Professor Carol Anderson on the Rittenhouse Verdict

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. One of the things that happened on Friday when Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted in Wisconsin was that some supporters of the verdict outside the courthouse started chanting, "Second Amendment". The BBC reports that others driving by haunt their car horns in support and leaned out their car window shouting, "We love the second amendment." The New Yorker says one guy attending a probate and house rally outside the courthouse during the trial wore a pro-second amendment hoodie. For some people, Rittenhouse was not a vigilante or a 17-year old kid who got in over his head, but a symbol of the right to bear arms to defend yourself when the police aren't enough.

Of course, in this case, Rittenhouse didn't start out as a person who was being physically attacked. He was a kid who answered the call of a local militia to go armed with an assault rifle in public to a city he didn't live in and protect other people's property. Yes, stores and government buildings were being damaged in Kenosha, but only Kyle Rittenhouse killed another human being. Only Kyle Rittenhouse, as a member of a non-law enforcement militia, used deadly force against other people. He's now being hailed as a hero of the second amendment. Congressman Matt Gaetz as we mentioned in the previous segment said he wants to offer the kid an internship.

Congressman Paul Gosar, who released that animation of himself killing AOC and going after Biden, released a poll asking if Rittenhouse should receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Shortly after Rittenhouse's arrest last year, his own legal team called him a minute-man and a member of the militia, NBC News reported that. Shortly after the verdict on Friday, Alex Kaplan from the liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters tweeted The Gab, a social media platform known as a haven for white nationalists, sent users an email newsletter urging them to quote, "Buy firearms and form Christian malitias."

This is all context right beyond the one acquittal on self-defense grounds. Here's more, the New York Times ran a story on Saturday that also looked beyond the individual verdict, a story called Rittenhouse's Case Highlights the Nation's Deep Divide Over Gun Rights. It sites the New York City case that the Supreme court is now deciding that would make it easier for the next Kyle Rittenhouse to show up armed in Times Square or wherever in the city. The case could interpret the second amendment to mean a right to bear arms in public. The city only allows gun ownership currently for self-defense in your own home or place of business for most licensed gun owners.

Of course, the Rittenhouse case has many racial overtones. Though he and the people he shot were all white, the protests that night over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a young Black man. Rittenhouse had been mobilized in response to that. After his shootings, he was allowed to leave the scene and go home. That's being called a good example of white supremacy. Can you imagine a Black shooter who had just killed two people being given that courtesy, same disparity with the way the rioters were treated on January 6th.

We'll get a take on the Kyle Rittenhouse case now that's rooted in history from historian Carol Anderson, African-American Studies Professor at Emory University and author of the book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Some of you will remember she was here for a book interview earlier this year when The Second came out. You may also know her books, White Rage, and One Person, No Vote. Professor Anderson. Thanks for joining us again today. Welcome back to WNYC.

Professor Carol Anderson: Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Brian: Let's begin way back at the framing of the bill of rights, where your book says the Second Amendment was rooted in the institution of slavery. Remind people basically of why you came to that conclusion rather than, or in addition to, for people to defend themselves against British tyranny.

Professor Anderson: It was because of the way that the ratification convention in Virginia laid out, where you had the constitution itself being held up. In Virginia, Patrick Henry and George Mason were arguing strenuously, that having the militia, the control of the militia under the federal government would leave slave owners defenseless because when the enslaved rose up that you could not count on the federal government to send in the militia to protect them. Mason was like, "We will be left defenseless."

They were willing to scuttle the constitution if they did not get protection for the militia and protection against the strong central government. The second amendment was, as I call it, the bribe to the south to allow the constitution of the United States to become the founding document for this nation.

Brian: You're right about that being in 1788, the year before the US was officially formed, 1789, or at least that's when the first presidential election was held. I guess the constitution dates to then 1788 that Virginia constitutional ratification convention and during the revolutionary war itself, you write about South Carolina not having enough of its militia members available to even fight the British during the revolutionary war because so many were involved in enforcing slavery. Can you give us more details about that?

