The two white men who shot Ahmaud Arbery did so operating on their basest, racist stereotypes of black men — the idea that black men are inherently dangerous and criminal.
If there had been, in the eyes of the white men who called 911, Ahmaud’s only crime was that he was a black man roaming through a neighborhood not considered his own.
Arbery is seen on video walking around a construction site, as others, black and non black, had done.
Ahmaud Arbery had been so dehumanized by the two white men who followed and killed him, that they likely could not distinguish one black man jogging through their neighborhood from the next.
Combine that with the kind of dehumanization that also took place on that Brunswick street — the literal stripping of Arbery’s humanness — and you get two white men jumping in a pickup truck out on a mission to hunt down a black man as if they were hunting deer.
