Heather Cox Richardson compares the murders of Renee Good and Ahmad Arbery, the jogger gunned down by white supremacists in 2021. In both cases, defenders of the shooters released video of the incident which those defenders claimed would exonerate the shooters. But in fact the videos showed the killings for what they were — murder.
In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “Fucking btch” after he killed her.
The thread that runs through both is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun.