The New York Times recently posted video footage of the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings, along with commentary and eyewitness accounts. The video offers the Times’ perspective on the story and, to my knowledge, contains most of the footage available.
If you’re trying to get your head around the Rittenhouse case, please add this to your info diet. I’ll warn you, however; the footage records all three shootings. It’s awful to watch.
I post it here because the video lays out facts that are fundamental to our understanding of why a kid would go on a shooting spree. There’s some bias present in the way the Times presents their stuff, but the raw footage doesn’t lie.
As you can expect, America can’t find agreement on what to do with Kyle Rittenhouse. On one extreme, conservatives want to brand him a hero. You can guess what folk on the other extreme would like to do with him.
From my perspective, there are three things that Kyle, right or wrong, taught us about America.
1. White Militia Privilege
During the Kenosha riot, opportunists and others saw fit to riot, destroying property and costing the city millions of dollars in damages. When the fires started, a former police officer, trained in the use of firearms, took to the internet to rally anyone interested in lending law enforcement a hand.
Soon, a bunch of white guys showed up, armed with AR style rifles. The looting, burning, and property destruction soon ended, while tensions rose exponentially.
From what I can tell, most of these men believed that they were there to help. An eyewitness paramedic recounts many of them shouting at Rittenhouse after the first shooting: “What are you doing?”
There’s also evidence that some of these guys walked with the protesters and pledged to protect them.
Few of them realized how inflammatory their presence was. White guys showing up to this kind of protest is one thing. White guys with assualt rifles and bullet-proof vests, allowed to roam the city with no restrictions whatsoever is an entirely different animal.
At one point, the police began to herd the protesters away from the park where the protesting began, toward an area where most of the militia had posted themselves. According to one eyewitness, the police coordinated with these guys to try and get things under control: “You know what the cops told us today? They were like, ‘We’re gonna push ‘em down by you, ’cause you can deal with them and then we’re gonna leave.'”
The video shows police officers in armored vehicles thanking the armed white guys and offering them water.
“We really appreciate you guys,” one officer said via the bullhorn of his armored vehicle.
My friends on the right will say, “hell yeah,” if folk want to burn and pillage, you can expect Americans to show up and help the police and property owners. My friends on the left don’t like the presence of coordinated militias at racial protests.
Guns don’t frighten me. I grew up with them. Most of the time, people who own guns don’t frighten me. But I’ll take a hard pass on armed civilians walking about during a protest. Kyle Rittenhouse and many others weren’t trained in the very precise discipline of staying calm when things go bad.
Rittenhouse’s first victim was a hyper aggressive homeless guy with mental health issues, fresh out of treatement. Seconds before the shooting, you’ll see him pursuing Rittenhouse, who turns and fires 4 times.
Rittenhouse stands next to his victim for a moment, looking like he’s about to lay his weapon down and surrender, or try and help, then runs away, to where we don’t know, as people are yelling at him.
Now, according to one of the militia men, he’s a scared kid with a gun, running through the streets while angry people yell at him:
“If you’re running around looking wild with a gun on you, people are going to think that you’re doing something wild with a gun on you. So they [the people who tried to disarm Rittenhouse] all reacted the way they shoulda reacted.”
This is one of many reasons why we shouldn’t allow armed militias at any protest. Sure, some from the Kenosha militia were former police officers/military personell with the proper training, but how many more weren’t? There’s no way to know, and this small-time blogger has no interest in assuming that everyone’s simply going to keep their cool.
But this isn’t just about the proper use of firearms during racial protests. A white milita carte blanche roaming the streets raises a significant issue, one that the black community reminds us of everytime angry white people assemble.
There’s no way in hell or anywhere else that this would’ve happened if the AR-toting crowd was anything but white. An army of black men with assault rifles strapped over their shoulders wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near this protest.
My friends on the right are quick to dismiss any discussion of white privilege, but I’ll submit the Kenosha protest as a very clear example of a place that only white civillians with guns can go.
And if one of these white guys shoots a few unarmed people, there’s really nothing wrong. He was just trying to defend himself.
2. Blacks Just Need to Get Their Shit Together.
Jacob Blake was shot 7 times in the back. If he had simply done what the police told him to do, as my right-leaning friends will argue, this would’ve never happened. “If Blake would have never been a felon in the first place, he would’ve stayed out of trouble,” they say.
The same goes for George Floyd. If he had chosen not to be high on drugs with a criminal record he would’ve never had a police officer’s knee squashed on his neck for 9 minutes while bystanders and other police officer’s told him to stop.
