Author: Common Dreams

I remember being thirteen and staying up to see if Trayvon Martin’s killer would be convicted. The announcement of the verdict kept being pushed back, but I kept watching — hoping that the anguish I was feeling would somehow be resolved by seeing George Zimmerman jailed. My mom said the delay was tactical: designed so more people would be too busy sleeping to riot when the verdict came up not guilty. I, naive and accustomed to being called smart for my age, thought it impossible. A kid—a Black Florida teenager, just like me—was stalked and killed for no reason....

The chaos and violence that are unfolding in Kenosha looks like the beginning of a civil war. I feel as though I am watching some natural disaster develop, suddenly overpowering any hope for social change “before it’s too late.” Is it already too late—that is to say, too late to disarm our concept of social order and, for God’s sake, safety? The American problem of guns is not only that there are so many of them, vastly more than there are people; and that they are deemed, by so many Americans, necessary for survival and empowerment, commanding a reverence...

“Trump is coming to [Kenosha] to use us as a prop in his commercial to scare White people to get votes.” – Rev. Jesse Jackson The community of Kenosha, Wisconsin countered President Donald Trump’s visit to the city on Tuesday, September 1, with a “Justice for Jacob” rally in the neighborhood where Jacob Blake was shot by a police officer last week, intent on spending the day focused on “resilience and compassion.” “We don’t need more pain and division from a president set on advancing his campaign at the expense of our city,” said Jacob Blake’s uncle, Justin Blake....

President Donald Trump defended the actions of a 17-year-old vigilante and Trump supporter who was charged with murder last week after killing two people and injuring another with a military-style semi-automatic rifle in Kenosha during demonstrations over the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Asked during a press briefing on August 31 whether he would condemn the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been enthusiastically embraced by the right-wing media after criticizing Democratic nominee Joe Biden for offering a purportedly insufficient denunciation of violence, Trump said “that was an interesting situation” and proceeded to suggest Rittenhouse’s shooting of three people...

Two people were killed and one injured overnight in Kenosha, Wisconsin after a white individual with a gun, who was arrested on August 26 by law enforcement in a nearby state, shot protesters who were demonstrating in the wake of the police killing of unarmed black man Jacob Blake. Most of Tuesday evening, August 25, was spent in a shifting standoff between the police and protesters near the county courthouse in downtown Kenosha. The protesters were dispersed from the park to the city streets by tear gas and rubber bullets. According to the Times: Many protesters left the area,...

The National ACLU, alongside its state chapter in Wisconsin, called for the local sheriff, chief of police, and mayor of Kenosha to immediately tender their resignations on August 27, arguing that the top law enforcement officials and city leader have failed in their duties. The criticism comes in the wake of the shooting of Jacob Blake on on August 23, and their handling of subsequent protests in the city that culminated in the alleged killing of two Black Lives Matter demonstrators carried out by an underage militia-style vigilante armed with an AR-15 assault weapon on August 25. “The curfew’s...