It’s Time To Stop Calling White Killers ‘Bullied Teenagers’
Yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old white man, was charged with two counts of homicide and one attempted homicide after allegedly shooting three people with a rifle in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
He is accused of killing two men – one 26-year-old and one 36-year-old. He was a Trump supporter who was in the front row of a rally in Iowa earlier this year; he supported the pro-police Blue Lives Matter movement, and on the night of the shooting he told journalists it was “his job” to protect Kenosha from protestors who were demonstrating, following the shooting of unarmed Black man Jacob Blake on Sunday by a white police officer.
These are the clearcut facts of the story.
Yet today, as the case has its first court appearance, The Times summarised the above as: “A bullied teenager who revered the police and found purpose as a vigilante appears in court today charged with murder after two people were killed after a night of unrest.”
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The framing of the now deleted tweet places Rittenhouse firmly in the role of victim. We are urged to see him as more human and it brings his background into question: a “bullied teenager” who “revered” the police and “found purpose”.
It seems unfathomable that this kind of language would ever be used to describe a Black man accused of murdering two white men.
Equally shocking is the passive way in which the line “Two people were killed” reads does not even make it clear that the “bullied teenager” was the one accused of killing them.
Funny, I’ve never seen a headline that does this much work excusing and distancing a young black man charged with murder from his crime. pic.twitter.com/pjSzu1U3qE
— Jane Bradley (@jane__bradley) August 28, 2020
This framing that so encourages us to sympathise with him is minimising of his alleged crimes, and...
