Kyle Rittenhouse vs. Michael Harriot

Michael Harriot, an African American author, writes in the Guardian-

Before sending a Kenosha, Wisconsin, jury to deliberate if Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer, Judge Bruce Schroeder informed Rittenhouse’s hand-picked jury that his fate rests on the “privilege” of self-defense.

Why the scare quotes on 'privilege'? It is a fact that there is a right, a privilege, an immunity, in both tort and criminal law for actions taken in self defense. 'The privilege of self defense is based in the idea that no one should have to idly stand by while suffering harm from another, and one need not wait for resort to the law for redress. The privilege exists in both torts and in criminal law.'

We now know what the jury decided.

A baby faced kid with a big big gun was attacked by a child molester who had sodomized minors. Instead of being able to steal an expensive gun and perhaps fuck the baby faced dude in the ass, the White pervert got shot. Big boo hoo. 

Neither side disagreed that the 18-year-old intended to shoot Anthony M Huber, Joseph Rosenbaum and Gaige Grosskreutz. They don’t disagree that the Smith & Wesson M&P 15 is a dangerous weapon. However, under Wisconsin’s self-defense statutes,

These are Jury instructions not statues. The Common Law is clear. There is a privilege of self-defense but it is lost if the attack has been provoked. 

Rittenhouse was allowed to use deadly force, even if he provoked the 25 August attack,

No. Harriot is lying. What Wisconsin's Courts have upheld is the notion that successful assertion of self-defense requires a reasonable belief that one cannot retreat before force likely to cause death or great bodily harm. In other words, self-defense only comes into play after all possible retreat or disengagement has been preempted by an immediate danger of being killed or suffering great bodily harm. 

 if he “reasonably believed” it was necessary to prevent his own death.

but only after he had exhausted all possibilities of safe retreat or disengagement.

 Even though he traveled to the city and walked into a chaotic scene with a killing machine.

As had Gaige Grosskreutz. No doubt, Harriot strongly disapproves of Black Panthers displaying guns and insisting that 'self defense is no offense'. However, it is 'open carry' laws that represent the scandal here. 

“A belief may be reasonable even though mistaken,” the jury instructions read. “In determining whether the defendant’s beliefs were reasonable, the standard is what a person of ordinate intelligence and prudence would have believed in the defendant’s position.”

If you are carrying a big gun some people may try to steal it from you. They may also shoot you with it. That is why sane people don't try to take guns away from baby faced youngsters. They call the police who are trained in that sort of thing.

It was reasonable for Kyle to shoot those who attacked him- including the child molester and the other nutters roaming around there creating havoc. That was the Jury's determination and it was perfectly legal and sensible. 

Before former Kenosha alderman Kevin Mathewson summoned “patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city from the evil thugs”, no one else had died during the unrest in his city.

But, as a result of his summons, at least one child rapist now has a pitchfork up his arse in Hades. That's a good outcome. 

The fact is, if Rittenhouse was answering a 'summons' then it is likely that he expected to be part of a disciplined corps. Thus he was not a 'lone wolf' vigilante. He was a kid who deeply regrets his naive actions.

 Before Rittenhouse killed two people and wounded another, no one else had been shot. So, why is it reasonable to believe Rittenhouse needed a killing machine to protect himself against the “evil thugs” who were not shooting and killing people?

The “reasonable man” test derives from the description of a nondescript English character called the “man on the Clapham omnibus” – a reasonably educated, but average, hypothetical passenger on a London bus route whose thoughts and actions are defined as “ordinary”. The US supreme court case Graham v Connor enshrined this concept into law. The reason police are often acquitted of killing unarmed citizens is that they can argue that a “reasonable” police officer would have used deadly force, even if the officer turned out to be wrong and the victim was unarmed. When I first heard this principle, the first thing I thought was: “A white person came up with this.”

Very true. West Africans were too busy enslaving and selling their brethren to come up with anything similar. A 'reasonable' African chieftain did not accord any right to self-defense to the guys he rounded up and sold to the slave-traders. 

