White Privilege on Trial

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan on loan from Ari.)

Let's be blunt about one thing: It isn't Kyle Rittenhouse or the McMichaels or Bryan that are currently on trial for murder: It's white privilege, white supremacy that's fighting for its life.

     The glaring common denominator linking these two trials, aside from their all but obvious political stripe, is that all the defendants are white males. Rittenhouse is on trial on two counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder. The McMichaels, a father/son duo in Georgia, are on trial for the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a black jogger who was chased and gunned down by a shotgun by the younger McMichael before the old man finished him off.

     Actually, I correct myself: The other fact these two trials have in common is that the moments of death for the three victims were videotaped. So, all cut and dry, correct? The killers were videotaped and the trials are mere formalities an inevitable guilty verdict, right?

     Not so fast. In today's day and age, seeing is not believing. In his long-forgotten science fiction novel, Killing Time, Caleb Carr brought home that very important fact, brilliantly crystallized in five short words: "Information is not necessarily knowledge." Carr's technothriller seems bound for prescient status because it takes place in 2023, the year after next, and predicts a global financial crash and a plague, all of which taking place between 2018 and 2023.

     Oh, and add to our future counterparts' woe the assassination of our first female president, Emily Forrester. But a digital disc of the assassination and the official version broadcast on TV tell two entirely different stories. Information is not necessarily knowledge.

     What Carr didn't take into account in his 2001 book was political bias.

    Out of its decades of broadcasting news, one of the things that stands out the most to me was a simple experiment CBS had done. They showed a bird's-eye view video of a right winger plowing his SUV into a crowd of protesters. They divided the two groups into Republican and Democrat. They asked them what they saw. The Democrats saw the attack for what it was- An act of attempted murder with a deadly weapon.

   The Republicans? Justified self-defense, a guy like them just doing his civic duty keeping the roadways cleared.

    It showed that your odds of seeing reality presented on videotape and seeing a completely different reality depends entirely on for whom you voted for in the last election (the very reason why identity politics is a loser). It's always a pitfall when you identify yourself by for whom you voted but a truly slippery slope is when you allow your political allegiance to warp your very sense of reality.

    This is precisely what we're seeing with the McMichaels/Bryan and Rittenhouse murder trials.

 There are currently dueling hashtags on Twitter: #KyleRittenhouseisInnocent and #KyleRittenhouseisGuilty. The first is ridiculous because no one is ever found innocent in a court of law. It's also ridiculous because one of the pieces of video that was shown today was Rittenhouse running after one of his victims before shooting him, blowing a huge hole in his defense that he killed two men and shot and wounded a third in self-defense.

     The video shot in the McMichaels case is, if anything, even less ambiguous. The video of Ahmaud Arbery's murder was shot by William Bryan and willingly released by him because the fool actually thought it would exonerate the McMichaels even though he knew a man was brutally murdered in that video. It was a shameless, good old fashioned lynching in the deep south and Bryan thought releasing the video was a great thing.

     What it did, instead, was raise a national furor that resulted in the McMichaels, and Bryan, getting (belatedly) arrested and sent up on murder charges. It involved the local prosecutor, Jackie Johnson, refusing to seek charges against the elder McMichael, who used to work for her office, and his son. 

     And, as usual, we'd begun the counter charges from the usual racist asshats and weekend Nazis who insist that the victims had it coming to them. Arbery tried defending himself, so he had it coming to him. One of Rittenhouse's victims was a convicted pedophile who'd already paid his debt to society, so he had it coming to him. Another one went after him with a skateboard. He had it coming to him.

     Just as 12 year-old Tamir Rice had it coming to him for holding a toy gun. Just as John Crawford had it coming to him for the same reason. Just as Brianna Taylor had it coming to her for, well, sleeping in her own bed. Eric Garner sold loose cigarettes. Michael Brown stole loose cigars. Trayvon Martin raised his hands to defend himself against a white man who was stalking him.

     In every case listed above, no changes were every brought against the murderers or they were found not guilty.

     We can always excuse the very worst behavior by like-minded people provided our enemies get it in the end. No transgression either real or imagined is unworthy of a death penalty handed down literally on the streets in Judge Dred fashion as long as the dead victims were our perceived enemies. And no capital crime is too heinous to excuse as long as the perpetrator is politically or racially aligned with us.

     And this is the very crux of white supremacy: That no crime is too serious to excuse no matter how hard we have to squint before we see justification for a homemade execution.