Vigilante Verdicts
The jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse case announced he was “not guilty” of killing Anthony M. Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum or of shooting Gaige Grosskreutz during the 2020 protests against police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The core of the defense was that Rittenhouse was “allowed to use deadly force, even if he provoked the 25 August attack,” if he “reasonably believed” it was necessary to prevent his own death.
This verdict was announced on the same day as Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address 157 years ago in the midst of America’s first civil war. The verdict is a defining feature of the outline of our future. It is ugly. It gives renewed legal force to white people to carry guns openly and shoot at people they perceive as threats. Those “threats” are virtually all people of color and “race traitors.”
New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who like many of us was not at all surprised by the verdict, said, “It represented yet another data point in the long history of some parts of the right valorizing white vigilantes who use violence against people of color and their white allies.”
Blow chronicles the most recent vigilante activity and concludes: “This list is long, and doesn’t only include individuals, but also organizations and entire periods of American history. I am sure that many in the white Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan also saw themselves as vigilantes…This vigilante impulse, what some call justice and others terror, has been a central feature of the American experience. So, has the way people have made heroes of vigilantes, encouraging, supporting and defending them.”
Vigilantes were created as a tool in the brutal stealing of the country from indigenous peoples. Supported by government bounties and “scalp edicts” issued by various authorities from 1675 to 1885, white settlers were rewarded for killing indigenous children, women, and men. In 1755 “the lieutenant governor of the province of Massachusetts Bay, Spencer Phips, issued an edict declaring the Penobscot people a target of extermination and commanding ’his Majesty’s Subjects of this Province to Embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing, and Destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians.’”
It is not much of a stretch to imagine similar encouragement for violence as right wing, authoritarian forces are moving to control all formal aspects of government. Rittenhouse came to Kenosha, after all, at the behest of a former Kenosha alderman who summoned “patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city from the evil thugs.”
Reuters recently reported on the vigilante attacks aimed at public officials at all levels. They described “a broader campaign of fear waged against frontline workers of American democracy” and documented “nearly 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 12 states, including more than 100 that could warrant prosecution.”
This intimidation includes calls for tarring and feathering, public executions and hangings, and firing squads. The rationale for such aggressive actions is self-defense against evil communists, anarchists, socialists, and criminals.
The violent future offered here can only be countered by deepening our love for each other and the places that sustain us. Just as we have a long history of vigilante violence, we have a long history of those who seek justice.
This verdict is a call to intensify our efforts, deepen our strategies, and find the courage to acknowledge that we are at a pivotal moment. As the visionary activists at Creative Wildfire say: “As communities on the frontlines, we study and learn from the freedom dreams and actions of our elders and ancestors. The ones who sowed the seeds to restore community self-determination that we see sprouting up today. The ones who broke the rules to change the rules. We carry forward their labors of love and struggles for dignity, inspiring us to prepare and plan for the ecological ruptures that they knew were coming. We carry the strength and wisdom of our lineages to create the worlds we need, again.” The jury is still out on our future.