WHAT STRUCTURAL RACISM?:

The lawyers for the white men who admit, and were captured on video, killing Ahmaud Arbery, have filed papers declaring their plan to "rely heavily upon Georgia's... citizen's arrest statute" as a defense strategy. That is, they will argue during the October murder trial that Greg McMichael, a former police officer, and his son Travis were attempting a perfectly legal citizen's arrest of Arbery because they decided he was up to no good--a supposition steeped in white presumptions of innate Black criminal guilt.

Essentially, the defense will be resting its case on the idea that it was actually Arbery who was breaking Georgia law by refusing to heed the shouted demands of a trio of white vigilantes in pickup trucks with shotguns.

Thomas R. Cobb, the white enslaver who wrote Georgia's citizen's arrest law, would likely see this as an appropriate application of the statute. In 1858, Cobb published An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America, in which he wrote that Black folks, "as an animal, in stature, in muscular energy, in activity, and strength," not to mention "in mental and moral development" had experienced their "greatest development while in slavery." Two years later, as Georgia's slave patrols and police ranks saw their membership head off to the front lines of a fight to keep Black people enslaved, Cobb penned a law to ensure every white person could help keep Black folks enslaved at home.

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