Professor Anderson: Absolutely. During the war, the British decided to hit what they call the soft underbelly, which was the south. They stormed Georgia and took Georgia like that. Then they were headed towards South Carolina. George Washington sent his emissary, John Lawrence, down to Charleston to plead with that government to arm the enslaved because he said, "You don't have enough white men to deal with the 8,000 strong force that the British are bringing. In fact, South Carolina only has 750 available white men to take on the British because the bulk of white men have been deployed as the militia to control that enslaved population."

South Carolina was basically, "No, we will not arm them. We will not arm them. In fact, we take umbrage at the fact that you would even ask us to do something like that." The South Carolina government began to contemplate surrendering to the British so that they could protect slavery. That gives you some sense of how powerful white supremacy is, that the US can be sacrificed in order to save white supremacy.

Brian: That's part of the origin story of the second amendment weeping ahead by about 230 years to today. You were quoted in Salon this summer saying the police had first welcomed Kyle Rittenhouse to the scene in Kenosha, Wisconsin with his Illinois AR-15. What's been documented about that?

Professor Anderson: Yes. There are reports that they were like, "Oh, we are so glad you guys are here." The police talking to Kyle Rittenhouse, "So glad you guys are here." Having white guys walk around with these rifles and saying, "Hey, it's hot out here. You want some water?" Providing aid and comfort to these white guys walking around with rifles. It begins to tell you about the sense of who has the right to bear arms? Who is not seen as a threat?

Jacob Blake, who was the Black man who was shot seven times in the back, was seen as a threat as he's getting into his car and he's been shot in front of his children. He is a threat, but Kyle Rittenhouse walking around with an AR-15 is not a threat. In fact, he's welcomed by the police. After the shooting, after he kills two men and wounds a third, he walks back to the police with his hands up as if to surrender and they go right by him. They don't see threat when they see this white 17-year old carrying this rifle.

Brian: We'll just acknowledge that the police version is that Blake had a knife and he was turning toward the police officer who shot him as the officer was trying to get them not to go in that car. You write about Rittenhouse walking toward the police with his hands up as if to surrender after his shootings and they don't even notice him. What did you mean they don't even notice him?

Professor Anderson: [inaudible 00:09:30] right by him. They don't see threat, they don't see danger. It's not signaling, it's not triggering for them that here is someone who has a gut and who has his hands up as if to surrender as if, "Look I did something that you really need to arrest me for." The fact that those things did not link up in the police officers mindscape is just really telling. As you did your intro about the ways that the folks were hollering, "Yes, Second Amendment, Second Amendment," in so many disturbing ways, they are absolutely correct because the Second Amendment is about the control of Black people. It is about diminishing the rights of Black folk.

This was a Black Lives Matter protest. Yes, white men were killed, a white man was wounded, but what we also know in this country is that when whites stand up for Black lives, they are vulnerable to the same kind of violence. I think of Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964.

Brian: Is that a good analogy? Because in the Rittenhouse case, his defenders say, and a lot of people who might question the place of race in the conversation about the Rittenhouse case would say, "The people he shot, besides that they were physically attacking him or pointing a gun at him or lunging for his gun, they were all white so this shouldn't be seen as a case of white supremacy." Obviously, you disagree with that. For people who think calling this particular case racial is overreaching, what would you say?

Professor Anderson: When Viola Liuzzo was killed, she was a white woman in Selma. Race was all over that. When Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed, they were killed because they were fighting for Black people's civil rights. Elijah Lovejoy, who was an abolitionist, in 1837, was killed. He was a white man who was in his printing shop, where he had a newspaper that had been attacked repeatedly, and he was trying to defend his printing shop and was killed. His killers were found not guilty. It's not enough, the frame of, "Well, they were white," is not enough to understand the way that white supremacy works in the United States. White supremacy will kill white folk.

Brian Lehrer: We can take some phone calls for Carol Anderson, among other things, author of the book, The Second, which is about the racial origins, racist origins of the Second Amendment, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-969. To the full title of the book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, as we put the call Rittenhouse verdict in the context of the current state of the Second Amendment in the United States, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-969, to tweet @BrianLehrer.

Professor, I understand we certainly see white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys celebrating this verdict. I mentioned the report of the right-wing social media site newsletter that called on people to form Christian militias. I assume they didn't mean the Christian churches in Harlem. How do you see the potential impact of this verdict on armed white supremacist group proliferation?

