“His name was Ahmaud Arbery. He was out for a run.”

This past week has been an awful one in this country. We have all witnessed how brutally immoral and wicked this country can get. It was perpetuated by the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who was pinned to the ground with an officer kneeling on his neck as he pleaded for mercy. Protests have begun in Minneapolis over Floyd’s death and have spread elsewhere throughout the country. It was also perpetuated after a video went viral of a woman in New York City, disobeying the stay at home orders, who called 911 and made the false allegation that “an African American man [was] threatening [her] and [her] dog.” Her phone call to the police singlehandedly threatened the life of another innocent black man, something we have seen all too much of in America.

This week has been the result of a boiling point reached in America for racial injustice. In February of 2020, a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, was out for a jog in Brunswick, Georgia, where he was falsely believed to be the suspect of a string of robberies in the neighborhood he was running in that had happened weeks prior. Travis and Gregory McMichael, the two white men allegedly responsible for the death of Arbery, claimed they were making a citizen’s arrest. Still, Arbery’s death appears to be caused by hateful racial profiling; he happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. It was not until three months after Arbery’s death that Travis and Gregory McMichael, along with William Bryan, who recorded a video of the incident, were taken into custody and charged with murder and attempted false imprisonment. The video, which has stirred racial tensions, did not sit well with many people. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has since been pressured by the public to investigate the case, which led to the arrest of the alleged perpetrators. A Georgia law states that citizens are allowed to arrest others, but, according to Arbery’s attorney, “you actually have to be observing the crime or be in immediate knowledge of the crime.”

Being an African American man, I am very disheartened knowing that this was a person minding his own business. It could have been any African American male that was jogging or walking the same path Arbery was on and matched the robbery suspect’s attire. It could have been me.

As a child, I watched Everybody Hates Chris, a great show from the mid to late 2000s that I still watch today. There is an episode where Chris, the main character, walks outside in his new shoes he’s gifted from his father. A white woman sitting in a police car next to an officer sees Chris and tells the police officer, “Officer that’s him… he’s wearing those shoes.” As a child I thought this was hilarious, but as I have gotten older I have realized this was a comical warning to African Americans that what happened to Arbery can happen to any of us.

What happened to George Floyd early last week is just one of the many constant reminders to African Americans that there are people still in this country that will try to justify our murders. The officers claimed Floyd was resisting arrest, but surveillance footage shows he was not.

Throughout history there has been much racial injustice that has resulted in unjustifiable killings of black individuals. In 2014, we saw Eric Garner being choked to death by an officer. In 2017, we saw Philando Castile be shot seven times for doing the right thing and warning the police officer about a gun in the vehicle the officer stopped him in. But, because the officer panicked, he was killed. “They really think we dumb and got a death wish, now somebody’s son is laying breathless,” a line from rapper J. Cole’s High For Hours that sums up these situations, and many others that have not garnered as much attention.

These incidents that we see on the news and social media, and are discussed amongst the African American community, cause black people to flinch when dealing with police and the justice system. It is a movement of great fear, a manifestation of what we have seen and how bad our encounters with police can get. While we could and should be irate because of the injustice that is taking place, we choose to comply to ensure we come out of each situation unharmed. It is when we are in compliance with officers, and the situation still ends tragically for us, that has produced exactly what is happening in Minnesota, New York, D.C., and other places in America right now: protest.

“As appalling and as egregious as it is, we’d be lying if we said it was a surprise. We’re not surprised, we’re hurt and we’re devastated.” – Stephen A. Smith

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This piece was contributed by The Bottom Line’s Sports Editor, Jamari Morgan. Jamari is a young man from Waldorf MD, with plans and goals that involve teaching and helping to raise the youth of communities, while letting God lead the way to my success.