What if Kyle Rittenhouse had been black?

[sharksrog]

What if Kyle Rittenhouse had been black instead of white? Remember, carrying his AR-15 after shooting three people and killing two, he walked right by police, who didn't feel he was out of place. If he had been black though, they very likely would have.

Kyle almost certainly would have been arrested, which he wasn't. It is quite possible that being armed, he might have been shot, possibly even killed. No way of knowing, of course, but I think it's more than reasonable that he would have been looked at differently by the police had he been of color, especially black.

I didn't think the evidence convicted Kyle, so I agreed with the verdict. In the case regarding the death of Ahmaud Arbury that is having final arguments today, I haven't seen quite as much evidence as in Kyle's trial, but based on what I've seen, a guilty verdict is in order there. With 11 whites and one black on the jury, the potential for surprise is there, and there is also the possibility I have misread the evidence. But the defendant who testified admitted there was no threat from the victim, so I think the die should be cast in that case.

I guess the bottom line here though is that it's sad that the police often treat people of color differently than they treat whites. I suppose we almost all do to varying degrees.

[sharksrog]

NBC News -- "Research published in 2012 by the American Psychological Association found that Black boys as young as 10 are not viewed in the same light as their white peers and are instead mistaken as older, are perceived guilty instead of innocent and face police violence if they are accused of crimes."

“'I have two beautiful daughters, and one looks white, and she is treated differently. People don’t realize that I’m her mom until she clarifies it,” Hill said. “My other daughter is ... dark ... and I have watched my own children be treated differently, whether it’s at a park or at school, because they’re completely different shades.'

"Hill said that when she enters a store with her two daughters, people will watch and even follow her and her older daughter, but no one pays attention' to her younger daughter, who presents as white.

"A study published this year by Elsevier in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that Black students ages 9 and 10 are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended or put in detention than their white peers are. In another study, conducted by researchers at the Yale University Child Study Center in 2016, scientists fit 132 early education teachers with eye trackers and asked them to watch clips of four children — a Black girl, a Black boy, a white girl and a white boy — and to look for misbehaviors. None of the children actually misbehaved, but the eye trackers found that the teachers spent more time watching the Black boy."

"Research published in 2012 by the American Psychological Association found that Black boys as young as 10 are not viewed in the same light as their white peers and are instead mistaken as older, are perceived guilty instead of innocent and face police violence if they are accused of crime."


When people of color are viewed differently than whites, we've got systematic racism. I would venture to say that virtually everyone of us has been guilty of it sometime.

[Islandboagie]

www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/black-man-who-claimed-self-defense-while-shooting-a-gun-found-not-guilty-on-same-day-as-rittenhouse-verdict%3f_amp=true

[sharksrog]

That was good stuff, Matt, but you didn't answer what might have happened to Kyle if he had been black when he carried his AR-15 past police, and you didn't address the studies I mentioned. Again, good stuff (although the Washington Examiner is a right-leaning publication with kind of a half-truth honesty rating), but you didn't address the points I made.

Remember, I felt Kyle's verdict was just, although when I saw him on Tucker Carlson's show, he came across as a bit pat, and as I mentioned, he was not guilty, but certainly not innocent. He used extremely poor judgment in putting himself in a position where he felt he needed his AR-15 to defend himself, and he's done quite a few bad things as well as some good ones. He's just a kid though, so I hope he'll turn into a good guy.

He may well face civil justice, although he's also considering some civil action on his own behalf. I don't think he'll get very far with his own civil action, but he himself may be vulnerable to the lesser judgment standard of civil action.

But, Matt, you didn't answer questions or even comment. I liked what you copied, but it didn't really answer the questions of the thread or the psychological studies it presented.

[Islandboagie]

If Rittenhouse were black he would have never been chased and attacked within the area of the riots in Kenosha, he would have fit in with the crowd and they would have accepted him as one of their own, regardless of his actual intentions of being there.. so the question has no merit. I'm not sure if the police would have treated him differently, usually if someone has their hands up and is noticeably giving themselves up there is no conflict, I'm sure if a black person had acted the same he would also be alive today. I find it a little surprising they just let him leave the scene of the crime like that, but that's poor policing. I don't think they were allowed to police the streets like they should have been, because the liberal leaders wanted the police to stand down in a lot of these situations, which led to encounters like this happening.

[sharksrog]

I don't think Kenosha police would have been impressed by a black man with an AR-15.

As an aside, in the movie Home Alone, John Candy plays a member of the polka band the Kenosha Kickers. I spent the first 12 years of my life in the Midwest. There isn't a huge amount of racial tolerance there, although it's better than the South. The N-word is used in the Midwest, but often the more euphemistic word "Coon" is used instead. Sadly, some of my relatives there were racists. Not blatant racists, but racists nonetheless.

I've done some racist things in my life. That's pretty sad.

[sharksrog]

Relations between Kenosha’s largely white police force and its minority residents had long been tense. “I think society has to come to a threshold where there's some people that aren't worth saving,” the region’s white sheriff had mused two years earlier, when four Black people accused of shoplifting were arrested following a high-speed car chase. “We need to build warehouses… and lock them away for the rest of their lives.”

Ouch!

[sharksrog]

Kyle Rittenhouse’s idolization of the police had started early. As a boy—growing up about a 30-minute drive south of Kenosha, just over the state line, in Illinois—he enrolled in a cadet program, which offered firearms training and the chance to ride along in patrol cars. He posed for pictures in police uniforms and filled his Facebook page with posts that celebrated law enforcement. Rittenhouse and his mother, who was similarly fervent in her support of the police, made frequent use of the so-called thin blue line flag—a black-and-white version of the American flag, with a single blue stripe. Originally employed by some members of law enforcement to represent their concept of themselves as the wall between civilization and anarchy, the “thin blue line” has more recently been adopted by some opponents of the Black Lives Matter movement.

