Equal Injustice

Now that Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted, the recriminations have begun. Those, and the protests that will follow the verdict, are unlikely to change anything. Part of the problem is that the legal system in the United States isn't really structured in a way that allows it to treat some people unjustly simply because others have been (or will be) treated unjustly.

When someone is on trial for homicide, and their defense is self-defense, the examination of events tends to concern itself with the act and its immediate antecedent. Jack does something threatening, and Jill shoots him, so the focus of the trial is on Jack's action. Jill is more or less automatically assumed to have done nothing that would have warranted Jack seeking to kill, injure or disarm her. The racial history of the United States, however, has demonstrated that this presumption of innocuousness, is not granted equally to all people. And so when people point out that a Jill were Black, she wouldn't be treated as if she'd simply been minding her own business when Jack mounted an unprovoked attack, they're drawing on that history.

But the legal system does not. And it is unlikely to anytime soon. As much as I understand the problems that people have with verdicts like this, and the legal system that produces them, the problem isn't that Kyle Rittenhouse got away with something. It's that the legal system doesn't do enough to ensure that other people in his situation, but who don't happen to be White, are given the same set of supports that he was.

Laws, and I suspect that this is the case everywhere, are not simply about keeping the peace and protecting rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They're also about assuring people that the Good among them will prosper and the Evil among them will be punished. And people's general understandings of Good and Evil are suspect at best and wildly self-serving as a general rule. And this makes the law into a weapon, to be used against those who are different in a way that make the whatever segment of the society that becomes the mainstream uncomfortable.

Kyle Rittenhouse owes a great deal to the fact that he's not considered to be an ongoing threat to mainstream society. Society, therefore did not feel the need to assuage their fears by throwing the book at him. It's a less formal sort of innocence until proven guilty. The problem that activists point out is, in effect, that many Black people have already been "proven guilty," often simply by association, in the eyes of society at large. But putting Kyle Rittenhouse behind bars would not have changed that.

There is quite a bit to be said for legal proceedings taking a more expansive view of the events leading up to a homicide that is then claimed to be in self-defense. The current habit allows for too much thoughtless, if not downright aggressive, behavior. But that's a different concern than whether the United States, as a nation, can do enough about the deep-seated fears and prejudices that so many people harbor, and can't simply be made into felonies.