I watched my home town burn after the Kenosha PD gunned down yet another man with Black skin for the crime of disobedience to whiteness. I wish I could say I was surprised when that story hit — the shooting. The details and the inevitable media bullshit fell into neat alignment with my memories of the racist, authoritarian, violent police force that existed way back when I was riding my bike down the very street Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire on.
Kenosha used to be a blue collar town in practice and not just in ideology as it is today. Generations of Kenoshans were put through the capitalist meat grinder in the 80s when Chrysler moved the big plant everyone’s parents worked at to Mexico. You could get T-Shirts with Lee Iacocca’s face on it, and any number of rude bits of text about him. I remember seeing those T-Shirts on a lot of backs. The protests and the anger didn’t win out. Everyone lost out, and then everyone was given someone to blame. Everyone lost everything, because just about every corner of the local economy were connected directly to that one assembly line.
Kenosha was always diverse, but never a melting pot. Non-whites were relegated largely to specific areas of town, and those were the places we white kids were told to avoid. Public schools that serviced primarily minority populations were the “bad schools”, the places you’d get threatened with if you weren’t doing your homework.
I learned at an early age what white privilege was. After a particularly criminal summer in junior high, my white friends and I finally got busted doing what we were doing. Despite lying to the cops and getting caught out for it, we all got a slap on the wrist and community service. Meanwhile Black and Brown kids weren’t so lucky. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized why it was I didn’t get into real trouble back then, trouble like the non-white kids got in, trouble that got you put into Juvie. I was white, and middle class, and my family was blue collar. I had step siblings who were of Mexican descent on their mom’s side. They didn’t get away with the things I got away with.
If you grew up in Kenosha, you have met this judge a thousand times. He’s in every bar, sitting there pontificating; making shit up as he goes along, clearly a man who failed upwards. Clearly a man who thinks of himself as the sole cause of his own success. Racist. Sexist. He’s hard working though, so the rest of it is just barstool bullshit.
Rittenhouse is a product of the attitudes that form judges like this racist piece of shit depicted above. When I was 12 years old my step cousin decided to settle an argument by shoving a loaded shot gun in my face. He was a hunter, too. Gun safety courses. NRA. He’s doing federal time now for something completely unrelated, but white men using guns to get what they want is nothing new to Wisconsin. Rittenhouse may as well have been my step-cousin. They have the same dead eyes.
Now it’s all going to get worse. The debilitated and abused sons of abused and neglected men, radicalized by hate radio on the way to their union jobs, men who every day work their bodies into bones for less and less and less, spending beyond their means just to get a taste of middle class life only to lose it all in some sucker’s bet, only to turn around and blame it on the Mexicans or the Blacks… these sons will take their guns hunting into the streets now. They’re all cowboys, all lionized by this racist, sexist, utterly token Judge, and the equally broken people who sat on that jury.
It’s all so familiar, but I don’t think I’ve felt this gutted since 1/6. I need justice to be real, and it’s not. I fear for my family, who live there, and who will almost certainly have to endure another righteous call for justice. But mostly I fear for what comes after this, and how much more blood will be spilled now that this Judge decided to lionize violent racists all over this nation.