November 20, 2021
The most shocking thing is how unsurprised we are. Given the all-white jury, the judge’s brazen misconduct and the coddling of a baby-faced killer, we all expected Kyle Rittenhouse to get away with murder. When the verdict was announced, few of us could summon the raw outrage with which we greeted George Zimmerman’s acquittal, when we still had a faint glimmer of hope that justice could be done. Now we’re just numb. We are inured to the fact that killers are not held accountable for taking Black lives and have had to learn anew, that the lives of those who stand with us are not valued either.
Some thought that a salient difference between George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse is that Rittenhouse’s victims were white. This facile observation ignores the long line of white accomplices from Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and Viola Liuzzo; to Heather Heyer, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, whose uncompromising advocacy for Black lives cost them their own.
Analysts have stated that Rittenhouse was acquitted because of the combination of the prosecution’s high burden of proof in self-defense cases and Wisconsin’s open carry law, (Source: “When It Comes to Self Defense The Burden is Often On The Prosecution,” by Shaila Dewan and Mitch Smith, The New York Times, 11/19/21). That is technically correct, but ignores the larger context. Rittenhouse’s acquittal comes while we are in the midst of an extremist project to restore the pre-Civil Rights era status quo— where Black people were denied basic human rights and where no white man was ever held accountable for killing a person of color. Back then, most white people were in one of two camps — those cowed into silence by the example of white martyrs and those all too happy to outsource rigid enforcement of the racial hierarchy to goons, cops and the Klan.
The evidence is all around us, from the January 6th insurrection to white nationalist Congressman Paul Gosar circulating a doctored video which depicts him killing Representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. This movement seeks nothing less than to maintain power and silence dissent through violence.
Yet this is hardly new. As detailed in this recent piece in The Atlantic, “each time minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo,” (Source: “America’s Most Destructive Habit,” by John S. Huntington and Lawrence Glassman, The Atlantic, 11/7/21). Huntington and Glassman describe the current Trumpist movement as a “counterrevolutionary dynamic,” that has antecedents in the dismantling of Reconstruction and ensuing Jim Crow reign and the “mid-century fight against Civil Rights.”
All three movements share “a hostility to racial equality;” a tendency to characterize proponents of equality as terrorists or Communists and then use that characterization to justify violence. To add insult to injury, these conservative counterrevolutionaries then accuse the victims of their violence “of inciting it.”
We need to see the Rittenhouse trial and acquittal as a recruitment video, signaling to other extremists that not only won’t their violence be punished, but that it may be rewarded. These people have shown that they are willing to kill for whiteness. The question for the rest of us is, “What are we willing to live with?”