Response to the Rittenhouse verdict

NEWARK, NJ—What is this thing, the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict?

It is a reaffirmation that Whiteness as power is a thing that White-designated people will slaughter their own to maintain.  The underpinnings and underbelly of America reared its head and walked out of the very annals of white supremacy into the sunshine of the morning that has never seen a sunset.  

The rosy-cheeked, youthful innocence of Kyle Rittenhouse is and has always been the American horror story.  White men fear the adolescence of Black youth in all its freefall without a constitution to catch it; but will hand weapons of destruction to their cherubims to wage war.

Let us hold to the fore that self-defense laws emerged to protect White men’s bodies, property, homes, family, hell all that is in their domain.  Infused into these laws is the right to self-defense if danger is perceived.  So, Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha, Wis. and brought a military grade gun into a police brutality demonstration where he felt unsafe and threatened which allowed him to defend himself from perceived danger.

I have no action steps for White-designated people on their response.  I can however remind us all of the history of White civil rights organizers, White partners of Black partners, White Quakers, White abolitionists, and other White anti-racists in the trenches have paid with their lives and will continue to do so if their White neoliberal counterparts look askance as the slaughter to maintain White supremacy continues.  

America was built on protecting Whiteness as power. The U.S. Constitution has enshrined it. State and local laws affirm it. And we have constructed an entire society to navigate within this paradigm, hence Rittenhouse and the legacy he seeks to continue. And he is not alone in his generation.  But this legacy is waning and the mythology of Whiteness drags like a carcass on the ever-breaking shoulders of new generations.  This legacy cries out for the courage of all generations to lay it to rest.