The fight for racial justice moved from the streets to the courthouse in 2021
America’s reckoning with racial justice moved from the streets to the courtroom in 2021, with complicated results. In April, former police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd on a Minneapolis street 11 months before, in what was widely seen as a landmark decision.
Another landmark — of a starkly contrasting kind — came in November, when 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on all counts after fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during race-related unrest in Kenosha, Wis.
The killers of Ahmaud Arbery were found guilty of murder in Georgia in a November trial that proved a majority-white jury was willing to convict white civilians for the murder of a Black man even in disputed circumstances.
The jury’s conviction of Minnesota police officer Kim Potter for the death of Daunte Wright, coupled with the judge’s denial of bail pending her appeal, was received with mixed reviews depending on which side of police reform discussion one is on.
As usual with the tangled topics of race, policing and the justice system, there is no simple message to be drawn from the cases in total.
Instead, they showed a nation at times edging toward a new consensus on the most egregious examples of racial injustice and at other times retreating into the old ways of doing things.
The Chauvin case was arguably the most emotive of all, centered on the killing that had sparked global protests and given new vigor to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Before the verdict came, there was widespread doubt in the Black community that a jury would convict a former police officer for murder. Comparisons were drawn to the case of Rodney King a generation before. Police officers in Los Angeles were captured on video savagely beating King and were acquitted on all charges.
But the jury did convict in Minneapolis, finding Chauvin guilty of all three counts for which he was tried, the most serious being second-degree murder. The 45-year-old Chauvin was sentenced in June to more than 22 years in prison.
The Chauvin verdict a harbinger of a new era in terms of law enforcement facing the full measure of justice for its actions? It’s simply unclear.
Civil rights activists pointed out that the murder of Floyd, though emblematic of the broader ills of police brutality, was unusual in its specifics.
The broader questions raised by Floyd’s murder seemed to get murkier as the year wore on, however. The brief moment of national consensus around Floyd’s murder had thoroughly broken down by the time Rittenhouse faced a jury in November. His case became a classic Rorschach test, with critics seeing him as a gun-toting vigilante and defenders viewing him as a young man of basically good intentions who became a victim of circumstance.
The verdict, predictably, was hailed by the right and lamented on the left. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that “justice has been served.” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) saw instead a “miscarriage of justice.”
The authors of the Declaration of Independence outlined a bold vision for America: a nation in which there would be equal justice for all. More than two hundred years later, it has yet to be achieved. Though generations of civil rights activism have led to important gains in legal, political, social, educational, and other spheres, the forced removal of indigenous peoples and the institution of slavery marked the beginnings of a system of racial injustice from which our country has yet to break free.
