Kyle Rittenhouse is a 17-year-old wannabe policeman who carried an AR-15 across state lines to feel masculine, patriotic, and important, and he ultimately killed two people and injured another. Former Attorney General of Florida Pam Bondi says he’s just a little boy who was protecting his community.
He wasn’t protecting his community — he lives half an hour away. He had to have his mother drive him there.
He’s not a little kid — he’ll be 18 in December, old enough to vote and go to war.
He’s not a victim — protesters wouldn’t have been chasing him if he hadn’t shown up from out of town carrying a rifle that he legally wasn’t supposed to have anyway.
This is what Conservative White America watches all day, celebrations and exaltations of white murderers contrasted with demonizations and vilifications of Black victims. And when the murderer is young, Conservative White America rallies around them to magnify their youth and exaggerate their innocence. Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer who gets to be a “little boy” and Dylann Roof is a murderer who gets to be a “sweet kid” but our young victims don’t have that luxury.
Michael Brown was 18 years old.
His murderer, who is the same height as Michael Brown, said he wasn’t a boy — he was a demon — and it was like wrestling with Hulk Hogan. (x)
Trayvon Martin was 17 years old.
He was walking home from the store when his murderer decided to stalk him, confront him, and then kill him because he was afraid of a child. (x)
Tamir Rice was 12 years old.
He and Kyle Rittenhouse are similar in that they were both carrying guns. Of course, Tamir’s was a toy and he was shot seconds after officers saw it, because what they thought they saw was a grown man carrying a deadly weapon. Officers on the scene said he was “maybe 20.” (x)
Law enforcement starts to see Black children as older than white children starting around 10 years old. After that, Black children have an extra four years tacked on to their age (on average), and when that Black child is accused of a crime, he’s more likely to be assumed guilty.
“Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection. Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent,” said author Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles. The study was published online in APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology®.
We talk about defunding the police in the context of unlawful police shootings and racially motivated police brutality, and the counterarguments focus on reforming the police instead: They just need more training. They just need to learn more de-escalation strategies. There’s no training that will change 400 years of racially charged propaganda that has painted Black people, males especially, as aggressive, criminal, brutes. There’s no training that will suddenly make police officers see Black children as Black children when 400 years of media and history has painted Black kids as older and more dangerous than they are because Black people in general are framed as more dangerous and more aggressive than white people. Racism, the assumptions around Black people, and the perceptions of Black children are all baked into the fabric of this country, and Conservative White America keeps that oven turned up every single day.
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