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One of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter explains that she never expected the civil rights movement to become as monumental as it has.

Peacocks upcoming documentary Use of Force: the Policing of Black America features interviews with numerous individuals who are fighting injustice and police brutality, including Alicia Garza.

Garza, along with Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, first coined the phrase Black Lives Matter in 2013, USA Today reported. It was created after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Cullors is executive director of the Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in L.A. Jails. Tometi runs the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

Garza, who is also special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told USA Today that the Black Lives Matter movement is intended to gather people "so they can connect offline and actually do something in their communities.

It was something that Garza had already been doing in her own community.

In Use of Force, Garza reflected that after attending college she returned to her hometown of Oakland, California where she hoped she could make a difference. There, she began doing advocacy work with organizations that fought against police brutality. She said she spent a decade organizing in San Francisco and more than five years in Oakland before taking on a more national cause.

No, I did not know that Black Lives Matter would become the force that it is today although I certainly want to say it was something that I wished for, but couldnt see beyond my own faith that it could happen and my own determination that we should try it," she explained.

She said that she, Tometi and Cullors created the platform for people so people could do more than be angry on social media.

On their site, they say their mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

They have organized some of the most impactful protests following police-involved shootings in recent history. Many of the hundreds ofprotests that erupted following the killing of George Floyd in 2020 were organized under the Black Lives Matter banner. Black Lives Matter has since become one of the biggest social justice movements in modern time.In fact,the New York Times reportedlast yearthat the movement may possibly be the largest in American history.

Use of Force: the Policing of Black America debuts on Friday.

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Black Lives Matters Co-Founder Alicia Garza Never Expected The Movement To Get So Big - Oxygen

The event will be held at theArkansas Governors Mansion.

A year to the day before he was assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, publicly defined the war in Vietnam as a civil rights issue on April 4, 1967, in an address titledBeyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silenceto a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam at Riverside Church in New York City. In doing so, King uttered the following prescient statement.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy-and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on lifes roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on lifes highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just. It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: This is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war:This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nations homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.[1]

Public reaction to Kings message was swift and hostile. A number of editorial writers attacked him for connecting Vietnam to the civil rights movement. TheNew York Timesissued an editorial claiming that King had damaged the peace movement as well as the civil rights movement.Lifemagazine assailed the speech as demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi. ThePittsburgh Courier, an African-American publication, charged King with tragically misleading black people. And at the White House, President Lyndon Johnson was quoted as saying, What is that goddamned nigger preacher doing to me? We gave him the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we gave him the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we gave him the War on Poverty. What more does he want?[2]

King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee exactly one year after he delivered the speech written by Vincent Harding, a black historian and trusted friend. Despite the hostile reaction to the speech, Martin King and Vincent Harding never disavowed it. But Harding always believed the speech was the reason King was murdered. It was precisely one year to the day after this speech that that bullet which had been chasing him for a long time finally caught up with him, Harding said in a 2010 interview. And I am convinced that that bullet had something to do with that speech. And over the years, thats been quite a struggle for me.[3]

Nine years after his death King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by another Baptist from Georgia, President Jimmy Carter. A federal holiday has been established to honor his birthday. His statue has been placed in Washington, DC. Numerous cities and towns have re-named major traffic arteries for him in the United States, and he is revered throughout the world as one of the most prophetic souls of the twentieth century, if not the modern era. When President Barack Obama took the oath of office to begin his second term, he placed his hand on a Bible that belonged to King and alluded to him during his inaugural address.

Yet the veneration of King has not included any significant or serious effort by U.S. policymakers, social commentators, and moral leadersincluding Baptist clergy, laity, associations, denominations, and educational institutionsto embrace the radical revolution of values King called for inA Time to Break Silence. The giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism have not been confronted. The U.S. currently devotes more of its budget on national defense and homeland security than on educating children, fighting disease, feeding the hungry and alleviating poverty.