According to my friends, Jacob Blake chose to break the law, and when you break the law, you get trouble. Jacob Blake reached into his car for a knife while police officers screamed at him to stop. They condemned him on the spot. He got what he deserved.
Kyle Rittenhouse, on the other hand, gets into an argument with a mentally unstable guy, shoots him 4 times, runs through the streets like a crazy person (according to one eyewitness from the white militia), shoots two more people who try to disarm him (as you’ll see in the video).
White milita guy commented on that, too:
“Anthony Huber [second victim] went down like a hero. He thought there was a threat there and he was reacting to it.”
I’ll argue that fear rendered Jacob Blake and Kyle Rittenhouse unable to submit to calm reason. Now, one is a criminal, one is a hero.
America is having a hard time figuring out which is which.
A few years ago, I watched the full video of Philando Castille’s death. He reached for his glove compartment while a police officer pointed a gun a few feet from his head, screaming for him to stop. That’s not a good tactical move by the way. If Castille’s intent was to shoot the officer, he didn’t have chance.
But it’s also not a rational move. What idiot would reach for a gun in a box when the other guy already has his gun drawn?
I know what it’s like to have a cop shove a gun in your face. I also know what it’s like to be 100% convinced that the guy with the gun is going to pull the trigger because he didn’t hesitate to pull it on your friend who’s now bleeding to death on the pavement. It’s not a moment of calm, rational thinking. All drama aside, it’s a moment of abject terror.
I can testify that your best decisions aren’t made in those moments, and that you have little control.
There is a mountain of reasons why police presence is frightening to our Black brothers and sisters; a compelling story that begs our attention. But if you’ve refused to hear it, you’ll never understand.
We do understand, however, a 17 year old white kid who’s so frightened that he makes an attempt at three lives. We also understand a violent protest when it’s a bunch of white people storming the capitol.
When Black people misbehave, we condemn. When white people misbehave, we understand. That’s one of the many painful lessons we learned from Jacob Blake, Kenosha, and Kyle Rittenhouse.
Blacks aren’t afraid of the police because a bunch of tree-hugging hippy liberals told them to be afraid of the police. Most live in predominately black neighborhoods. They’ve seen things that would incite anyone to believe that there’s a problem.
For us white follk who’ve had an altogether different experience with law enforcement, there’s a mountain of data that begs us to consider a different story, one that comes courtesy of well-heeled researchers and other academians of all colors.
But we refuse to look. We’re too scared. The people who don’t think like we do have obviously given their minds to some nation-damning liberal agenda and are completely unworthy of the few hours it would take to consider something different.
So, we douse our minds with one side of the story and vomit our half-truth perspectives onto the internet, displaying a blatant ignorance for all the world to see.
I’ve done it hundreds of times.
Wanna guess why we’re so averse to exposing ourselves to other side of the story, one that might challenge us and strengthen our grasp of reality? We’re frightened. We have a desperate need to be right, to be the good guys, and for us Christians, to be on God’s side.
Ask me how I know.
You can always count on scared people to act irrationally.
3. A Long Walk Back
The ever more prevalent “Blacks need to get their shit together” argument is a symptom of the increasing propensity of whites to get angry any time a Black person talks about race.
I have a conservative blogger friend who temporarily wrote about the division that Black Lives Matter is causing, implying that they’re little more than opportunists who use Kenosha-like protests to further their divisive agenda.
The data that supports racial bias in American law enforcement doesn’t exist. Neither does the division that comes when a large group of people decide that they’re only going to consider one side of the story.
For a long time now, this large chunk of America has ignored the Black community’s pleas for police reform, among many others.
Because we’ve closed our eyes and ears for so long, it doesn’t matter what happens. Any time a Black person is shot, or allegedly mishandled by a police officer, there’s going to be trouble. And every time, right-leaning America is going to categorically ignore the mountain of problems that got us there, blaming everything – everything – on the Black community’s need to stop misbehaving.
In any relationship, when one party refuses to listen while blaming everything on the other party, trust will erode to the point where the realtionship will simply rip itself apart. Healing from that takes a level of courage that most people can’t muster.
A pastor friend once taught me about what it takes to mend a bad marriage: when two people walk a long way down a bad road, they’ll have to walk back.
The same goes for a divided country. I’m not sure we have the guts for the walk back, so we’ll keep walking in the same direction.
