There’s a scene we should keep in the forefront of our minds as Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial begins:
On a chaotic August night in Kenosha, a white 17-year-old who had just shot and killed two people and wounded a third approaches police with an AR-15 style rifle slung across his chest, a rifle he was too young to carry in Wisconsin. His hands are up part of the time. At other times they are down near the rifle. People are yelling that he had just shot someone. He walks past armored police vehicles and a police cruiser without being stopped. Then he returns safely to his hometown of Antioch, Illinois.
On Monday, jury selection began in a case that will hold the nation’s attention in the weeks to come. Rittenhouse is charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide.
A jury will decide his guilt or innocence. But the issue this country most needs to reckon with goes back to that indelible scene of Rittenhouse’s easy passage out of Kenosha, and the simple fact that, whether we care to admit it or not, the scene would have played out far differently had that 17-year-old been Black.
That’s the heart of things. I know it. You know it. We all know it.
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If an armed Black teenager emerged from the protests and riots in Kenosha, hands up then down then up again, people yelling that he had just shot someone, there are two possible scenarios: that Black teenager would have been swiftly taken to the ground and arrested, or he would have been shot.
In Rittenhouse’s case, people on the far right have tried to turn him into a hero. They raised millions to bail him out and provide a defense.
Could we expect a hypothetical Black Rittenhouse, if arrested or shot by police, to receive the same hero treatment? Of course not.
Rittenhouse’s guilt or innocence matters when it comes to justice in this specific case. But what matters more broadly, in a country still convulsing from the civil unrest of 2020 and the far-right’s desire to bury anything that might address institutional racism, is the fact that a young white man in America and a young Black man in America still inhabit wildly different worlds.
Absent that fact, none of this would be happening. It was the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, preceded by a string of high-profile incidents in which police officers had killed unarmed Black men, that launched nationwide protests against police brutality and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement.
People don’t take to the streets in the middle of a pandemic without good reasons. But it’s no surprise those reasons were largely ignored by a swath of the population fed news by a network that tells its predominantly white audience that white people are the real victims of discrimination in America.
Let me pause to clarify two things. I’m not calling Rittenhouse a white supremacist, and I realize he is charged with killing or injuring white men. Rittenhouse’s own motivations and ideologies are not the point.
The point is that we live in a country where a white teenager out late at night and armed with a deadly rifle that was obtained illegally can walk toward police officers with confidence he won’t wind up dead. A Black teenager cannot do the same. That’s pretty much the definition of institutional racism.
Whatever the Rittenhouse jury hears in the coming weeks, and whatever verdicts they eventually render, the circumstances of that teen’s privileged walk away from a scene where he shot and killed two people and wounded another remain the same.
He told investigators that the police he walked by said he should go home. On a night of widespread violence on the streets of this Wisconsin city, the police told a 17-year-old carrying an AR-15 style rifle — a rifle he had used to shoot three people just a short time before — to go home.
Rittenhouse walked a path that night that no Black 17-year-old could ever follow. He inhabits a distinctly different America.
His alleged crimes are central to the trial that will unfold in Kenosha. But that scene, that safe and easy walk away from those alleged crimes, is central to the fundamental injustice that exists in this country, an injustice that led thousands upon thousands into the streets last summer to peacefully protest, and led some to riot and burn buildings in rage.
The clear existence of that injustice is what matters. Until all white Americans summon the collective humility to acknowledge it and stop swinging wildly at the slightest suggestion of institutional racism, we will remain stuck.
Rittenhouse, whether found guilty or innocent, can end up a footnote in the seemingly endless history of America’s racial divide. Or, if we step back and examine the central problem revealed by his stroll past police that August night, his case can mark a turning point.
That’s a path available to all of us. But it’s one we have to choose to go down.
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