We may never learn the true financial cost of the tragic military misadventure known as the war in Iraq. As the tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq approached Reuters reported on a study by a team of academicians which tallied the cost of the war at $1.7 trillion, a figure that did not include $490 billion owed to Iraqi war veterans for disability benefits. The study projected that expenses related to the war in Iraq could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades.[4]

After U.S. forces finally withdrew from Afghanistan last year I wrote:In total, 2,448 U.S. service members have died. Tens of thousands more were injured. The U.S.spentmore than $2.26 trillion including more than $500 billion for interest for the military effort in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan since 2001.

The result of those sacrifices is more than disappointing to U.S. families who lost loved ones, to veterans who lost comrades, to veterans who are permanently maimed and scarred in ways that only war can cause, and to people who care for them. The sorrow and anguish felt by men, women and children in Afghanistan who hoped the U.S.-led war would defeat the Taliban goes beyond disappointment. For those persons, the outcome of the war in Afghanistan is so heartbreaking that we will never have enough money and words to tally and talk about it.[5]

At the same time U.S. leadersincluding Baptist and other religious leadersare venerating Kings memory they have ignored or rejected his call for the United States to use its wealth and prestige to lead the world in a radical revolution of values that rejects war as the preferred means of resolving differences. Former President Barack Obama could not have been guided by the vision of the Baptist preacher whose Bible he used for his second inauguration. Although Obama could not persuade U.S. officials and global allies to embrace a military response to Syria the way George W. Bush did concerning Iraq, U.S. militarism continues to cast an ominous cloud over the world and hinder efforts to address glaring problems at home.

Jonathan Trans 2012 essay about the war policies of the Obama administration reminds us that Obama articulated what Tran termed a theology of war.[6] It is more than sadly ironic that the first African American to hold the office of President of the United States oversaw a policy of killing American citizens by using armed drones. The militarism King criticized was also clear in the virulent response by Obama and other U.S. leaders to the disclosures by Edward Snowden that the U.S. engaged in wholesale spying on American citizens and others throughout the worldincluding the leaders of nations considered its allies.

Decades after King was murdered by a gunman, the nation suffered the massacre of twenty children and six adult staff members of Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, Connecticut by a shooter who had already killed his mother and later killed himself. The militarism that drives U.S. global policy seems to have turned on our own children. The response to the Sandy Hook massacre was not, however, to confront the giant of militarism. Firearm manufacturers and their lobbyists, like defense contractors and their lobbyists, now hold more influence than ever before.

Sadly, devotion to corporate profit-making continues to hamstring efforts to make our society and the world safe. Thus, militarism has joined forces with materialism so much that American schools look and feel more like fortresses than places where children are nurtured to learn, work, and play together. We somehow are blind to the stark moral and ethical contradiction of singingLet There Be Peace on Earthwhile arming schoolteachers and cheering people who openly brandish handguns.

The moral and ethical disconnect between the rhetoric used to venerate King and the persistence of entrenched racism in American life continues to afflict us. Policymakers refuse to acknowledge the plain truth that the law and order, and war on drugs mantra used by every U.S. president since Lyndon Johnson produced the mass incarceration of millions of people who are disproportionately persons of color. Thanks to the not always covert racism of law and order and war on drugs enthusiasts, more black people are politically and socially disenfranchised in the United States now than were enslaved in 1850, ten years before the Civil War began, a fact Professor Michelle Alexander forcefully presented in her 2010 book titledThe New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindness.[7]

Oppressive law enforcement policies that gave rise to civil unrest during Dr. Kings lifetime still operate against people who are black and brown. Years after President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder became the first black persons to hold their respective offices, the terrorism of racial profiling remained as prevalent as when Dr. King was assassinated, if not more so.

