“Sentencing does not provide closure in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery”
I was painting my apartment in a futile attempt of stress escapism as I listened to and watched the sentencing of the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery. The stoic eyes and eyebrows of the COVID masked defendants as the judge doled out life sentences convinced me that they would be welcomed by racists in whatever Georgia State prison became their new home. They likely knew that the judge would throw the book at them, and they were prepared to catch. As someone who spent three years in and out of courtrooms as a defendant, I also gleaned that Judge Walmsley would impose the maximum sentence before he gavelled it to Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan. I imbued that white supremacy was going to receive a minor scrape in that courtroom, but what I did not expect was for abolitionist thought to enter the sentencing minutes.
Briefly lifting his head up and scanning the courtroom, Judge Walmsley said, “sentencing does not generally provide closure…and I find that’s an unfortunate thing.” With those words, he unwittingly amplified that prisons and jails do not accomplish what most of us are conditioned to believe they do for victims and survivors of the transgression, which is to assuage hurt. A life sentence satisfies the base desire for vengeance, but it does nothing to salve the deep and indelible gash that is Ahmaud’s murder; his abrupt and tragic dismissal from the lives of everyone that knew him, and for those of us who are vicariously traumatized by expectant Black death in a white supremacist patriarchal capitalist dominated society.
The increasingly vogue and prophetic Black imagination of a world without prisons is a testament to the realization that human transgressions require a healing that cannot be atoned with torturous isolation. The late bell hooks who coined the term “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”, was demanding that we think deeper about all of the factors that contribute to any human act of harm no matter the race or gender expression of the perpetrator. She was pushing us to consider that we are all affected actors of systems that valuates the rationality of a white and male manifest destiny where everything and everyone is a commodity to be traded for a coin, dollar, or crypto over humanity. William Bryan and the McMichaels didn’t kill Ahmaud because he was a threat to them, they dismissed his life because they are conditioned to see people like Ahmaud outside of the spectrum of commodified worth. To them Ahmaud was an insignificant Black who had dirty toenails.
And prison won’t change that. I know, I’ve been there. Prison only reinforces worthlessness. Black men in the prisons that house the McMichaels and Bryan will likely want to harm trio as revenge for their conditioned desire to hurt the whiteness that Ahmaud’s killers wear. White racists will coddle and clothe Ahmaud’s killers to express the solidarity that whiteness requires to survive. I’ve seen this with my own eyes.
Black youth will continue to harm each other on street corners because they are babies born into the idea that the commodification of everything and everyone, vis-a-vis the American dream, is the appraisal of their self-worth. Take a look at how social media virality is usually accomplished. The more you show off the more we, meaning I, too, are liked, followed and retweeted.
I want a world where prisons are unnecessary, which means that a societal shift in human and climatic worth is applied in our views on economics, human taxonomy, and governance. Currently with over 2 million people in American prisons, 3.6 million on state and federal supervision, and over 70 million people living with a criminal convictions, an honest assessment of our democracy can conclude that incarceration and criminality are necessary evils, a collateral consequence to American prowess in the world.
The gulping skookum of this analysis need not overwhelm our possibilities for undoing and building new ways of thinking and doing. Judge Walmsley’s statement about the ineptitude of prison as a mechanism of closure is edifying. And, no, no one is asking to close in one day the 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, the 218 immigration detention facilities, 80 Indian Country jails as well as the military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories. But, as someone who has been there and done that we need to take Judge Walmsley’s words into deeper consideration. We need to be honest about our expectations about incarceration. What do we want them for? Is it for a greater civil society, or for where people like the McMichaels and Bryan can continue to view Black life as insignificant and worthless?
Listen to the audio essay: https://spoti.fi/3I0iWYI
