After Rittenhouse Acquittal, Ibram X. Kendi Says Trump Supporters Are ‘Fighting To Maintain White Male Supremacy’
Critical Race Theorist and Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi attributed Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal to a desire to “maintain white male supremacy.”
Rittenhouse — a teenager charged with murder for fatally shooting two men and injuring a third while defending himself during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin — was declared not guilty on Friday afternoon. Following the verdict, Kendi said on Twitter that he is “thinking about” an article he wrote last year in The Atlantic.
“They are fighting to maintain white male supremacy,” he quoted from the article. “Which is to say, they are defending law and order. Defending their America — where white men can rule and brutalize without consequence.”
Wrote it last year. Thinking about it now. #RittenhouseVerdict
“They are fighting to maintain white male supremacy. Which is to say, they are defending law and order. Defending their America—where white men can rule and brutalize without consequence.”https://t.co/VZWv56LBuS
— Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram) November 19, 2021
The article, which discusses the summer of 2020 as the “summer of Trumpism,” denounces Trump for claiming that Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense — a conclusion supported by evidence revealed during the trial. As Kendi wrote:
The summer ended on August 25, when Kyle Rittenhouse borrowed an AR-15-style assault rifle from a friend and allegedly fatally shot Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony M. Huber and injured Gaige Grosskreutz. These three people had been demonstrating in Kenosha, Wisconsin, against the police shooting of Jacob Blake two days earlier. Trump suggested that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. “He was trying to get away from them,” Trump said. “And he fell and then they very violently attacked him … He probably would have been killed” if he didn’t defend himself with lethal force.
The violence of Chauvin and Rittenhouse bookended the summer of Trumpism. The three long, hot months from May 25 to August 25 compressed 413 years of American history into a cellphone video in which anyone could easily see the history for what it has always been: the violent “self-defense” of white male supremacy. Colonialism, capitalism, slavery and slave trading, Indian removal, manifest destiny, colonization, the Ku Klux Klan, Chinese exclusion, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, eugenics, massive resistance, “law and order,” Islamophobia, family separation — all were done in the name of defending life or civilization or freedom.
Following the verdict, Washington Post politics reporter Eugene Scott also quoted from the article: “Whenever white male supremacy shoots, assaults, violates, devastates, exploits — no matter what,
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