From the start, the events that led to Rittenhouse fatally shooting Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and injuring Gaige Grosskreutz, are incomprehensible without considering the role of race in how things unfolded. The shootings occurred during protests after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, on August 23, 2020. The United States was already in the midst of huge protests following the May murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer. But the case could never serve as a plain assessment of race in America, in part because the three men Rittenhouse shot were all white.
The most striking element of Rittenhouse’s experience, and one of the reasons it became such a focal point for national attention, was the way he was treated by police. Rittenhouse was 17 when he self-deployed to the streets of Kenosha, not far from his home in Illinois, carrying an AR-style rifle. Just a few minutes before he shot the three men, footage showed police greeting Rittenhouse and giving him a bottle of water. After the shooting, he then went home, where his mother persuaded him to turn himself in. At the police station, detectives cut off his interview when he plainly did not understand Miranda rights.
[A] young Black man in the same situation would almost certainly not have been afforded all—or perhaps any—of these indulgences. The Second Amendment may be written in a race-neutral way, but in practice Black Americans do not have the same rights that their white compatriots do. A Black boy might never have had the audacity to go to protests with a rifle on his back. If he had, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to waltz past friendly police, turn himself in on his own timeline, and have his rights so carefully protected. But this injustice was outside the scope of the trial.
A group of conservatives, largely of the MAGA variety, have chosen to make Rittenhouse into a hero. That’s disgraceful, and not merely because much of the effort has been shameless profiteering. Rittenhouse’s choices during the summer of 2020 aren’t something that anyone should emulate. Even if you are more sympathetic—if, for example, you found yourself moved by Rittenhouse’s apparent breakdown on the witness stand during his trial—you should object to the commodification of the worst moment in a teenager’s life.
In fact, 17-year-olds shouldn’t even possess rifles. That’s not a normative statement; it’s a description of federal law (albeit with a few exceptions). Rittenhouse initially faced a charge of unlawfully possessing a dangerous weapon, but the judge tossed that charge in an arcane dispute over the length of the gun. The larger and more socially important matter of whether 17-year-olds—or anyone else—should be acting as a vigilante defense force is not strictly a legal question, but a political one. No judge or jury can resolve that.
[S]elf-defense laws are being stretched to their limits by the number of people carrying guns in the United States today. Going to a protest armed may be a stupid and provocative thing to do, but it is not (necessarily) an illegal one, and the legal parsing of self-defense does not take prior wisdom into account, but begins at the moment of conflict. A reasonable jury might have reached a different conclusion on these charges, but its ambit was always going to be narrow.
Over time, the repeated failures to convict white defendants erode trust and legitimacy. A functional justice system will produce both convictions and acquittals, but the disproportionate burden borne by Black Americans is a sign that our justice system is not a functional one.
A similar theme is found in the Washington Post column that express fear over future vigilante actions. Here are excerpts:
The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse was no bolt-from-the-blue surprise, but I worry about what it portends — and potentially encourages. I fear that other self-appointed, heavily armed vigilantes will take this verdict as a green light to act out their bloody fantasies.
The jury accepted the defense’s claim that Rittenhouse . . . . was acting in self-defense. Perhaps his tearful histrionics on the witness stand were convincing. Perhaps Judge Bruce Schroeder’s long-standing reputation as a jurist who tilts the scales toward criminal defendants was a factor. Perhaps prosecutors should have put on a more coherent, less disjointed presentation from the beginning . . .
Rittenhouse ended up killing protesters Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and wounding a third person, Gaige Grosskreutz, 26. One of the men tried to take Rittenhouse’s rifle, the defense argued; another tried to attack him with a skateboard; another pointed a gun at him. In each instance, defense lawyers claimed, Rittenhouse had reason to fear for his life — and therefore had the right to fire in self-defense.
The issue had become whether, in the split-seconds before firing, Rittenhouse genuinely felt he was in mortal danger — rather than how Rittenhouse had created danger in the first place by needlessly inserting himself, and his loaded rifle, into an already tense situation.
My fear is that the verdict will encourage like-minded yahoos to take it upon themselves to act as guardians of law and order. In a nation where there are more firearms than people, no good can come of such vigilantism. For proof one need only look to Brunswick, Ga., where the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black jogger, are on trial for murder — also claiming they were acting as guardians of their community, and also claiming they acted in self-defense.
[A]ll the principal actors in the Rittenhouse case — the defendant and his three victims — are White. But since the Kenosha protest was about racial justice and police violence against Black Americans, race was very much the subtext of the Rittenhouse trial, too. Rittenhouse became seen as an avatar of White grievance and anger.
He [Rittenhouse] is a “victim” only to the extent that he might have bought into some apocalyptic fantasy of “the real America” being under siege. The protesters in Kenosha that night in 2020 — Black, White, Hispanic, Asian — were real Americans, too. The streets belonged to them as much as to Rittenhouse and his fellow vigilantes.
There is a distinction between being “not guilty,” which the jury declared Rittenhouse, and being innocent in the moral sense. Friday’s verdict cannot be allowed to blur that line.
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