Earlier this week, the three men who chased down Ahmaud Arbery and killed him were convicted of hate crimes in federal court. They are already serving long sentences, including life without parole for two of them, for his killing after convictions in state courts. The verdicts won’t change their lives much, but the trial exposed their racism and prejudice. 

Transcripts of texts and testimony of witnesses showed the men used the n-word freely when referring to African Americans. The AP wrote, “In 2018, Travis McMichael commented on a Facebook video of a Black man playing a prank on a white person: ‘I’d kill that f—-ing n—-r.’” In another text he wrote, “Love it, zero n—-rs work with me.” Another defendant described a Martin Luther King Day parade as “monkey day parade” and said the Black man his daughter dated would “fit right in with the monkeys.” They complained that Black people “ruin everything.”

The exchanges reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s “The Banality of Evil” and of my own experiences growing up in the South. Arendt described Adolf Eichmann as more of a faceless bureaucrat than an evil mastermind. He oversaw the process of killing millions of people while seeming to be an otherwise normal, relatively boring man who reflected little on the consequences of this job and its impact on humanity.

The transcripts of those texts, Facebook posts, and testimonies in the Arbery case are disturbing to me because they were so familiar. I grew up hearing similar slights. I heard them in school, in bars, on hunting and fishing expeditions, and in kitchens and living rooms from people who otherwise were fun, funny, and caring. Today, many of those people are productive members of society, not outcasts or reprobates, and their views are not much changed. They would have heard the Arbery defendants and laughed at the memes and agreed with the sentiments even if they were careful with their own language.

The prevalence of these attitudes is why Ahmaud Arbery’s killers lived freely for months after they killed him. It wasn’t the oversight of a single district attorney. It was the acceptance of an entire society that readily believed the story of the White men who killed him without considering that Arbery was a victim and without acknowledging the impact of his death on his family and the larger community of African Americans in southeast Georgia. 

These mindsets are the foundation of systemic racism that so many Republicans deny and seeds of the right-wing extremism that too many GOP politicians enable. Ignorance drives the mentality of people like the Arbery killers. They’re people who lack the ability to see the points of view of people who have different life experiences than them. They accept the prejudices ingrained in them without question and allow them to fester as resentments. 

The resentments, though, are fueled by people who should know better, but will exploit them for political and personal gain. Tucker Carlson morphed from a movement conservative-type to a right-wing populist on the anger of White people fearful of losing their place in society. He knows better. Dan Bishop used free speech as an excuse to support the White supremacist social media site Gab. The free speech he supports is what Arbery’s killers shared across the internet and Gab is where the Pittsburg synagogue killer posted statements like “jews are the children of Satan.” Like Tucker Carlson, Dan Bishop knows better, but he’ll exploit bigotry to enhance his political fortunes. 

The Dan Bishops and Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps will express outrage over the Arbery killings, but only after the killers have been caught. They’ll look the other way and allow them to walk freely as long as nobody notices. In more heated times, they won’t yield the machetes or light the flames or pull the trigger. They’ll leave those tasks to the ignorant ones who they can then denounce.

Instead, they’ll rile them up with misplaced anger over things like Critical Race Theory or transgender people in bathrooms. They feed the resentments of prejudice and then deny responsibility when those resentments turn into violence. They demand accountability for the perpetrators while defending the instigators. 

Today, you won’t hear Bishop or Carlson use the N-word and they may even denounce its use, but these are the same people who two decades ago claimed exorcising it from polite company amounted to political correctness. And before that, they started segregationist academies and sent their children to them because they wanted what was best for their kids and what was best was not sharing space with Black children. And before that, they were people who excused extrajudicial killings after whipping up resentment and dangerous passions with fiery rhetoric, even if we never see their faces in the old post cards of lynch mobs.   

I’ve known the Dan Bishops and the Tucker Carlsons all my life. I grew up with them. I went to school with them. And I worked with them. They would always keep their hands clean, going to the right churches and joining the right clubs. They know what to say in public and what to keep behind closed doors. They maintain a plausible deniability of bigotry, but they also know how to inflame the passions and harness the resentments of people with a rougher edge for their own advantage.  

The language of the Arbery killers is horrifying, not because its shocking, but because it’s all too common. The three men who killed him were otherwise good citizens except for a dangerous prejudice that burned within them. They chased down Ahmaud Arbery because they believed more people would think their actions were right than think they were wrong. And they believed that, in part, because of the rhetoric and actions of people like Tucker Carlson and Dan Bishop and Donald Trump. And they were almost right.

If we’re going to end the racism that led to the deaths of people like Ahmaud Arbery or George Floyd or Breona Taylor or Trayvon Martin, then we’ve got to stop giving people like Dan Bishop a platform.