Insensitivity to the insidious racism that poisoned the United States when King was killed has not changed. Trayvon Martin,[8]Oscar Grant,[9]and Amadou Diallo,[10]like Martin Luther King, Jr., were black men shot to death by people who claimed the moral and legal right to take their lives. The racism and militarism King deplored in 1967 were major factors in causing the August 9, 2014, death of Michael Brown, Jr., an 18-year-old un-armed black teenager shot to death by Darren Wilson, formerly of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department. That racism and militarism also accounted for the killing of Eric Garner, who was choked to death on July 23, 2014, by Daniel Pantaleo while other New York Police Department officers pressed their knees on Garners torso despite his repeated statement I cant breathe!

The world has since then suffered the trauma of George Floyds murder by a Minneapolis Police Officer who pressed his full kneeling weight against Floyds head and neck as the helpless man died pleading for his mother. Do not forget how Elijah McClain died at the hands of Aurora, Colorado police. Plainly, the United States has not become more informed about or responsive to racial injustice since King died. We have simply militarized the injustice in brazen ways.

We have not confronted or corralled the giant triplets of militarism, materialism, and racism. Rather, we have added sexism (including homophobia and transphobia), classism, and techno-centrism to the mix. The triplets are sextuplets now!

The painful truth is that political, commercial, and even religious leaders are comfortable bestowing platitudes on Kings life and ministry while actively and deliberately disregarding his warnings and call for repentance. Our leaders play on (some would say pimp) Kings moral authority for their own benefit at every opportunity. However, they question the relevancy of his teachings and warnings for our time.

It is bad enough that politicians and pundits do so. Now the Arkansas Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission has invited Mike Huckabee to deliver the keynote speech during a January 17, 2022, event intended to commemorate the King holiday. Huckabee is a Fox News right wing commentator, former Arkansas governor, and white Southern (slaveholder) Baptist preacher. His daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was spokesperson for former President Donald Trumps vicious policies and is a Republican candidate for governor of Arkansas this year.

Such contradictory behavior amounts to what I have called re-assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Kings ministry and message is being re-murdered by drone warfare, NSA surveillance, a militarized law enforcement culture, and our support for regimes that use military force to oppress minority populations in this society and elsewhere in the world (militarism), and by the half-truths and outright lies uttered to defend those actions.

King is re-murdered by fiscal policies that promote the corporate interests of investment bankers over the lives and fortunes of workers, homeowners, retirees, and needy people (materialism).

Kings dedication to attack and eliminate the causes of systemic poverty is currently being re-assassinated by policies that widen the glaring income inequality between the super-wealthy and the poor (classism).

Kings righteous indignation against injustice is murdered by proponents of the so-called prosperity gospel and those who use religion as a weapon to deny civil rights to people who are LGBTQI, poor, immigrants, women, or otherwise vulnerable (racism and sexism).

Kings call for a radical revolution of values is murdered when we profess to honor his memory while bowing to the techno-centrism responsible for poisoning community aquifers through fracking for natural gas. Thanks to capitalist greed and political incompetence, devotion to techno-centrism has produced melting polar ice, rising oceans, climate change, global warming, growing deserts, dying coral reefs, raging wildfires, and ever worsening weather patterns.

When we honestly assess the mood and conduct of U.S. leaders and the public at largeincluding religious leaderssince King was assassinated in Memphis, it becomes clear that we have not chosen to embrace the radical revolution of values King articulated. We have not weakened the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism. We have nourished, bred, and multiplied them. Religious leaders such as Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. who followed Kings model of prophetic criticism and congregational leadership have been rejected and condemned in much the same way President Johnson responded to King.

King was correct when he observed, America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities Sadly, we seem unable to realize that by rejecting his call to reorder our values and prioritiesin other words to engage in the Biblical imperative of repentancewe not only re-assassinate King. By rejecting his values while pretending to venerate King as our greatest prophet we are destroying ourselves and risk losing any moral authority we claim as agents for peace, justice, and truth in the world.

Sooner or later, those who feed a death wish find a way to destroy themselves. Over the course of the past three generations we have watched and heard the death rattle of the society that rejected Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime, killed him, and has re-assassinated him since the day he died.

