Clack: In Arbery's killing, an all-too-familiar pain - San Antonio Express-News

panggilansaja.blogspot.com

In the spring of 1980, I was a student at the University of Houston living in Taub Hall. The dormitory was adjacent to Lynn Eusan Park.

I felt a kinship and hometown pride in the park’s namesake who, like me, grew up in the Denver Heights neighborhood on San Antonio’s East Side. In 1968, Lynn, one of the black student leaders on campus, was elected U of H’s first black homecoming queen and the first black homecoming queen of a predominantly white university in the South. In 1971, she was murdered in Houston.

From Taub Hall, you had to walk by or through the park to get anywhere on campus. One night, I and one of my friends, Alex, who was also black, shot pool at the student center until it closed at midnight.

Walking back, we were about halfway to our dorm when we heard a cacophony of yells. Alex looked to his left, his eyes widening, and he said, “What the …” before breaking into a furious sprint.

I looked to my left and couldn’t believe my widening eyes. I finished Alex’s sentence with an expletive before racing after him.

Speeding at us, through the park, was a pickup whose cab was filled with hooded figures whooping and hollering. If they were shouting words at us, they were swallowed between our fear and the wind rushing past our ears. I do remember thinking I couldn’t believe I was being chased by the Klan in a park named after a black woman.

Because of the trees in the park, there was only so far a motor vehicle could travel before having to turn around. Alex and I didn’t stop running until we were up the steps into Taub Hall.

The next day we complained to a student affairs director, a black woman named Thelma, who downplayed the incident, saying that it wasn’t the Klan but a white fraternity, Kappa-something, with a reputation for stunts like that.

I don’t doubt it was a stunt and they intended no physical harm. But we didn’t know that in those moments after midnight. Klan or Kappa, the fear they elicited from us was the same. We ran because we knew history. We ran out of a fear that had been birthed in a nation with a reputation of white sheets in pursuit of black bodies.

There have been racially unsettling moments in my life, but this, surprisingly, isn’t one of them.

Maybe the combination of time and the knowledge that it was “just” frat boys playing pranks tempers any edges of anger.

In retrospect, knowing — or assuming — they weren’t going to hurt us dulls the memory and anesthetizes the discomfort.

Maybe I’ve refused to allow my mind to dwell on some expletive-deleted arrogant frat boys donning white sheets to scare a couple of black teenagers.

But that experience wasn’t close to being as unsettling as standing in the midafternoon sun on a highway in Money, Miss., in front of the weathered and collapsing building that was the grocery store where the alleged whistle of 14-year-old Emmett Till, in 1955, led to his lynching.

I know I wasn’t as frightened as I was one night in Jasper driving down the road on which, a few months earlier in 1998, James Byrd Jr. was tied to the back of a pickup by white supremacists and dragged for 3 miles to his gruesome death.

The rare times I think about what happened at U of H, it’s never with the anger I immediately feel each time I see a picture of Trayvon Martin or read about the latest run-in with the law or sordid controversy by his killer, George Zimmerman.

And it’s never with the pain I felt upon watching Ahmaud Arbery’s knees buckle after he’s shot in a video. Arbery, a 25-year-old black man in Glynn County, Ga., was running on a road near his home in late February when he was confronted by a father and son who labeled him a suspect, armed themselves and pursued him in their truck.

In the video, Arbery is seen running toward the truck, where he gets in an altercation with the son, who is holding a shotgun. Three shots are fired, and the unarmed Arbery falls to the ground.

The video helped lead to the father’s and son’s arrest Thursday on charges of murder and aggravated assault. But for more than two months, prosecutors had refused to bring charges, saying that it was legal for two citizens to label another citizen a suspect for crimes they admit to not seeing him commit, arm themselves, pursue him and demand that he stop.

Father and son will now receive the presumption of innocence they denied Arbery, who would have turned 26 on Friday.

Cary.Clack@express-news.net

Let's block ads! (Why?)

"in" - Google News
May 09, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/2WIjw7o

Clack: In Arbery's killing, an all-too-familiar pain - San Antonio Express-News
"in" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MLa3Y1
https://ift.tt/2YrnuUx

Bagikan Berita Ini