WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE JUSTICE SYSTEM| RITTENHOUSE VS ARBERY
Protesting judicial verdicts should be illegal
In western media today, the words white supremacy have been used to death in one context or another. Charges of white supremacy are constantly being served liberally like cheap wine that the term must have lost its organic meaning by now.
The term like many other buzz words of today—such as White Privilege, Racist, Homophobe, Islamophobe, Toxic Masculinity, Uncle Tom, etc—has become a dietary staple of traditional media houses. They drink a daily cocktail filled with a mix of these words chasing a progressive high that is never sated.
What is white supremacy? If I were to give a guess as to its definition based on my understanding of the term and without referencing a dictionary, I would say white supremacy is the belief in the inherent racial superiority of the white race over other races. However, to be objective, let me reference a standard dictionary definition.
Merriam-Webster gave two definitions of white supremacy stated as follows. 1: the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races. 2: the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races.
The first definition aligns with the guess definition I gave earlier in this write-up, so I’m on the right track. Common observation shows that charges of white supremacy as is currently being used is mostly in the sense of the second definition. When people speak of white supremacy, they are referring to “systems” that favour the white race over other races. The existence of such systems though is a matter of debate, depending on whom you speak to.
Interestingly, searching for the term white supremacy on google brought up an article about Kyle Rittenhouse, which did not surprise me as Rittenhouse had been dubbed a white supremacist and the verdict from his trial labelled as a confirmation of the existence and potency of white supremacy.
Firstly, it doesn’t make much sense to refer to Kyle as a white supremacist. Anyone familiar with the case and assessing it without an agenda can quickly realise how little anything about it had to do with race. Kyle by his actions had to be very terrible at white supremacy and being a racist as to kill white people in the promotion of white supremacy.
If white supremacy was at play on the matter of Kyle’s verdict, do the white lives of the victims not matter in this case? Does white supremacy pick and choose which white people to exalt and which to screw? Does Kyle rank higher on the white supremacy scale than the whites he killed? Did white supremacy deny justice to white people just as a matter of F U to other races?
It beats my imagination and terrifies me at the same time that the Rittenhouse case has been given a racial spin and that placards convicting Rittenhouse of racism and white supremacy stood proudly on display outside the courthouse without being challenged. It’s 2021, and nothing is race-neutral anymore, it has to be racist or anti-racist to reference Ibram X Kendi.
Supposing the people Rittenhouse had killed were black, you’d have a much harder time convincing some people that he did not kill them out of racial hatred than convincing the same set of people that bigfoot exists.
I suspect that had the victims been black, the verdicts would have been different. Even with the fact that Kyle’s victims were white, some insist that there has been a miscarriage of justice, and see the verdicts as signals—a dog whistle to supposed white supremacists that the coast is clear to go about killing people without consequences.
You’d have to stretch the imagination to conclude that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist motivated by racial animus and that the justice system corruptly had his back and unjustifiably freed him.
That the president of the United States, gave out two almost conflicting statements about the verdict—the latter seeming to suggest a miscarriage of justice—shows that one need not look too far to find such stretches of imagination in practice.
The general feeling one gets from the mainstream media coming off the Rittenhouse case is that white supremacy runs amok in the US enabled by the justice system. However, the outcome of the Arbery case which followed shortly seems to poke gaping holes in that sentiment.
The same people who doubted the justice system now hail it for its verdict delivered on the Arbery case, forcing me to ask, which is it, is the justice system broken, racist, ruled by white supremacy or not?
Does the justice system pick and choose which cases to be fair on and which to be prejudiced on? Even though that seems unlikely—even contradictory—some people hold both thoughts in their heads and it’s a miracle their heads do not explode from the cognitive dissonance living rent-free and playing loud obnoxious music in their heads.
Given that violent protests have occurred following the Rittenhouse verdict and none following the Arbery’s, I ask, should such protests which by nature undermine the integrity of the justice system by calling to question its verdict, be allowed in the first place?
Would the courts not be tempted to tailor their verdict not to fit facts but to match the emotional expectations of people? What does that mean for the future of the justice system if people are simply going to protest verdicts they do not agree with? I fear the courts may already be bending to satisfying the emotional expectations of mobs, and if that is true, it needs to be nipped in the bud.
I believe it should be illegal to protest court verdicts, if the results are unsatisfactory, then the appeal process or other legal processes of redress should be activated and followed through. Such protests send the wrong signal and run the risks of becoming a recurring tactic used by disaffected people to overturn the outcome of a verdict. I do not trust that the courts would always be strong enough to withstand such an assault if it happens incessantly.
If we can agree that the events of January 6th are reprehensible, then we should have no problems seeing such protests as reprehensible either. We must trust that the courts would be fair in dispensing justice or else, it risks becoming a court of jungle justice verdict, a truly dystopian nightmare.