That hyperbolic proposition isn't a thing you have to believe in order to agree with what I wrote and so you are just engaging in taking an exaggerated stance to argue.
Well, this is exactly what you suggested. You suggested that Ahmaud Arbery had reasons to believe that these rednecks were about to murder him.... for sure.
You cannot be much familiar with the U.S. if you don't understand this.
A lone black man, at night and on foot, is in grave danger if confronted by white yahoos with trucks and guns. Heck, I'd be scared and I'm a big white dude.
Tom
It was not night but that's not really relevant. So if what you said is true, then why in the love of God any black would be jogging through white neighborhood, or any neighborhood for that matter?
Oh, and I am pretty familiar with US and was warned to lock car doors when driving through South Side Chicago. Have never been in Georgia though. But I do read news and I don't remember ever reading about white lynching blacks on the street. I am talking about modern times.
You are correct about Georgia in that it's changed drastically since the 50s and 60s, even more so since the 90s.. Things like what happened to Mr. Arbery are very rare. In fact, I've never heard of anything like this happening in modern times here in Georgia. I live in a mixed race middle class neighborhood in Georgia. None of my Black neighbors, including the Black police sergeant, the Black probation officer, the Black nurse, the Black school teacher, the Black woman who is in charge of our local sanitation department or the Black retired military officer have any fears about running through our neighborhood. We all get along. There is virtually no crime in my neighborhood. I still lock my car doors, as I was taught to do that when I was a child growing up in NJ in the 50s and 60s.
But, my view of Georgia has absolutely nothing to do what happened to Mr. Arbery, who was murdered by 3 White men, who I presume thought he had committed a crime based on the fact that he was a Black man who had been checking out the construction of a new home, just like several other people had done, but those people were White. So, yes, just like the rest of the country, we sadly have some dangerous racists in Georgia, but the Georgia that I know has made substantial progress in the nearly 30 years that I've lived here. Georgia is a large state, with over 10 million people, most of them are nothing like the three that killed Mr. Arbery.
Systemic racism is a national problem. To put it the way a former Black coworker of mine did: "I can take a Southern racist over a Northern racist any day because at least I know where I stand with the Southern racist." In other words, we know who the more harmful racists are in the South because they are more open about it. There have been Black folks killed by the police without justification all over the country. Our last president, who was from New York City, was very racist. He even encouraged the police to rough up suspects and we all suspected that this was code for Black suspects, since his racism goes way back to his youth and the influence of his racist father, who was sued for discriminating against Black folks who wanted to rent from him. But, by now, I think you should have gotten the point.
Of course that doesn't mean that all Black folks are harmless either, but nobody should be murdered simply because someone of a different culture or skin shade has suspected that they have committed a crime. The one positive that has come from this is that Georgia has finally updated a very old law regarding making a citizen's arrest.
I'm mostly posting this because I am sick and tired of people in other parts of the US, trying to blame racism on the South. As one who was raised in the Northeast, but has spent most of her life in many different areas of the South, I know that racism is alive and well in just about every part of the US. One hopeful sign that I read recently is that most Americans prefer to live in mixed race neighborhoods. Maybe there is hope.