Now that the State of Arkansas has proudly announced its intention to re-assassinate King by having an un-reconstructed Southern Baptist preacher and right wing politician named Mike Huckabee deliver a keynote address on the King holiday at the Arkansas Governors Mansion at the invitation of the state agency that bears Kings name, we should be clear what its conduct means.

A society that behaves this wayhas gone beyond a death rattle. It is already morally and ethically dead.

We are attending the visitation.

This analysis is revised from my March 24, 2015, T.B. Matson lecture at the now closed Logsdon Seminary on the campus of Hardin-Simmons University in Waco, Texas. Another version of this commentary appears at chapter 5 ofThe Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope (Judson Press, 2017).

Notes.

[1]Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silenceis among the writings of Dr. King compiled by James Melvin Washington and published under the titleA Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.(San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1986).

[2]For reactions toBeyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silenceseehttp://www.milestonedocuments.com/documents/view/martin-luther-king-jr-beyond-vietnam-a-time-to-break-silence/impact.

[3]http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/us/vincent-harding-civil-rights-author-and-associate-of-dr-king-dies-at-82.html?_r=0

[4]http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314.

[5]https://baptistnews.com/article/afghanistan-and-america-bloodlust-and-the-failure-of-prophetic-imagination/#.YdfsYWjMK8U

[6]JONATHAN TRAN,Obama, War, and Christianity: The Audacity of Hope and the Violence of Peace(Christian Ethics Today, Spring 2012).

[7]Michelle Alexander,The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindness, (New York: The New Press, 2010).

[8]Trayvon Martin was a seventeen year-old black male who was shot to death by George Zimmerman as Martin was returning to his fathers residence from a convenience store in Sanford, Florida the night of February 26, 2012. Zimmerman was acquitted by a jury on the charge of manslaughter.

[9]Oscar Grant III was fatally shot in the back at point blank range by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer Johannes Mehserle during the early hours of New Years Day of 2009 in Oakland, California. Mehserle was eventually convicted by a jury of involuntary manslaughter, served two years in the Los Angeles County Jail, minus time served.

[10]Amadou Diallo was a twenty-three year old Guinean immigrant who was shot and killed by four New York City Police officers who fired 41 bullets, 19 of which struck Diallo, outside his apartment in the Bronx. All four police officers were later acquitted of criminal charges related to Diallos death.

(Wendell Griffenis an Arkansas circuit judge and pastor of New Millennium Church in Little Rock, Ark. This story was featured in Counter Punch.)

Here is the original post:
The Re-Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. - City Watch

Jacqueline Smetak| Press-Citizen opinion writer

We have met the enemy and he is us."

So said Pogo during the McCarthy Era and again for Earth Day in 1970. Fifty years later. it's still relevant.

We are currently engaged in an odd auto-genocide. It's not unusual for those who kill lots of people to not only deny responsibility, but to deny the massacres ever happened in the first place.

What's odd is that we are not killing other people. We are killing ourselves.

We acknowledge those who die in war. We lay wreaths and offer thoughts and prayers, even for those dead so long that no one alive remembers them.

Since 1775, the total number of American military who died in every war we've fought is 1,354,664. Of those, 666,441 were combat deaths.

But now we are confronted by mass deaths we refuse to recognize. One is natural cause. The other is violence. Both are preventable.

On Jan. 20, 2020, the CDC reported the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States. Nearly two years later, the number of dead is more than 800,000.

The other threat is firearms. We rank second, worldwide, in the number of deaths each year. Among wealthy nations, we are No. 1.

Between 1968 and 2015, the number who died of gunshot was 1,516, 863. Combined, those deaths from gunshot and COVID are a million more than died in all our wars.

The numbers are bad enough, but what is worse is this has been so politicized that a sane conversation is impossible. For those of us who remember when vaccines for most diseases were unavailable, COVID anti-vaxxers are incomprehensible. But anti-vaxxers have been using the rhetoric of fear and disinformation for the last 300 years.