Why is Harriot exhibiting his idiocy to us? Does he think that anybody anywhere thinks Black people are smarter than White people? To say 'White peeps came up with this' is a recommendation because Whites are smart and successful. In Africa and Asia, we sometimes say 'us guys came up with this but it isn't crap. Such and such White Professor has explained that it was a sensible thing.' Even so, we may prefer to ditch the indigenous thing in favor of the thing the Whites came up with. That's how come those African or Asian states that have moved forward don't exhibit indigenous institutions but have a carbon copy of institutions which evolved among White people. 

Because all of our opinions are shaped and colored by our experiences, “reasonable” is a subjective notion. 

In Harriot's subjective view. But the very notion of subjectivity as opposed to objectivity is something White peeps came up with. That's why Harriot frames his argument as he does. 

Only white people’s perceptions are made into a reality that everyone else must abide by. 

Unless they live in a place where they may suddenly be enslaved and sold to the highest bidder. The fact is, people want to emigrate to places where certain types of white people have put their stamp on juristic and administrative institutions. On the other hand, there may be 'ghettos' in America where 'white people's perceptions' and prejudices don't shape reality. Those are places everybody wants to get the fuck out off. 

Think about how much privilege one must have for their feelings to become an actual law that governs the actions of people everywhere.

Think about how sensible and smart a people must be if other people living far away nevertheless find it highly utile and beneficial to adopt their laws and institutions. 

Mobutu and other African dictators were more privileged than any American president. They could kill and eat their opponents if they so desired. But they didn't bother with laws of a universal type. The whole point about privilege is that it puts itself above the law. 

Harriot may not be a cretin but, the fact is, it pays him to appear so. Why not just put a bone through your nose and shout 'ooga booga!'? It's what I would do- if that would help me sell my books. 

While there is no doubt about the value of the white lives Rittenhouse snuffed out, 

we need more, not less, child molesters- right?

there’s also no doubt that Rittenhouse was venturing into one of the scariest, most dangerous situations those white jurors 

unlike black jurors who have very different ideas regarding where's a fun place to have a family picnic

could imagine: a Black Lives Matter protest. It is easy to see how, for Rittenhouse and jurors, the victims

who were White

were part of the frightening mob of “evil thugs”.

Not to mention a guy who fucked kids in the ass. 

In America, it is reasonable to believe that Black people are scary.

Not black South Indian peeps like me though. Sad. 

Understanding the innate fear of Blackness embedded in the American psyche does not require legal scholarship or a judge’s explanation. 

It requires us to believe Harriot. The problem here is that three white guys got shot and the shooter walked because the Jury agreed that those white guys were scary. Why? Normal white peeps don't try to grab guns off kids. They run away and call the police. On the other hand, really scary dudes think they can get a kid to hand over the gun coz he don't got the balls innit? We have seen plenty of movies in which that happens. The kid should shoot the bad guys when he has the chance. Otherwise they are going to fuck him in the ass and then kill him. 

This belief shapes public perception, politics and the entire criminal justice system. And it is indeed a privilege only afforded to whiteness.

Which is why smart people want to emigrate to America. South Africa used to have something similar. Nobody wants to emigrate there now. Sensible people there are packing their bags and trying to get visas to places where Blacks are in a minority. Interestingly, more Black than White professionals are emigrating from South Africa to the USA. They know that when the shit hits the fan, the Whites will be rescued. Thus they spend a lot of money to get out while the getting is good. 

Only white people’s perceptions are made into a reality that everyone else must abide by.

Very true. White Science and White Medicine has replaced whatever was indigenous in such African and Asian countries as have managed to rise up or who wish to rise up. 

Researchers have found that Americans perceive Black men as larger, stronger and more threatening than white men the same size. 

Unless they are South Indian black.

A 2016 paper found that Black boys are perceived as older and “less innocent” by police officers. Black girls as young as five years old are viewed as older, less innocent and more aggressive than white girls. In real life, 35% of gang members are Black, but in Hollywood, 65% of the roles described as “gangsters” are played by Black actors.

What percentage of Hollywood producers and directors and scriptwriters are Jewish? Does Harriot really not understand that the sort of White people he doesn't like also don't like the Jews in show biz? 

