TRIGGER WARNING: (As if you weren’t already warned in the title of the post.) If you thought the arrest of the two men who lynched Ahmaud Arbery was enough… the end… then you need to stop RIGHT HERE and move on to other things. My lament continues.
There are things to still talk about. Things we, as whites, need to do. I will not argue with you over the phrase “black lives matter” or other supposed issues from that phrase or protests in that time period. I am here to lament and try to persuade my white brothers and sisters to keep moving forward for Ahmaud Arbery. If this is not for you… move on.
In the days of Michael Brown and the protests that took place in Ferguson, MO, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” got a lot of white people upset. What was missed was that it started as a question: “DO black lives matter?”
That was 2014. We were needing to ask that question in 2014… nearly 150 years after fighting a Civil War, then passing amendments to the Constitution (which went ignored), then passing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s.
And here we are… 6 years after that “offensive” phrase disturbed us as white people. And we MUST ask it all over again. DO black lives matter? When Ahmaud Arbery is lynched… on video… and the case is not even taken up until two months after the murder… and gone through THREE prosecutors… and a video (which was already in police hands) is “leaked.”
Do. Black. Lives. Matter.
We have witnessed once again the public display of what Eddie Glaude calls the “value gap”: the belief that black lives are less valuable than others. The black experience with COVID-19 has revealed inequalities that have been there all along—in health care, power, wealth, education, income, and incarceration.
This quote is from a fine article by a young black man. More is HERE.
The young man lynched… his name is Ahmaud Arbery. Say it.
DO black lives matter?
Apprentice 2 Jesus 