A former police officer and his son shot and killed unarmed 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery who was jogging while being black in a neighborhood outside Brunswick, Georgia on February 23 of this year. The white shooters justified the assault on Arbery whom they thought looked like a suspect in several nearby home break-ins.
Following months of public outrage in the murder of this innocent victim, local authorities finally charged Gregory McMichael, 64, and Travis McMichael, 34 with murder and aggravated assault.
But many if not most of these murderers are never charged, and many who are, eventually go free by being declared innocent.
Stigmata Imposed on the Body
Officials in 17th-century C.E. Puritan Boston coerced Hester Prynne into permanently affixing the stigma of the scarlet letter onto her garments to castigate her forever socially for her so-called “crime” of conceiving a daughter in an adulterous affair.
Stigmata include symbols, piercings, or brands used throughout recorded history to mark an outsider, offender, outcast, the enslaved, or an animal.
Though Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter is a work of fiction, members of several minoritized communities continue to suffer the sting of metaphoric stigmata forced onto their skin, birth sex, sexual and gender identities and expressions, religious beliefs and affiliations, countries of origin and linguistic backgrounds, disabilities, ages, and many other areas of their identities.
Many overt forms of oppression are obvious when dominant groups tyrannize minoritized communities. Prime examples include the horrific treatment of people of color under the system of apartheid in South Africa and Black Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the mass slaughter of Jews and other stigmatized and marginalized groups in Nazi Germany, and the merciless killing of Muslims during the Christian “Crusades.”
Many forms of oppression and enforced stigmata (as well as dominant group privileges), however, are not as apparent, especially to members of dominant groups. Oppression in its fullest sense also refers to the structural or systemic constraints imposed on groups even within constitutional democracies like the United States.
Stigmatized and marginalized groups live with the constant reality of arbitrary and unprovoked systematic violence directed against them simply based on their social identities. The intent of this xenophobic (fear and hatred of anyone or anything seeming “foreign”) violence is to harm, humiliate, and destroy the “Other” for the purpose of maintaining hierarchical power positions and attendant privileges of the dominant group over minoritized groups.
On February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch leader in Sanford, Florida, shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Martin was walking on the sidewalk talking on a cell phone to his girlfriend and carrying a can of iced tea and a small bag of Skittles when Zimmerman confronted and shot him, and then he claimed self-defense. By most reports, Martin’s “crime” was walking while being black in a predominantly white gated community visiting family and friends. His stigmata included his black skin and his youth while wearing a “hoody.”
Black parents from all walks of life throughout the country engage with their sons in what they refer to as “the talk” once their sons reach the age of 13 or 14 instructing them how to respond with calm if ever confronted by police officers. Parents of these young men know full well the stigmata embedded into their sons by a racist society marking them as the expression of criminality, which perennially consigns them to the endangered species list.
In the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin, 32-year-old Iraqi American Shaima Alawadi was the victim of a brutal hate-inspired murder in her San Diego, California home. On March 24, 2012, Alawadi’s eldest daughter, Fatima al-Himidi, found Aalwadi “drowning in her own blood,” beaten with a tire iron. A note near Alawadi bloodied body read, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.”
We witnessed the brutal police chokehold death of Eric Garner, the multiple-bullet police killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Stephon Clark, the vigilante death of Trayvon Martin, the execution-style murders of three Muslim students in North Carolina — Deah Shaddy Barakat, a dental student, his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha – the destruction by arson of a building at the Islamic Institute in Houston, Texas, and the ever-increasing number of murders of primarily trans women of color.
And these are merely just a few of the most visible examples of this form of violence against unarmed members of stigmatized groups, primarily people of color. Earlier we witnessed the brutal attacks on Rodney King in Los Angeles, the barbarous slaying of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas, and the fierce rape and murder of Cherise Iverson, a 7-year-old girl in a Las Vegas casino bathroom.
We must not and cannot dismiss these incidents as simply the actions of a few disturbed and sadistic individuals or to a limited number of “bad cops,” for oppression exists on multiple levels in multiple forms. The killers live in a society that subtly and not-so-subtly promotes intolerance, spreads stereotypes, imposes stigmata, and perpetuates violence and the threat of violence. These incidents must be seen as symptoms of larger systemic national problems.
In these times of declining social mobility, and as the gap between the rich and the poor ever widens, dominant groups attempt to divide the dispossessed by pointing out scapegoats to blame. For example, vigilantes sometimes calling themselves members of the so-called “Minutemen” movement target and hunt down anyone suspected of entering this country undocumented.
We are thus living in an environment in which property rights hold precedence over human rights. Metaphorically, oppression operates like a wheel with many spokes. If we work to dismantle only one or a few specific spokes, the wheel will continue to roll over people.
In the final analysis, whenever anyone of us is diminished, we are all demeaned, when anyone or any group remains institutionally and socially stigmatized, marginalized, excluded, or disenfranchised, when violence comes down upon any of us, the possibility for authentic community cannot be realized unless and until we become involved, to challenge, to question, and to act in truly transformational ways.
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Photo credit: istockphoto.com