Professor Anderson: I see it as giving them the green light that this kind of vigilantism, this kind of, "Come and if there is a protest, you have the right to bring your weapon to that protest and shoot folk, and as long as you claim self-defense, you're fine. You're fine." That's what this is because when you think about it, Rittenhouse was responding to a call to come to Kenosha to protect this property, that Kenosha is out of control with all of this Black Lives Matter stuff.

The response was from the police, "We're so glad you're here." When you have the police saying, "We're so glad you're here," and you have Kyle Rittenhouse being found not guilty, it is the signal that Black lives do not matter, that you do not have the right to protest injustices, you do not have the right to call out the systemic racism in the United States, and to try to push to make this society much more equitable, much more fair, much more just.

Brian: Gwen in East Harlem, you're on WNYC with Carol Anderson. Hi, Gwen.

Gwen: Hi, how are you? Can you hear me?

Brian: Can hear you just fine.

Gwen: Great. I think you're missing some really big points here. I think this is not just a Black and white issue. This is a much bigger issue. This is an issue where it is now legal to go and shoot somebody and kill them because you felt-- Well, I don't even know what he felt. This is what I want to compare it to. Say that there's a shooter that comes into a public school, and the principal goes and he tries to pull the gun away from this shooter or let's say the shooter actually has a gun like Trump prescribed you have one, and he tries to go and get that gun away so that that shooter does not hurt those children.

Now, he doesn't know what the shooter is coming into the school for. You go ahead and you turn around and you arrest the principal. No, the principal gets killed, and you go ahead and tell me that because he tried to interrupt somebody who was possibly there to murder the children, but we don't know that because he didn't say that. That guy, the shooter, gets the pass. This is what happened here.

Brian: You're talking about the case of the first person who Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed, Joseph Rosenbaum, who was lunging for his gun. You're saying that Rosenbaum should be looked at like that principal who's trying to disarm Kyle Rittenhouse, as a guy with a gun, as a threat.

Gwen: He was a hero. I'm tired of the shilly-shally game. I have watched it on TV all weekend, this nonsense and making this guy-- By the way, Kyle Rittenhouse was let out of the mental institution a few days before this happened because he tried to commit suicide. So don't tell me this guy's all there. You don't go to an institution if you're all together. Even the mental illness, I'm not there to punish him for.

What I'm trying to say is that I watched the media skip one and two and go right to three. Okay, it wasn't self-defense. If a man came into an audience at Times Square, where I was protesting, and people didn't try to get that gun away from him, I would be even more terrified. It was terrifying to anybody that he came in with an army weapon, but also was terrifying if he was running with the police. I saw pictures of him running right next to the policeman, and they didn't even try to stop him.

The whole thing is unbelievable. You know what? It matters for white people just as much as Black because when you go to any protest now, watch out. Anybody can be armed, and anybody can shoot you, and now anybody can get away because [unintelligible 00:17:24] we just set the record this way.

Brian: Gwen, thank you very much. I hadn't heard anything about Kyle Rittenhouse being in a mental institution. Carol Anderson, have you? Since this is the first I've heard that and I've consumed a lot of media about this case, I don't want to pass anything along as fact that I don't know is fact. Do you anything about that?

Professor Anderson: I have not heard that either.

Brian: So we leave that unconfirmed as far as we're concerned right now. Let's go on to Nikki in Nassau County. You're on WNYC. Hi, Nikki.

Nikki: Hi, good morning, Brian. Hello.

Brian: Hi. We got you, Nikki. You're on.

Nikki: Okay. The guest said something, or there was a brief discussion about whether this is related to race. All I wanted to say, and I'll take my comment off-air, is if Kyle Rittenhouse's name was Kareem Rittenhouse, we would not be having this back and forth today because he would have been convicted. If you can tell me that the outcome would have been the same if this were a Black man, then we can say it's not about race. Thank you so much, Brian. I'll listen off air.

Brian: Thank you so much. That's a central point, Carol, right?

Professor Anderson: Absolutely. One of the central points that I make in the book is how uneven this right to bear arms and the right to self-defense really is. The way that it is deployed. It is the way to understand the Second Amendment was designed as a means to say that the white community has the right to protect itself from Black people. We see this in stand your ground cases where when somebody white kills somebody Black, they are 10 times more likely to walk away with justifiable homicide than when somebody Black kills somebody white and tries to use the stand your ground defense.