A primary tool of the police trade also fascinated Rittenhouse: guns. When he was nine years old, his mother shared a picture on Facebook of her boy wielding an AR-15-style assault rifle, the mass-market military-inspired weapon Americans have snapped up by the millions—sometimes for as little as a few hundred dollars from big-box retailers. In the photo, he stands in a muddy yard, the weapon comically large in his stubby arms, its magazine well empty. He smiles with cherubic cheekiness while one finger pokes at the trigger.

Rittenhouse’s lawyers declined to provide access to him or to his mother, Wendy Lewis, to respond to my questions. But the long paper trail generated by the Rittenhouse family’s involvement with the legal system portrays a young man buffeted by familial and financial disorder, for whom the power and control represented by policing—and by guns themselves—could have been appealing.

Court records for 2003, the year of Rittenhouse’s birth, show that the wages earned by his father at a chain grocery store were being garnished due to his falling behind on rent. The boy’s family was evicted twice in 2005. In the summer of 2017, his mother, filling out an application for a new apartment, indicated her reason for departing her current address as “Left kids’ dad.” Within months Lewis was evicted again, and soon thereafter she filed for bankruptcy, listing $14,103 in assets—most of that represented by a heavily used Chevy sedan, along with child support she was owed—against $31,434 in debts. After that, the family landed in an inexpensive ground-floor apartment in a complex about which online reviews reveal a litany of complaints, from broken appliances to “black water constantly.”

Rittenhouse appeared to have had a rough time at school. In 2017, Lewis sought a restraining order to protect her 14-year-old son from a 13-year-old middle school classmate. In the petition, she wrote that the boy “calls Kyle dumb and stupid. Say that going to hurt Kyle.” She claimed that the boy also visited the family’s apartment, where he yelled “to my son Kyle calling him names and telling him that he is going to kick his butt.” The following year, Rittenhouse attended some high school but seems to have left without finishing ninth grade; two people told the Chicago Sun-Times that he had dropped out. (His mother would later tell police he was “homeschooled.”) Classmates described Rittenhouse to Vice as easily angered and confrontational. They claimed that he was known for supporting Donald Trump and enjoying “triggering the libs.” The contentiousness seemed to go both ways: A video shared with Vice showed Rittenhouse being pushed to the ground from behind by classmates.

In January 2020, Rittenhouse traveled to a Trump rally and cheered for his presidential hero from the front row. Around that time, he also applied to the Marine Corps, but didn’t qualify. In March the coronavirus caused him to be furloughed from his part-time job as a YMCA lifeguard. As The Washington Post first reported, when he got his $1,200 stimulus check, he decided he wanted an assault rifle. The only problem was that Rittenhouse, at 17, couldn’t legally buy a weapon of that kind.

Rittenhouse had a friend who was old enough, however: Dominick Black, a curly-haired 18-year-old who hoped to join the Air Force and who was dating Rittenhouse’s younger sister. A lawyer for Black didn’t respond to requests for comment, but extensive police documents related to his later arrest, including video of an interview conducted by an investigator, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. According to those documents, Black, who lived in Kenosha, and Rittenhouse traveled to a rural stretch of northern Wisconsin, where Black’s stepfather owned property, and purchased the Smith & Wesson 223-5.56 rifle from an Ace Hardware in a nearby town. They used Black’s name and Rittenhouse’s money. Black said he recognized he could have refused the illegal transaction, but feared that “[Kyle] would have threw a fit.” The idea was that they would go hunting, but Rittenhouse never took the necessary safety courses to get licensed. Instead, they shot targets.

A video posted to Rittenhouse’s TikTok account showed him firing the rifle in a wooded area while a rap song played. The social media account carried the subtitles “Bruh I’m just tryna be famous,” “Trump 2020,” and “BLUE LIVES MATTER.” A picture of Rittenhouse and Black, which appears to be from the same trip, showed them clutching assault rifles, the image superimposed over a thin blue line flag, as if they were already lawmen.

When they headed home, the two faced a problem: Rittenhouse lacked the paperwork required to store the gun at his family’s apartment. According to police reports, when Black’s stepfather learned what they had done, he locked the gun away in a safe in his garage in Kenosha. He would subsequently allow the boys to take it “up north,” but each time demanded the weapon back once they returned.

As the summer of 2020 passed, Rittenhouse began to careen into scrapes with other teenagers and the law. In July, a cellphone recorded what appeared to be Rittenhouse, Black, and a short dark-haired girl who looks like Rittenhouse’s sister, hanging out near Kenosha’s lakefront when they got into an argument with a tall young woman. A shoving match erupted; Black attempted to pin the young woman’s arms in a bear hug, so she couldn’t defend herself; Rittenhouse seemed to go into such a frenzy punching her that one of his American flag Crocs flew off; then several boys knocked Rittenhouse to the pavement, and he got up and fled.

Then in late August, police clocked Rittenhouse driving at least 20 miles per hour over the speed limit on the freeway. When they stopped him, they found that he lacked a valid driver’s license. Four days later, as Kenosha exploded with unrest, Rittenhouse may have glimpsed an opportunity. Here was an apparent chance for him to be the law, as he’d always dreamed—and his gun was already waiting for him at Black’s stepfather’s house in the burning city.


As I've mentioned, Rittenhouse has done some good things. But you can see he's done some very bad things too. I hope he turns his life toward the good things.

[Islandboagie]

www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/25/us/nfac-black-armed-group/index.html

[sharksrog]

I'll ad this group to my list of groups I wish didn't exist. We simply don't need semi-automatic weapons in the hands of people like this. I strongly believe thought that Americans have the right to carry their muskets.