Rittenhouse, Identity, and Process Antiracism
The public narrative on race in the United States has become mind-numbingly dumb. One only needs to spend a cursory amount of time on social media to see hot takes from all sides about how the other side is immoral and unethical. It’s the Pee Wee Herman “I know you are but what am I” discourse on race. The key failing is that moral and ethical riders are attached to identities, when identities are morally and ethically neutral. The result of attaching such riders is that activism resembles moral conversion narratives of fundamentalist Christianity with the predictable backlash.
Identities are produced through social/political/economic/natural prcesses. I have written elsewhere about how the process of a changing segregation in Birmingham, Alabama produced identities that were both slotted in the sense that Black people had a particularistic role in governing while white people had a universal role and completely unable communicate in a way that allowed for governing processes to emerge. (See https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02723638.2014.941691.) Simply, identities are the result of governing processes in which individuals have little to no control and which are controlled by powerful institutions.
Consider the Rittenhouse trial. Kyle Rittenhouse is not unethical because he is white. He is unethical because he murdered people. His actions make him unethical, not his identity. The trial, a state-initiated process, was less about guilt or innocence and more about producing and reproducing whiteness. As Jilisa Milton tells us, the “reasonable person” construct in the legal system is a stand in for whiteness. (See https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/justice-for-ahmaud-arbery-jury-selection-and-what-is-reasonable.) The judge disallowed certain language when describing the murder victims and the entire process was tilted in favor of Rittenhouse. The state-run legal process of the trial thus produced and reproduced Rittenhouse’s whiteness who notably was on trial for defending that same state. Yes he benefitted from whiteness, but that was not his fault and frankly, had little to do with him as an individual.
This processual production and reproduction of identity is by and large beyond anyone’s control. Your racist uncle who you scream at during Thanksgiving, ruining it for everyone, has almost no control over the processes that produced either his or Rittenhouse’s whiteness. All of us are subject to racializing processes that are by and large far beyond our control and all the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion trainings in the world are not going to change this. The processes that produce identities must be transformed in order to get new, novel antiracist identities.
Individual conversion is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
So how do we change it? My personal opinion is that the state cannot/will not change and I offer the recent failure by the Democrats to produce any meaningful social legislation, i.e. the creation of new processes. That’s out the window at this point in history. The other option is to create grassroots institutions that invent new relationships and processes that produce different kinds of identities. I would argue that The Automotive Free Clinic and the Educational and Economic Resource Network do this work, but, believe me it is not easy. (See
https://www.automotivefreeclinic.org/ https://automotivefreeclinic.networkforgood.com/projects/146009-educational-and-economic-resource-network.)
Finally, I believe that the identity-based antiracism has largely been an abject failure and should be abandoned. It has become a fundamentalist religion of sorts and does little to stitch together the fabric of community and society. Process antiracism should be the approach going forward.