many
assumed justice was served compared to the Rittenhouse verdict. The
juxtaposition of images of the two trial cases conjured hope for
change in our two justice systems: Rittenhouse went home, while the
McMichaels and Bryan went back to jail.
The belief that the
justice scales were blind and balanced in the Arbery case is
confusing accountability with justice. In truth, both trials were
merely opposite sides of the same coin, displaying the fragility of
whiteness.
White fragility is
shown in the discomfort and defensiveness when whites are asked to
address front and center racial injustice—whether in the Deep
South or the urban North. Not wanting to ignite white fear nor white
grievance, Linda Dunikoski, the prosecutor in the McMichaels and
Bryan trial, did not mention race except once in her closing
argument: “The men,” Dunikoski said, attacked Mr. .
Arbery “because he was a Black man running down the street.”
However, her
one-sentence descriptor tapped a recurring theme: white men—like
McMichaels and Bryan—chasing Black men to lynch in the Deep
South. “He was trapped like a rat,” Gregory McMichael,
65, boasted to police after the shooting. William Bryant, 51, a
neighbor of the McMichaels, said during his interrogation by the
Georgia Bureau of Investigation that Travis McMichael, 35, said,
“f—ing n-word” after fatally pumping three bullets
into Arbery. As many Blacks know, hearing all this solid evidence
does not assure a verdict.
The defense
attorneys’ strategies, on the other hand, intentionally used
dog whistles, racial tropes, and Georgia’s 1863 Civil War-era
citizen’s arrest law to tap into white fear. During the
antebellum period, the slave-catching law was for the sole purpose of
returning fugitive slaves to their slave masters. The McMichaels
attorney used that law to justify shooting Arbery, whose run took him
into the white segregated section of town, as an imminent threat to
white space and a dangerous bulgar. Greg McMichael told police he
warned Arbery to stop running or would “blow your f***ing head
off.”
One of the classic
ways to stoke white fear and justify violence toward Arbery was to
dehumanize his Blackness. Crude depictions of African Americans as
ape-like, intellectually inferior, and hygienically unclean are
enduring racial tropes that don’t die. Arbery was depicted
running “in khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long,
dirty toenails” by one of the defense attorneys. Another
defense attorney attacked Black pastors, saying, “We don’t
want any more Black pastors coming in here… sitting with the
victim’s family, trying to influence the jurors in this case.”
As many Blacks know, hearing all these racist statements as defending
evidence does not assure a verdict.
Dunikoski has been
applauded for fighting racism, quietly. Many whites prefer racism to
be spoken about softly, if at all, because it leads to the corrosive
antics of silence and stalling change. Dunikoski’s strategy
proved her knowledge of white fragility, and the defense attorneys
displayed it.
The Rittenhouse
trial, meanwhile, showed another aspect of white fragility: the
damage of defensiveness.
Rittenhouse cried
self-defense when he shot three white men, two of whom died during a
protest in Kenosha over the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Blake, a
Black man, was shot seven times in the back, leaving him paralyzed.
(The police officer who shot Blake was acquitted too, but that’s
a different trial.) Rittenhouse crossed state lines with an AR-style
rifle and was acquitted of first-degree intentional homicide and four
other felony charges.
Maintaining white
fragility as a defense permits whites to universalize their human
experience at the expense of people of color. It makes it difficult
for whites to see BIPOC families reflected in theirs. The white judge
and predominately white jury saw their son in Rittenhouse as a
vigilante 17-year-old whose boyhood shouldn’t be ruined. In
contrast, I wished the white judge and predominately white jury in
the Trayvon Martin case saw their sons in him. Trayvon was 17 wearing
a hoodie, holding Skittles, unarmed, and shot by the neighborhood
vigilante.
White
fragility also allows whites to weaponize their hurt feelings, making
invisible the suffering of others. Rittenhouse sobbed during his
courtroom testimony and the trial was paused by the judge – who
also barred the word “victim” from being used to describe
the men Rittenhouse shot but allowed the words “arsonists”
or “looters.”
White
fragility impedes justice. White fragility bolsters white supremacy’s
bully stance against racism and its thin-skinned defensiveness to
maintain it. These two court cases displayed white fragility’s
modus operandi.
