Ahmaud Arbery

“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Fury raging from within, so much outrage that I have been feeling an intense desire to run down those white boys who dared to touch, to shoot, to murder Ahmaud Arbery’s beautiful black body. I have been feeling so much rage that I did not understand and definitely could not give voice to my visceral response. I tried to ignore, to think about everything but the senseless savagery that had snuffed a life, a dream, a family, a community, a society. Even news on the pandemic was better than reflecting on Ahmaud Arbery’s murder.

But slowly, I am coming into my knowing.  Why do I feel so much rage?  Because the brutality is touching upon my own knowing and experiencing of the white terror but in part. I know in part what it is to be the wrong color in the wrong place, to be told to go back to my country, to be mocked for eating the wrong food, wearing the wrong clothes, speaking with the wrong accent. I only know in part because my body has not been tortured, mangled, hung to be gawked at. I do not live with the history, the collective consciousness, and daily lived experiences in which my very existence gives rise to unjustified hate, anger, and brutality. I do not constantly walk and breathe with the terror that if I make the wrong turn, linger my hands to the wrong side, speak with the wrong attitude, look in the wrong direction that I would be shot.

What must a non-white embodied person do to be seen as human in America? How must we act, talk, be in this space to be accepted? How must we sit, walk, or run in white America? Should we bow before the white forces, should we kowtow every time in which they invade our space, should we lick their boots so they feel powerful in their pitiful white skin?  What do they want? And why must we cower before the white terror? Are they so pathetic in their miserable lives that they can only find meaning in committing violence against the black skin? Do they derive power only from the oppression of others? How small can they be?

I cannot ask for justice, justice would be if those white men lived in constant terror, made to feel the burden of their white skin, cornered into four walls of oppression. No, I ask God to give me a merciful heart that I would again see humanity in those eyes, that I feel my own humanity rather than the rage that overwhelms me. It is asking for mercy so that I do not blow up the legal system, the attorneys and policemen who have failed to show those white men humanity by holding them accountable but herald them as white gods who may do what and how they will to black bodies. I want mercy so that I do not rail against the holy sanctimonious white Christians who feel that their white brothers are being persecuted for being white. For being white, seriously? Are they afraid that they will live in the history of what they have done to non-white skin? If only.

It is in mercy that I too feel my own humanity, my own limitations, maybe powerlessness, as I sit and hear stories upon stories of broken black bodies instead of this rage. Yes, it is in fighting the systemic racism we can restore mercy but justice, no. There is no justice until those white bodies have lived in black bodies, lived in the history of white American crimes against the black body. In my rage, I demand justice, the tearing of their white bodies, but with my tears, I ask for mercy, not for them because I believe they are monstrous self-deified whiteness, but for myself so that I do not lose my humanity. I beg to feel my humanity so that I am able to defy, transgress, transform the society which deifies whiteness. I do not want to become them, monsters of hate, but an agent of change. God have mercy on me, on all of us.

Samantha Joo