Editor’s Note: Areva Martin is a CNN legal analyst and a civil rights attorney. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion on CNN.
Tuesday brought guilty verdicts in the federal hate crime case of the three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery. The jury delivered the verdicts quickly – a momentary respite in the grueling wait for justice when it comes to race in America.
The outcome was not a surprise given the overwhelming evidence presented by the prosecution and glaring lack of evidence presented by the defense. The prosecution called 21 witnesses, with many testifying about horrific and offensive racist slurs and rants by the defendants – hatred aimed specifically at Black people. The language that witnesses attributed to all three men was so disturbing as to cause a juror to ask about counseling and to send one witness off the stand in tears.
The case speaks to bigger issues about an entire swath of our country that has been inculcated with theories of White supremacy and superiority – and Black inferiority.
These theories and messages play out regularly on television, in communities like the one at issue in this case, and in the media. They reinforce anti-Black sentiment that will only worsen as state legislators introduce bills seeking to restrict schools from teaching Black history and the fullness of American history, and as school committee members and rogue parents fight to ban books that present the truth about our past and present.
These efforts are about gaslighting children into believing they live in a colorblind society, even as many grow up in enclaves and environments that would produce three White men who lived and breathed a false narrative about White superiority – and then acted on what they had been taught.
It is so telling that one of the defendants, William Bryan, recorded the chase and the actual shooting of Arbery. Bryan likely believed this video would prove his innocence, but instead, the video showed a terrified, unarmed man confronted and cornered by hate-filled strangers as he tried and failed to take the gun out of the hands of one of the men ready to shoot.
How do we look at the consequences of the indoctrination of White privilege in this case, and at the same time acknowledge that for too many people, good policy means avoiding making White people feel bad about this country’s history of racism?
While the defendants’ hateful, destructive language echoed through the courtroom, pierced our hearts and may have threatened our trust in the criminal justice system as it was intended – the words and actions of Ahmaud Arbery’s loved ones overcame. Like the mother of Emmett Till, Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones, stood steadfast amid her unimaginable grief and loss. The love she has for her son shone bright, whether she was speaking about him in the courtroom and asking the judge to refuse a plea deal that would have spared the government, the defendants, and us the pain of seeing the defendants’ motives for what they were.
It should not have been Wanda Cooper Jones’s job to set that example. From the initial prosecutors involved in the case, who were quick to give the defendants a pass, to the federal prosecutors ready to make a plea agreement, the judicial system would have run right over justice for Ahmaud Arbery were it not for his mother’s relentless commitment and effort? (The Justice Department says prosecutors consulted Arbery’s family attorneys before entering the agreement; they say they were told his family did not oppose it. Arbery’s mother and lawyer say otherwise, and a judge rejected the plea deal.)
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The racially charged language presented in testimony revealed the mindset, hearts and attitudes of these defendants. It demonstrated their belief that Black people are subhuman, violent criminals who don’t deserve to live or even pass through their coveted White neighborhood. And it demonstrated their conviction that a world without Black people was a better place.
Until we grapple with the scourge of racism and the White privilege that emboldened these men to believe that a video of them chasing a Black man down and killing him would be seen as evidence of their innocence, this will be a scenario that replays itself over and over. The names will change but the horrors will remain a constant – haunting our fears and our reality.
