Chen-ou Liu's Translation Project: First English-Chinese Haiku and Tanka Blog

Saturday, November 20, 2021

Another Black Man Rittenhoused Haiku

This Brave New World, XXXI

a shooting star... 
another black man 
Rittenhoused


FYI: Rittenhouse’s TikTok bio: Bruh I’m just tryna be famous. For more, see Kyle Rittenhouse, American Vigilante: After he killed two people in Kenosha, opportunists turned his case into a polarizing spectacle. Paige Williams, The New Yorker, June 28, 2021

According to a recent Harvard study, Black people are more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter. ...

... Two men were fatally shot. A third was maimed. Everyone involved in the shootings was white. The astonishing fact that Rittenhouse was allowed to leave the scene underscored the racial double standard that activists had sought to further expose: the police almost certainly wouldn’t have let a Black man pass...

Last year[2020, the first year of the pandemic], the U.S. broke records for gun sales and reached the highest level of gun homicides in decades...Thirty states have adopted “stand your ground” laws, further institutionalizing civilian use of lethal force...