White Vigilantes and Black Protest

White Vigilantes and Black Protest

John Nichols on Kyle Rittenhouse plus Eric Foner on housing.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
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We’re still thinking about the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict in Kenosha, where Republicans have been celebrating the “not guilty” verdict in the trial of a 17-year-old who shot three people, killing two, during the street protests over the police shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. John Nichols comments on the threat from white vigilantes to Black protest, and on the broader antidemocratic moves by Republicans in Wisconsin and nationally.

Also: Racism in America for decades led to strict housing segregation. But historians are now showing that that wasn’t simply the result of white people’s refusing to live near Blacks—segregated housing was the result of a carefully organized, long-term effort to establish a legal basis for systematic racial discrimination. And the groups that succeeded were not the KKK or White Power groups. They were realtors’ organizations. Eric Foner reviews that history.

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Start Making Sense Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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