Monday
Kyle Rittenhouse having been found innocent, on grounds of self-defense, after shooting three people, I am repurposing a past post on Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule. While the play deals with class rather than racial differences, it still explains why a young White Man avoids consequences in ways a Black man never could.
While I am disturbed by the laws that allowed Rittenhouse to get away with murder, I am also unsettled by the images—15 minutes before the shooting—of police thanking Rittenhouse for being there with his (illegal) weapon, despite the curfew, and giving him water. Nor did they arrest him after the shooting, later explaining that he didn’t look like someone who would shoot people. Rittenhouse returned home (across state lines) and turned himself in the following day. Had a Black man wandered into the area with a gun, is there any question that he would have been treated far differently?
Basically, only Whites are allowed to plead self-defense when it comes to gun shootings, even when no one would have been killed had Rittenhouse not brought a gun to Kenosha. Whites can walk with impunity carrying automatic rifles whereas people call the police on Blacks just for making them uncomfortable. One of the clearest expressions of the double standard has come from Wisconsin’s own rightwing senator Ron Johnson in remarks about the January 6 Capitol insurrection:
“Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said during the radio talk show The Joe Pags Show. He was discussing his recent comments downplaying the danger that day and he has said he “never really felt threatened.”
“Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this could get me in trouble — had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned,” Johnson continued.
In other words, people who look like me are by definition friendly whereas people who don’t must be repelled by gunfire.
Brecht’s play dramatizes the double standard. It’s not an exact parallel since Rittenhouse’s victims shared his skin color and, unlike the victim in the play, they actually threatened him (although the first two were unarmed and the third, who had a gun, thought he was dealing with an active shooter). But as in the play, privilege allows the killer to plead self-defense.
Like many of Brecht’s plays, Exception and the Rule is a parable about class relations. A merchant who must cross a desert in order to make a fortune kills his porter after mistaking a helpful gesture as a hostile move. Although the porter has offered him some of their dwindling water supplies, the merchant thinks that man is attacking him and shoots him. Despite this, the judge in the subsequent trial exonerates him, ruling, “In the circumstances as established it was inevitable that he should believe himself threatened.”
We can see the verdict coming when the judge is questioning the merchant. Similar reasoning led the jury to free Rittenhouse:
What you mean is that you were right to believe that the porter must hold something against you. So you did indeed kill someone who might well be harmless, but only because you could not have known that he was harmless. It happens sometimes with our police. They shoot into a demonstrating crowd, a harmless crowd, but they shoot because they can only believe that these people are going to drag them off their horses and lynch them. These policemen shoot out of fear. And their fear is that of the reasonable man. What you mean is that you could not have known that this porter was an exception to the rule.
Merchant: One lives by the rule, not the exception.
The reasoning is reiterated in the judge’s ruling. Even though the judge concludes that the porter was indeed engaging in a kindly act, he finds against his widow:
The merchant belongs to a different class from that of the porter. He could only anticipate the worst. He could not credit that the porter whom he had ill-treated, as he himself has said, would offer him an act of friendship. His common wit told him that he was in the greatest danger. The isolated nature of the area must have caused him great anxiety. The distance from the police and the restraint of the law would encourage his servant to demand his share of the water. The accused therefore acted in justifiable self-defense regardless of whether he was actually threatened or merely believed himself to be threatened. In the circumstances as established it was inevitable that he should believe himself threatened. The case is therefore dismissed; and the widow’s claim fails.
Brecht’s message is that it doesn’t matter how nice a worker or a merchant is because classism is systemic. Therefore, stop trying to placate your boss, who will turn on you the moment it is to his advantage. For Brecht, political action is the only solution.
In our situation, it’s racism that is systemic. If you are Black, it doesn’t matter what’s going on inside your head because you are automatically regarded as a threat by virtue of your skin color. Coincidentally, the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger who was chased down and killed by three men, goes to the jury tomorrow. They too are claiming self-defense.
In this case, they may not escape justice since there’s video evidence of them chasing Arbery until, feeling cornered, he finally turns and charges them. Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule, just as there was an exception for Derek Chauvin’s cold-blooded murder of George Floyd. To let cases this blatant go would expose the system even more than it has been exposed. But for the most part in America, Blacks are assumed to be guilty and Whites innocent until proven otherwise.
That’s why gun laws don’t work for both sides, why Blacks can’t “stand their ground” or “open carry” with the same impunity as Whites. The play explains it to us. In a majority White society with America’s racial history, it would not be reasonable (in the eyes of a white judge and white jury) for Blacks to feel threatened by Whites. After all, Whites aren’t threatened by Whites. Unreasonable fear would be a Black afraid of and shooting a White.
It’s why one often sees videos of police talking down, ignoring, or even (as in the case of Rittenhouse) praising Whites with guns while shooting
–12-year-old Black boys with toy guns (Tamir Rice);
–Black men who innocently pick up an air rifle from a store shelf (John Crawford); and
–Black men who calmly inform police, during a traffic stop, that they have a registered firearm in their glove compartment (Philando Castile).
Juries invariably give these officers a pass, just as they gave George Zimmerman a pass when, playing vigilante, he assaulted and killed teenager Trayvon Martin.
Those who complain about schools teaching Critical Race Theory don’t realize that only by confronting and exploring together our race history can we as a nation move beyond Whites’ irrational race fears and start interrelating as fellow human beings. It’s why we need more Toni Morrison in our schools, not less.