Brian: There is also the other white vigilante case taking place right now, the McMichaels plus their friend, William Bryan, for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. There are obvious parallels, but also big differences, like Arbery was not a suspect in any crime, according to police, was chased down and confronted proactively by the armed trio, and they killed him when he tried to protect himself.

Closing arguments are today. There's a lot of anticipating that they will get convicted, which of course we can't know at this point, but if they do, does that draw a different line around these self-defense arguments and acts of white supremacy, not guilty for Rittenhouse, but guilty for them, the defendants, in this case, would mean something very different than the conversation everyone's been having after the Rittenhouse verdict alone?

Professor Anderson: It will be different because part of what you saw with the McMichaels is that they basically saw themselves as the slave patrol, that you had Ahmaud Arbery, they said, "What was he doing? He was running in my neighborhood," and that their testimony, their police report did not line up with that video at all. Remember, in that case, you had two district attorneys who looked at that video and did not see anything wrong. It took incredible public pressure and protest in order to make that video public and that is what has led to this trial.

Brian: That's such an important point along the way to remember if they do get convicted, that it was only the public release of the video after George Floyd was killed into that political environment that drew attention back to the case. When previously, as you say, the DAs, I guess they had the video, but they did not see a reason to charge the McMichaels or William Bryan because of it.

Professor Anderson: Exactly. The second DA, in fact, wrote an extended brief about why this was justifiable homicide. When you think about that trial, it is the defense attorney talking about, "We don't need any more Black pastors up in here because they are intimidating." So Black is the threat. It's not the pastor that's the threat, it is the Blackness that is the threat. It was Ahmaud Arbery's Blackness that was the threat.

Brian: This is WNYC FM HD & AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Times River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio, a few more minutes with Professor Carol Anderson. How would you like to see gun laws changed for all the white riots and other violence against innocent Black people that there have been in US history? A lot of people learn more about Tulsa this year than they ever knew before.

Look, another level deep from that and you'll see Wilmington and other places with at least acquiescence by the police in those cases. Some Black Americans value the right of armed self-defense themselves. It was a Black Panthers thing, for example, 50 years ago as you know. Do you want to see more of an equal right to private militias or to try to seriously limit them?

Professor Anderson: What we really need to do is to rethink what real safety and security looks like in America. As long as we attach safety and security to guns we are all in danger. It is just recently here in the Atlanta Airport, the largest busiest airport in the nation. A man brought his gun in through TSA and when the security official said, "Let me check this bag something doesn't look right here." The guy reaches in the bag and the gun goes off in the busiest airport in the nation.

We have to rethink safety and security and that means we don't need hundreds of millions of guns floating around. It means that we do not take as they did in Texas, all of the kinds of protections off of gun ownership, so no background checks, no training necessary, really? It is this fetishization of guns and this fetishization of attaching security and safety with guns that has made us so unsafe. Part of that unsafeness, that's not even a word, is this fear of Black people.

That's what we've got to get to, the anti-Blackness that courses through this society. It is how one of your listeners said, "If his name had been Kareem Rittenhouse, he would've been found guilty. If his name had been Kareem Rittenhouse, he may not have even managed to get home." Think about Jacob Blake, which was the root of this uprising in Kenosha.

Brian: Last thing, you wrote about the current proliferation of stand your ground laws and open carry laws in this context. I guess that would include the New York City Supreme court case as viewable in racial terms, as they are deciding right now whether to expand New York's gun laws forcibly, to include open carry, not just primarily self-defense at home or in your store. Do you see it that way?

Professor Anderson: I've read the public defenders, Amicus Curiae eye brief in that case and I get it. I get how the use of gun laws has been a means to continue to criminalize and prosecute Black people. That does not deal with the anti-Blackness in American society that sees Black as a threat. Can you imagine in New York, where everybody could possibly have a gun? When you have Black as the default threat it's going to be slaughter, it's going to be slaughter. We have to rethink safety, which means we have to rethink anti-Blackness in this society.

Brian: Carol Anderson, African American Studies Professor at Emory University is the all author this year of, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Thank you for joining us today.

Professor Anderson: Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

 

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