The Trouble with Rights
“The trouble with rights is that they don’t always apply to everyone equally. The idea that they do is a mere fiction, and a fiction that serves the interests of the dominant classes in society.”
Image of Black Lives Matter protest by Cooper Baumgartner.
To hear some people talk, the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse is a matter of rights. All human beings have the natural right to self-defense; a jury of Rittenhouse’s peers decided that he was acting within that right. What else is there to say?
The trouble with rights is that they don’t always apply to everyone equally. The idea that they do is a mere fiction, and a fiction that serves the interests of the dominant classes in society. Otherwise, Chrystul Kizer would have been able to claim self-defense when she killed the man who was trafficking her. According to Kizer, she killed Randall Phillip Volar III when he pinned her down after she said no to sex. Doesn’t that sound like a case where Kizer should have been allowed to make a claim of self-defense?
That’s far from the only case of its type; the main reason I bring it up is that it also happened in Kenosha, WI. The reality is that self-defense is not a right we all possess equally, or Kizer would have been granted the same assumption of innocence that Rittenhouse was.
Rittenhouse’s gun was in fact an illegal firearm. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse by his friend Dominick Black, because Rittenhouse was legally too young to buy such a weapon. That’s called a straw purchase, and it’s a federal crime with a ten-year sentence. I’d always been told that you could not claim self-defense if you were committing a crime when the incident happened. That doesn’t seem to be the case… or at least not always.
Rittenhouse vs Reinoehl
So, Kyle Rittenhouse guns down two people at a Black Lives Matter protest and gets acquitted on all charges.
Michael Reinoehl kills a member of Patriot Prayer, also at a protest. Reinoehl also has a claim of self-defense. Would a jury have agreed with that claim? We’ll never know, because unlike Rittenhouse, he doesn’t even get a trial. He gets hunted down and killed by a Federal task force within days. Trump goes on TV and boasts about it, describing the killing as “retribution.”
That’s the country we live in.
In the absence of a genuine right to self-defense that applies equally to everyone, it’s pointless to even discuss whether Rittenhouse’s actions fit the legal definition. He was only able to make the claim because he was allowed to do so, and he was only allowed to do so because the legal system wants to protect people like Kyle Rittenhouse. For an anarchist, the issue of his legal guilt or innocence is basically irrelevant – after all, we want to abolish the whole system that found Kizer guilty and Rittenhouse innocent in the first place.
The Defense of White Supremacy
The real question is not whether Rittenhouse was or was not acting in self-defense when he pulled the trigger. The real question is what he was doing there, why he was carrying a rifle, and why so many people wanted him to be found not guilty. All three of those questions have the same answer: the defense of white supremacy.
Rittenhouse claims not to identify with racist ideologies, but that doesn’t really matter. When he saw that Black Lives Matter protests were happening in Kenosha, WI, he made it his mission to show up with a rifle to help suppress those protests. Of course, he phrased that as “protecting private property.” From the perspective of the white supremacist society we live in, “private property” is always going to matter much more than black lives. Black people are being murdered almost constantly by the police, but the important point to many white Americans is to make sure that no one ever riots over it. It doesn’t matter how many people die. It only matters that no one fights back.
Green Light for Gunmen
Predictably enough, the Far Right is interpreting the Rittenhouse verdict as a green light to kill antifascists and anti-racist protesters with impunity. Gab – the Right’s preferred social media network – called on its users to “buy firearms and form Christian militias” in response to the acquittal. Members of the Proud Boys declared that “The left won’t stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood.”
For anti-fascists, there is no green light even to defend ourselves. If one of us uses a gun, we can be hunted down and shot on the street with no trial at all. If the fascists do the same, they now feel confident that they will be acquitted at trial.
That grim reality – not the legal question of self-defense – is what matters now about the Rittenhouse trial.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha.
