A Call for Sympathy

There is a house in my neighborhood that has bronze lions at the mouth of its driveway. They are huge, menacing felines, maybe eight feet tall when accounting for their pedestals, that roar at visitors with unwelcoming paws raised. I remember a house near our home when I was a kid that had small, 18-inch lions on its porch which were often decorated for holidays, wearing Santa hats during Christmas or Cupid's wings in mid-February. I drove by that house in March and was delighted to see that the lions are still there and are still used for advertising, as both were clad in Irish rugby shirts for St. Patrick's Day. The idea of decorating the imposing lions at the house in my current neighborhood in such an undignified way is unthinkable. 

All lions are panthers—panthera leo, to be specific—and there is no standalone thing as a panther, which is a class of big cat, not an animal. What you're thinking of as a panther—the sleek, deadly black stalker—is either a black jaguar or black leopard, panthera onca and panthera pardus, respectively. The word panther is derived from the Sanskrit word for whitish-yellow, pandarah, which is how they described tigers. The ancient Greeks took the word, made it panthera, and expanded it to mean all animals, which science as used for classification purposes ever since. Later, some Texans evolved the word to Pantera and used it as an excuse to make shitty heavy metal. 

I've always been struck by the pair of panthers at this house, which strikes me as ostentatious and out of sync with the welcoming decoration of the house itself and yard. My curiosity about other people's homes does not come close to my wife's, whose Zillow usage borders on the criminal, but I would like to know when the lions were installed, by whom and, most of all, why. It was with this interest that when I ran by that house this weekend I noticed that the wooded area they own across the street, which seems to have been worked on by machines of various sizes since at least the sixth day of creation, was in some form of completion. My inquisitiveness got the best of me and I hopped a small fence and looked around. 

I found nothing remarkable, it appears that they employed armies of earth movers to clear an area for a garden. But I couldn't help but think when I returned home how lucky it is to take a jog, lightly trespass on a neighboring property and not for one second feel in danger of being shot and killed because of it. 

I have been purposely avoiding writing about Ahmaud Arbery and the nationwide protest over his killing not because I think the issue isn't important or because I don't have strong feelings about it but because I am a tireless believer in the concept of innocent until proven guilty and I am uncomfortable with mob justice, even versions that espouse my own preferred outcomes. I am overwhelmed and moved by the amount of voices that have screamed out in righteous anger about the killing of a young, unarmed black man on his daily run. And while the video of the accused leaping out at Arbery from a pick up truck, blindsiding him and shooting him dead is disturbing indeed, watching it in horror does not mean you have passed the bar, and, at least for now, our criminal justice system is decided by juries, not Instagram shares. Am I giving these Georgia men more due process than they allegedly showed Arbery? Absolutely, but as Sir Thomas More dramatically said "I give the devil benefit for law for my own safety's sake." 

So the fates of the McMichaels, the father and son duo accused of murdering Arbery, are in the court's hands where they belong. My fear is that Arbery, who has already lost everything, will be on trial soon enough as well. Why did the arrests take so long? The killing took place on February 23 and there wasn't an arrest until May 7 despite plenty of evidence of what happened. The delay, and the fact that it took a nationwide movement to dislodge it from its torpor, is an embarrassing new entry in a depressingly long list of evidence that suggests American black bodies account for little. That fact is ugly enough, I fear that as we lurch to a trial, it will get uglier still. 

The public defense of the McMichaels so far is that they were complying with Georgia's citizen's arrest statute which states that "A private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge." Proving that the McMichaels had immediate knowledge of a crime is going to be a high hurdle but not nearly as high as the hurdle of getting around the fact that the statute allows private persons to arrest an offender, not shoot him when he's unarmed. However, outside of the courtroom there will be, as there always is in cases like these, a furious search for crimes and reasons that justify the fact that Arbery is dead. Already, video has surfaced of Arbery looking around an under-construction home, not too different from the poking around I did in my neighbor's leveled garden area. Allegedly, Arbery brought a gun to a high school basketball game in 2013 and it's been confirmed he was arrested for shoplifting two years ago. So far, liberal and conservative pundits have been fairly aligned in condemning the outcome of the shooting and the Georgia county's lethargic response to it, but as time wears on and this issue becomes more politicized, I have no doubt that details of Arbery's life will be paraded around by those who want to find a crime to fit the punishment. I shudder to think if Arbery ever posted anything controversial on social media at any time.

Remember the Carson King situation? The affair that dominated our attention in the Before Times? It combined sick children, racism, beer and football into a potent mix of nonsense. King became a celebrity at 24 for flukey reasons and used that fame to raise money for a children's hospital. It was discovered that he had retweeted racist content when he was 16 and people got very mad on the internet because of it. One side defended King, saying that old tweets are ancient history and that no one should be condemned to a life of shame because of a bad choice when they were kids, the other countered that no, King’s tweets were not ancient history, they should not be brushed aside and no amount of fundraising can buy absolution from racism, especially when doing so reenforces the idea that people of color can be dismissed and marginalized as long as the person doing it is philanthropic or otherwise respected. 

Remember Trayvon Martin, the black Florida teen who was fatally shot in 2012? Martin was unarmed and deemed suspicious when he was shot and killed by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who said he was acting in self-defense. In the political shitstorm that followed the investigation and trial of Zimmerman for second-degree murder (he was found not guilty), Martin’s social media posts were used as evidence by pundits as justification for Zimmerman’s actions, citing that the thuggish and dangerous way Martin portrayed himself online painted a picture of a young man who was simply waiting for a bullet to find him. In “The Hate U Give,” a remarkable young adult novel by Angie Thomas that dramatizes a case like Martin’s, a white character uses the choices of a slain teen (he was a drug dealer with ties to a gang) as the reason that the teen, who was shot by a cop during a routine traffic stop, was going to be killed violently eventually. When Martin was killed, he was roughly the age King was when he made his ill-fated retweet. Martin’s posts were used as justifications that he should be killed, even if they had nothing to do with the reasons he was found suspicious in the fateful moment, I fear that a similar vindication campaign awaits Arbery. We will be told that he "was no angel" and that he was latently dangerous even if there was no immediate evidence that this was the case. One of the McMichaels is a retired police officer (which caused a district attorney to recuse from the case, part of the reason for the arrest delay) and we will be told that his judgement of a dangerous situation is better than ours. 

This will be more evidence of the two separate but unequal sets of rules that stubbornly exist in America, where kids with toy guns or unarmed joggers are unchecked threats but paramilitaries screaming at federal officers are freedom fighters. I don't know where to run my frustration aground when its demonstrably safer for me to take an automatic weapon to the statehouse than it is for others to take a routine run, something I take for granted. 

Ta-Nahisi Coates, the inimitable writer, has said that “Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism towards others.” People like Carson King have our sympathy. Our skepticism of people like Ahmaud Arbery is what got him killed. I don't know how many more egregious cases like this it will take to widen our net for sympathy and shrink our capacity for skepticism, but if not in this case, when?