“This nation feels so broken right now.” “People need to understand it’s not Black against white.' “We don’t know what to believe.” In 2 outbursts of bloodshed, Kenosha, Wisconsin, seemed a microcosm of a nation wracked by discord.
Tireece Anderson, 32, points to an area where Kenosha, Wis., police have allegedly harassed Black residents while his girlfriend, Rose Cavin, 30, listens on Friday, Aug. 28, 2020. The southern Wisconsin city remained on edge following the police shooting of Jacob Blake and violent protests that followed.
As people here navigate barricaded streets, boarded-up windows and their own place along some of the deepest fault lines cleaving the U.S., there are many more than two perspectives on what happened, what it means and the way forward.Charles Stevenson pulled up to a quiet, green block 150 miles from his Green Bay home. There was something he wanted to show his 9-year-old son.
Around the corner, Tireece Anderson said the shooting hadn’t surprised him. Police don’t get along with Black residents like him, said Anderson, a 32-year-old warehouse worker who’s had his own encounters with the criminal justice system and with police he says wrongly targeted and were unduly harsh with him.
After the gunfire, with his AR-15-style rifle over his shoulder and his hands in the air, Rittenhouse walked toward police vehicles that kept going past him, even as a witness shouted, “He just shot them!” Police Chief Daniel Miskinis has explained the response as officers dealing with a chaotic scene.
“He knew the potential consequences of his actions, and he was prepared to die so that other people wouldn’t,” said the woman, Hannah Gittings. “That’s a hero.”Set along Lake Michigan between Chicago and Milwaukee, Kenosha is to some extent a demographic slice of the U.S. “I’ve been the mayor for a long, long time. But this isn’t what I’m used to,” said John Antaramian, a Democrat who returned to office in 2016 after serving from 1992 to 2008. “This is different.”“There’s two justice systems. There’s one for that white boy ... and then there is a justice system for mine,” Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr., told a diverse crowd of about 1,000 people at a rally Saturday.Blake’s family and police representatives dispute much of what happened.
To these demonstrators, most of them white, what had happened in their city was a travesty of destruction and criminality that was able to unfold under the cover of protest.She and her partner, Dustin Bose, live close to the center of the protests and the fires earlier in the week. The two said they had spent nights on their porch with their guns loaded, feeling they needed to protect their home and family, including a 5-year-old child and a disabled 19-year-old.
“But they didn’t,” said Wallner, a Black truck driver, an activist and an aspiring police officer himself. Looking out on Kenosha’s prized lakefront, James White and his girlfriend dissected the events that have shaken their hometown. One night White was at a friend’s house, listening to police scanner traffic about an approaching crowd, and they got worried enough to turn out the lights out and sit in silence. Word had gone around that a crowd was out to attack white people’s homes in the friend’s racially mixed neighborhood, he says.
The violence, the vandalism, all of it, had brought her to tears the day before. She sees residents channeling anger into peaceful protests, “and they should be,” she said. But the destruction broke her heart.
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