Vaccines don't work;they make people sick;mandatory vaccinations are medical despotism. And this in spite of the fact that 98-99% of those who now die of COVID are unvaccinated.

With firearms, it's worse. We can dismiss COVID deaths. They did it to themselves. With firearms, however, there's too much collateral damage.

But every effort to stop the carnage is blocked by the Second Amendment, with one side screaming A well-regulated militia and the other shall not be infringed." Frightened people tend toward authoritarianism. The most recent studies point to as many as 40% of us favoring authority, obedience and uniformity (Law and Order) over freedom, independence and diversity.

COVID creates a world out of control. Firearms provide a means to take advantage of this.

We've been split since our beginnings between a distrust of the federal government vs. an understanding that the survival of this nation depends on an effective federal government. That was the point of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

One side saw the government as an agent of unwanted change, the other as an agent of progress. We got to live this conflict acted out in civil war and civil rights, and we're still acting it out.

What's simmering now is another civil war. Civilians own nearly 400 million guns, half of those are owned by 3% of the population. And there's people who believe the Constitution allows them to overthrow our government by force.

Stand your ground laws have created open season on people who are seen as a threat. Laws protecting people who drive their cars into protesters have been passed in Iowa, Floridaand Oklahoma.

Not guilty verdicts in the trials of George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse and the like have sent the message that it's OK to kill people who can be constructed as a threat.

And then there's Jan. 6.

Jacqueline Smetak lives in Lone Tree.

See the original post:
Opinion: With COVID-19 and firearms, are Americans fighting another civil war? - Iowa City Press-Citizen

One District Attorney and social justice activist said the three verdicts showcase the evolution of the racial justice movement.

GLYNN COUNTY, Ga. Lucy McBath, current representative of the 6th district of Georgia honored her late son, Jordan Davis on Twitter on Nov. 23, 2021.

Tuesday marked nine years since the 17-year-old was shot and killed by Michael Dunn over an argument about loud music at a Jacksonville gas station.

The day after her post, the jury reached a verdictin the death of Ahmaud Arbery case, finding Travis McMichael guilty on all charges including malice murder, and finding Greg McMichael and Roddie Bryan guilty of felony murder.

Almost two years before the verdict was reached, on Feb. 24, 2020, Arbery, 25, was jogging in a south Georgia neighborhood near Brunswick in Glynn County when he was shot and killed.

Arberys shooting occurred just three days before what would have been the 8th anniversary of the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida in 2012. George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin was acquitted of charges relating to his death in 2012.

Davis and Martin were both 17 and from Florida, having been killed only a few months apart. District Attorney and Social Justice Activist Gregory Griggs called these hallmark cases that have been elevated to their stature due to "racism that played behind them."

I think that the similarities, again, are the use of guns, or the use of guns in the defense of a way of life, which is antithetical to the freedoms and justice and protections in America, Griggs added.

One of the few things that stand out to Griggs is the convictions that were given to the killers of Arbery, Martin, and Davis. Convictions that, for Griggs, showcase the evolution of the racial justice movement.

Unlike the other two cases where there was not a conviction, or there might have not been maximum time, the jury did a good job of holding the actions of Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and Ronnie Bryan with the verdict they sent down yesterday, he said.

Griggs calls the conviction in the Arbery case a "racial reckoning." He added that the verdict is a blueprint moving forward of how to effectively organize structural, legal, and political power for the betterment of the community.

Sentencing for the Arbery case will begin in November, then the three men will appear in court once again--at the federal courthouse in Brunswick--to be tried on hate crimes charges.

A federal judge scheduled the trial to begin Feb. 7, with jury selection.

The first step is over, I believe the Arbery family can start healing now, Griggs said.

