As Revealed In The Killing Of Ahmaud Arbery ‘Southern Hospitality’ Doesn’t Always Apply To Black People
The idea of community and who belongs and who does not was a common theme in the Jan. 7, 2022, sentencing hearing of three white men convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery.
“They chose to target my son because they didn’t want him in their community,” said Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, during the hearing. “When they couldn’t sufficiently scare him or intimidate him, they killed him.”
Arbery was the 25-year-old unarmed Black man who was shot to death on Feb. 23, 2020, while jogging through a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. Race went largely unspoken throughout the trial, but the idea of belonging was clearly drawn in black and white.
As a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Clark and Atlanta University, I have witnessed and studied perf...