The idea of the “scary Black person” manifests itself in every segment of the US criminal justice system. It’s why police are more likely to stop Black drivers, even though – according to the largest analysis of police data in the history of the world – white drivers are more likely to be in possession of illegal contraband. It’s why unarmed Black people are killed by cops at three times the rate of whites, in spite of the fact that most on-duty police fatalities are committed by white men. After controlling for factors that include education, weapon possession and prior criminal history, the US sentencing commission found that federal judges sentence Black men to prison terms that are, on average, 20% longer than white men with similar circumstances.

But it was African Americans who backed Clinton and Biden's draconian sentencing laws. The truth is some young African American men had higher longevity and life-chances if they were locked up, under three strikes, for fifteen or twenty years. 

African Americans could have kept incarceration rates down but chose not to do so. Why? Life-chances for families improved if members of a particular cohort were removed from the community. Locking up people is very costly but can pay for itself if their families then pays more in tax and their neighborhoods feature fewer drive-by shootings. 

It’s why 5,000 people responded to Mathewson’s Facebook call-to-arms. It’s why police officer Rusten Sheskey was not charged with a crime for shooting Jacob Blake seven times in the back and the side. Blake’s pocketknife made Sheskey fear for his life, but Rittenhouse was allowed to waltz past officers from the same police department carrying a killing machine during chaotic protests. They did not see the gun-toting teenager as a threat. He is not Black. He was not scary.

Kyle was not a convicted child molester. A Jury has found he did nothing wrong. But this means three white men were a threat. They were scary. 

That privileged loophole extends past the borders of Wisconsin.

Why is Harriot pretending that the killing of Arbery was self-defense? The guy wasn't armed. The nutters who killed him filmed the event. There is no 'privilege of self-defense' here whatsoever. 

 It is on display in the trial of the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. The impromptu lynch mob hunted Arbery down based on an 1863 law that allows citizens to arrest anyone based on “reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion”, referred to by Cornell professor Joseph Margulies as a “catching-fleeing-slave law”. This explains how a court could seat only one Black juror in a county that is 26.6% Black.

Sadly Harriot's notion of 'explanation' falls short of one considered reasonable by White people. The proper way to argue a point like this is to shove a bone through your nostrils and shout 'ooga booga!' At any rate, that's why I think I failed my Chartered Accountancy exams. 

Knowing how this belief has shaped reality for every Black person in America explains why white people are the only group who doesn’t think “attention to the history of slavery and racism is good for society”. 

Sadly, attention to the history of slavery would reveal that Africans exported fellow Africans while the Japanese and the Chinese preferred to cut off trade with those who trafficked in their people. Furthermore, attention to the history of the emancipation struggle and the Civil Rights movement would reveal that talking stupid bollocks harms black people. The proper thing to do is back 'pattern and practice investigation' followed by 'consent decree' based reform. 

It is reasonable to assume that Black history is as scary as the people in it.

African history is a fucking nightmare.

 It is reasonable to assume that police fear for their lives when they detain Black suspects. 

No. It is reasonable to assume that police men with a reputation for killing innocent people will get a bigger pay-off from the local gang-boss. The economics of crime has been well understood since the early Seventies. The big fish pay police men and judges to kill or incarcerate the small fry or the plain innocent. That way the police and the judges get to look like they are tough on crime while lining their pockets. 

It is reasonable for conservatives to assume that Black voters will upset the political equilibrium if they are not systemically suppressed. 

No it is reasonable for conservatives to bank on older black male voters. However, it is the Hispanics who will secure their victory. 

And yes, it was reasonable to believe that Kyle Rittenhouse’s white jurors would grant him the privilege of self-defense.

Because he shot people who would have fucked him in the ass and killed him with his own gun.

The Rittenhouse verdict is proof that it is reasonable to believe that the fear of Black people can absolve a white person of any crime.

Like that of killing a white child molester who is attacking him. 

Harriot may get paid for parading his own hereditary grievance and we wish him good luck in this piece of entrepreneurship. However, what his article displays is African American unwillingness to reform the judicial system. Does this arise out of Black fear of Black criminality- of which Blacks are the biggest target? Do people like Harriot want fellow Blacks to be incarcerated or killed so as to feel safer while simultaneously demanding reparation on their behalf? A reasonable person may follow this strategy. But what is reasonable may be immoral. It is certainly un-Christian.