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I know the temptation here is to tell Kyle Rittenhouse, “Cry me a river, stop sniveling for sympathy” and “why aren’t you writing about the tears shed by the families of those he murdered?” This temptation must be resisted if we ever want to make deep cuts in mass incarceration! https://twitter.com/chicagotribune/status/1322531756210311168
Mass incarceration is a mentality, a punitive reflex & retributive urge, a desire to see violent wrongdoers suffer without our care or concern, to otherize & dehumanize them, the same response used to “niggarize” violent black offenders, of which there are many in our prisons!
As I stress in “N*gga Theory,” we must temper the hard edge of retribution with compassion for the human frailty of even the most despised wrongdoers or we will never make deep and lasting cuts in racialized mass incarceration.
N*gga Theory recognizes that the “self”—when regarded as an object of moral evaluation—is no more than a tissue of contingencies: Morally we are at the mercy of luck!
The epistemic humility about our capacity to know the just deserts of even violent & serious wrongdoers that should accompany this insight into the moral luck phenomenon should also temper our corrosive contempt even for the Kyle Rittenhouses of this often sick & twisted world.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those who rushes to instantly forgive violent racists like Dylann Roof or some trigger-happy cop. Rehabilitation, restoration, redemption take time.
But when we stoke the retributive urge toward our enemies, when we totally monsterize & dehumanize them, we reinforce a moral framework & punitive mindset that disproportionately harms the black community, which will bear the brunt of the carceral policies driven by that mindset.
