For many Black Americans, that case served as a cautionary tale that just being Black could make them targets, said Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of Boston University’s law school. In the days of integration, it was a questioning of why Black people were in a particular place - a demand for proof that they belonged in order to put white people “at ease.”Īrbery’s death recalls the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, a Black teen, by a white Hispanic man patrolling his Florida subdivision against supposed criminals. “Laws that say, ‘if you can’t say where you live, you can be locked up and made to work on the chain gang for some time.’” During segregation, Black people were told they were in the wrong place. Pinckney pointed to vagrancy laws and Black Codes, passed after the Civil War, that aimed to control freed slaves. of people taking the law into their own hands - and of white Americans using that as a pretext to violently enforce racial boundaries. It has evolved over time, but there is a long history in the U.S. White vigilantism signifies “the need to keep the Black population, particularly the Black male population, under surveillance and under control,” said writer Darryl Pinckney. “That’s the thing about vigilantism, it’s that something precious to me, for me, for my community, is being stolen and it’s being stolen by the unworthy, by the undeserving,” Anderson said. The impetus for raiding the Capitol, Anderson said, was the unfounded claim that there was massive amounts of voter fraud in cities where there were sizable Black populations, “the notion that Black folks voting is what stole the election.” Capitol, in which an overwhelmingly white crowd of supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged with the idea that the 2020 election was “stolen” from them, stormed the building in an effort to take ownership of the government. The two coinciding trials highlighted deep racial rifts within American society, particularly following last year’s broad movement for racial justice that swept the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.īoth also came at the end of a year that began with an insurrection at the U.S. that give white men with guns the ability to create chaos and sometimes get away with it,” said Waldman, author of “The Second Amendment: A Biography.” The unmistakable connection: The idea that white men who perceive a problem “should grab a gun and wade into trouble and then claim self-defense,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. In Wisconsin, while both Rittenhouse and the three men he shot were white, the encounter was triggered by the 17-year-old’s decision to travel from his Illinois home to Kenosha and arm himself with an AR-15 rifle, bent on protecting local businesses from Black Lives Matter protesters. The sense that it is on me to put Black lives back into their proper place.”Īrbery, a Black man, was chased and shot to death by white men suspicious of an outsider in their predominantly white Georgia neighborhood. “So much of this issue about protection and safety is about the safety and the protection of whites or white property,” said Carol Anderson, historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University.
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