Sunday Hot Take: The Rittenhouse Effect
The Acquittal Was Not a Surprise, but It Portends Trouble
Kyle Rittenhouse “wants to get on with his life,” his defense attorney Mark Richards said on Friday. And he will be able to — unlike Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenblum, the two men he killed during a protest in Kenosha, Wisc., last year.
Rittenhouse, 17 years old at the time, killed the two men and shot another, claiming he feared for his life, even though he travelled from his home in Illinois to Kenosha armed with an AR-15 with the expressed purpose of “protecting local businesses,” with presenting a show of force, with playing cop. He was acquitted of all charges, his self-defense claims creating enough doubt to sway a Wisconsin jury.
Rittenhouse will be able to get on with his life and, because he has become a right-wing cause celebre, is likely to be able to cash in on the notoriety, as so many others like him have done. Expect books, TV appearances, the whole Fox News treatment.
And expect more Rittenhouses to make their appearance, vigilantes presenting themselves, armed and ready, as the last line of defense between their skewed version of civilization and the dangerous hordes — itself a version of the “thin blue line” argument often professed by police and their supporters.
None of this should surprise anyone following the trial on even a cursory level. The judge, Bruce Schroeder, was an intrusive presence throughout. The prosecution offered a surprisingly weak case. The lone surviving victim, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted pointing his gun at Rittenhouse, though only after the shooting started. Rittenhouse cried on the stand.
Perhaps more importantly, the self-defense claim always was going to be difficult to dispute — a function of the defense itself. Legal scholars told The New York Times that a self-defense claim raises a high bar in criminal trials, putting, “the onus … on the prosecution to prove otherwise.” To be fair, this is by design, though it is not the case for all defendants. There is a disparity in how these questions are applied — one tied to race and class and that privileges certain actors over others, and that most often allows white defendants to walk. White defendants — and police — are more likely to be believed when they say they feared for their lives, especially when their victims are black or brown.
Historical stereotypes are the main culprit — the kind of baked-in racism that the right now lumps under their caricature or “critical race theory.” African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims are seen as inherently threatening, with white defenders of Black rights being lumped under the same umbrella, their presence painted as an inherent threat, as anarchy itself. White fear often is justified on these grounds, and then works its way into self-defense claims.
In this case, only Rittenhouse’s reactions to protesters who approached him mattered in court, along with the unrest on Kenosha streets that erupted in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed black man days before. That Rittenhouse chose to arm himself in a way that made him seem like a threat to many was irrelevant, apparently. That he was white and his comrades were white appear irrelevant, too, if you only consider the race of the victims and not the larger context of what had been happening in Kenosha and the rest of the country over the course of the year (and throughout American history).
The Rittenhouse acquittal sends several messages, the most powerful of which is that you can exacerbate a situation by your presence, by bringing firearms, by presenting yourself as a threat in an already tense situation, but not have to face the consequences of your own choices. This is the lesson here, as it was with George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin and as it is being argued in Georgia in the trial of the three men who killed Ahmed Arbery.
I am not arguing for the elimination of self defense as a defense, but we should question its use in these situations and ask why self-defense claims by Black defendants are far less frequently than those made by Whites.
Beyond that, this trial points to a confluence of American pathologies, weaving race, a broken media system, Trumpism, and the fetishization of firearms on the right into purely American outcome. Class plays into this, as well, but in a distorted way, filtered through anger and resentment, racism and a desire to return to an Edenic past in which White workers were seemed to have it made. That this trial was taking place at the same time as criminal and Congressional proceedings focused on the Jan. 6 D.C. insurrection, the trial of Arbery’s killers, and the killer of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville just underscores how widespread these horrific ideologies are and how deeply they have embedded themselves into the American psyche.
Rittenhouse is the latest face of these ideologies, portrayed as just a kid doing his best to protect Fox News’ version of America. A kid who should have been treated as a kid and not as an adult — a legitimate question to raise, though why it only comes up with White kids and not with Black teens is never considered worthy of public debate.
Rittenhouse shot three white men. Two died. Many will question why race even matters. But Rittenhouse was in Kenosha in response to protests over the shooting of a Black man. Some of the protests turned violent. The gun-toting defenders swooped, seeing themselves as a bulwark, and because they saw the protests not only as a threat to property, but as inherently illegitimate.
This argument is central in the Fox News universe, in which newscasters and anchors ignore or downplay the grievances of the communities we as a nation continue to marginalize and brutalize, while treating all protest as an affront, a threat.
And as the response to the verdict ramps up and more people take to the streets, we can expect to hear the same tired refrain from the right about how the collapse of civilization and the need to defend it at all costs.