person,’ backs BLM Kyle Rittenhouse, right, sits for an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted on charges stemming from killing two men and wounding an-other during the unrest that followed the shooting of a Black man by a white police officer, said in a wide-ranging interview that aired on Monday night that he’s “not a racist person” and supports the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
“This case has nothing to do with race. I t never had anything to do with race. It had to do with the right to self-defence,” the 18-year-old told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an interview that aired on Mon-day night.
Rittenhouse is white, as were the men he shot.Rittenhouse was 17 last year when he travelled 32 kilometres from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, which had been racked with protests in the wake of the August 23 shooting of Jacob Blake.
That shooting and the response in Kenosha — protests that turned destructive — be-came part of the national reckoning over police use of force against Black people following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis the previous May at the hands of police.Rittenhouse, armed with an AR-style semiautomatic rifle, joined others who said they were intent on protecting private property from potential damage on Aug 25.
During his trial, prosecutors argued that the teenager was a “wannabe soldier” who went looking for trouble that night. Rittenhouse countered that he fired in self-defence after he was attacked and in fear for his life. —AP
