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Literally the Least I Can Do: Spreading Awareness in White Suburbs About Our Complicity in Black Lynchings
She pulled up to the stop sign and gave me a smile of encouragement. We are two white women in a suburb. She said, “thank you for doing this.” And I said, “It’s the least I can do.” And she said with excitement, “Did you hear they got the guys? They arrested them.” And I said, “that’s the least they can do.”
It’s May 9, 2020 and I made two signs out of cardboard, paper, and a black sharpie. One reads: “Blue Lives Murdered Ahmaud Arbery.” And the other reads, “Black Trans Lives Matter Nina Pop #SayHerName.”
It’s been two months since Ahmaud Arbery was shot twice by two white men, one a retired cop, on February 23rd. Besides the fact that he should have never died, these two white men killers should have been arrested immediately. But like Keith Lowell Jensen on Twitter said, “Always remember, they didn’t make arrests because they saw the tape; They made arrests because we saw the tape.”
Arrests are the bare minimum. It’s asinine to live in a country where we think justice is putting people in jail when that’s not justice. Ahmaud Arbery being alive would be justice.
I hope we are keeping in mind that Black lynchings happen and often we don’t hear about them. Arrests are the bare minimum. And…