The rest is here:
Ahmaud Arbery verdict reached 9 years after the deaths of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin - 11Alive.com WXIA

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Two days before a nearly all-white jury bought Kyle Rittenhouses claim he was acting in self-defense when he shot three men, killing two, at a Black Lives Matter protest, Maddesyn George, a 27-year-old Native mother, was sitting in a courtroom in Eastern Washington, waiting to learn how many years she would have to spend in federal prison for a shooting a white man she said had raped her.

George, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, admits she killed Kristopher Graber in July 2020. The two had been friends; in a police interview, she said was at Grabers house doing scratch-off tickets when he got on top of her and raped her with a vibrator. When she protested, he pulled out a gun, George told the tribal detective. Graber eventually fell asleep, and George took the gun from him, along with cash and drugs, according to prosecutors. Then she left. The next day, Graber went out looking for her, found her sitting in a locked car, and confronted her. In the altercation, she shot him once through the window, killing him.

I was like panicking cause I was like, Oh, fuck, the windows open this much, likehes going to fucking, he is going to get me, George told the tribal detective shortly after the shooting. So then I got the gun off the floor.

Yet unlike Rittenhouse, George never got a chance to argue that the shooting was done in self-defense. Last summer, federal prosecutors filed a motion trying to block her from making that argument at trial, arguing that she was the initial aggressor in the shooting, and arguing the purported assault wouldnt be enough to justify a self-defense claim.

A couple weeks later, staring down the possibility of a 35-year sentence, George decided to take a plea deal for voluntary manslaughter and drug possession, according to Steve Graham, her lawyer. On Wednesday, US District Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson sentenced George to six and a half years in federal prison, lower than the expected range, and far less than the 17 years prosecutors had asked for. Everybody outside the courthouse was just delighted, Graham says. Because the sentence was a third of what the prosecutors asked for, and then also because the judge said she believed Maddesyn. And she articulated that she fully understood.

Yet Georges sentence is a stark contrast to Rittenhouses not guilty verdict, delivered by a jury on Friday. Here we have Rittenhouse gas up his car, cross state lines, claiming to defend himself, when Maddesyn George was in her own reservation, hiding out from this white man who crossed reservation lines to try to come after her, Graham says. The two cases played out in separate jurisdictions, with very different sets of facts. But their outcomesRittenhouse goes free, while George is going to prisonillustrate larger disparities in whose claim to self-defense is seen as legitimate, according to Caroline Light, director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. An Urban Institute study, for instance, found that homicides with a white perpetrator and a Black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim. Meanwhile, according to a survey of 608 women imprisoned for murder or manslaughter convictions, 30 percent said they were convicted after trying to protect themselves or loved ones from physical or sexual violence.

After the Rittenhouse verdict came down, I called up Light, the author of Stand Your Ground: A History of Americas Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense, to talk about the connections between his case and Georges, and these larger trends.

We just got news that Kyle Rittenhouses self-defense claim was successful, and the jury acquitted him of all charges. What do you make of the verdict?

Its devastating. What happens in these courtrooms affects our lives and our culture and our behaviors. It sends a message to certain people that if they want to take a deadly weapon into spaces where it could get volatile, and then claimafter they kill peopleto have been in fear for their life, a court is likely to exonerate them. When we see demonstrations against anti-Black violence, against hate crimes, against police violence, does this decision then license people who feel like those demonstrations themselves are an act of aggression, to go in with their firearms and start shooting? That, to me, is the torturous logic at the heart of this decision.

In a way, this expands the idea of self-defense, right? If Kyle Rittenhouse put himself in this situation, and yet he could successfully claim self-defense, thats sort of expanding the notion of what qualifies. Might that be good for other people whose self-defense claims typically arent believedlike women who kill abusive partners in self-defense?

It might affect, say, a white woman who wants to take a firearm into a Black Lives Matter protests and threaten demonstrators. But it will not expand the terrain of self-defensive capacity for a woman who uses a firearm to defend herself from an angry or violent boyfriend.

Why not?

