A woeful verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. Like many I'm put in mind of another seventeen-year-old American involved in gun vigilantism, though this one was killed: Trayvon Martin. The arguments of Kelly Brown Douglas' Stand Your Ground is as necessary now as it was then. And the desperate wish, spotted on Facebook, resounds: that this land might care as much about innocent black boys as it does about guilty white ones.
I can't stop thinking that, before Rittenhouse entered the scene, the protests and unrest in Kenosha and elsewhere were charged but never lethal. In a summer of protest, nobody was killed. Openly carrying a gun with him, he brought the possibility of lethal force to the scene. And yet somehow the jury was persuaded that he was right to imagine his life was threatened. By the possibility someone else might use the gun he brought against him! It's absurd. He brought an assault weapon to a scene and, to prevent others from using it to kill him, claimed to have killed them in "self-defense." They died so he wouldn't be harmed by the danger he brought to the scene - and the jury (and the Wisconsin law) bought it. It's unreal.
Not unreal: Joseph Rosenbaum is dead. Anthony Huber is dead. Gaige Grosskreutz was seriously injured.
And the man responsible, with a gun he wasn't entitled to carry and wasn't trained to use in a state he didn't even live in, walks out scott-free - and is lionized by violence-loving white men itching for a piece of the action themselves. If the conviction of Derek Chauvin showed what justice would look like if our system worked, this verdict is a reminder that the system remains unjust. Before it's fixed, if ever it can be, we'll have more Rittenhouses, and more Rosenbaums, Hubers and Grosskreutzes. Weep for this death-dealing land.