For women, for sexual minorities, gender minorities, and people of color, and low income people and people with drug addiction, and houseless peoplethe various, layered social vulnerabilities that put people in a position where they may need to use lethal self defensethose are the very people who are not going to be able to claim the same kinds of immunities as someone like Kyle Rittenhouse or George Zimmerman.

The law is written to appear neutral. It doesnt have any reference to different races, or different genders, or class, or anything like that. But the way it plays out in the courtroom is always already stacked against people who are occupying different social vulnerabilities, especially multiple social vulnerabilities. So someone like Maddesyn George is not going to benefit from the self-defense expansion that we will see in the wake of Kyle Rittenhouses trial.

Because shes not a white man.

Its about both actors. Part of what happens in the courtroom, with a Kyle Rittenhouse or George Zimmerman, is that they succeed in magically reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator. [Rittenhouses] defense was successfully able to position him as a victim of violence rather than a perpetrator of violence. Framing it as, he had no choice, and had to defend himselfa rational response to a reasonable threat.

During slavery, and at the very beginning of the settler colonial state, there were people who justified colonial violence based on a need to protect themselves from dangerous savages or other offensive terminologies for Indigenous people. And so armed white masculine violence could easily be justified as protective and as virtuous violence rather than aggressive and hostile.

If we look at someone like Kyle Rittenhouse, he looks very much like the average mass shooter. What we had were people trying to disarm a potential threat. It turned out, he was indeed a real threat. And yet, the court exonerates himand treats the people who tried to disarm him as the perpetrators. That, to me, is devastating.

Youve spoken before about how important it is which events get included of the chronology of a self-defense casewhich events the jury looks at when theyre deciding whether its provocation, self-defense, or something else. Because Maddesyn George took a plea deal, her attorney Steve Graham never got a chance to make this argument at trial, but I asked him where he would start the clock if he were presenting this case to a jury. Id love to read you his response. He said:

During colonialism. Thats when we would talk about the clock starting. And the fact that she was on her lands. That she was here first, her ancestors were here first. She hid out there. We would start with the fact that she was sexually harassed by a white copand we documented that, and the judge believed her about that. It would start with the fact that not much was really done when she was a victim of prior crimes. It would start with Mr. Graber, essentially being allowed to run amok up there, and sell drugs, and hurt women with impunity. And then it would kind of come around to the culmination of the real unspeakable indignity that she suffered at his hands.

Thats fantastic. However, the prevailing legal system doesnt do it that way. We tend to interpret especially female perpetrators of violence through a very particularly curated chronological lens. Are you familiar with the case of Brittany Smith? This was a woman who killed the perpetrator in her own home, and she was defending her brother. In the trial, they were throwing out the evidencehorrible evidence of physical violence, all kinds of evidence that this man had brutalized herand they spliced it out. It was like they did this curation of chronology that completely excluded all the evidence of sexual violence and harm that had preceded the deadly encounter.

Is that because she didnt shoot him right in the middle of him raping her? Like, what does it take?

Thats the issue.

What happens in the trials around women who use self-defense against partners or acquaintances is what we believe about gender and race and class and drug addiction, these things are stacked against them when they try to claim the status of victim. The law is always skeptical of any womans claim that she was sexually assaulted. And the law, and our dominant culture, is always skeptical of a person of color who takes the life of a white person. Theres just so many preconceptions and biases baked into our culture that were stacked against Ms. George from the get-go.

There really are very few cases you can point to where a woman who kills or maims the man who sexually assaults her, is exonerated. Shes probably going to go to prison. And if she doesnt go to prison, shes going to plea to something so that she can avoid prison time. But she will be criminalized for taking that life.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

This article has been updated and corrected. A previous version of this article misstated how people are taught to respond to active shooter situations. In fact, the FBI instructs people to first run from an attacker, to hide if fleeing is impossible, and to fight back as a last resort.

Read more:
Two Days Before Rittenhouse Verdict, a Native Woman Was Imprisoned for Killing Her Alleged Rapist Mother Jones - Mother Jones