[ If Democrats want to win Wisconsin this fall—a big “if”
still, according to Democrats on the ground—they will have to face
down the ugly, and still largely unacknowledged, legacy of white
supremacy in America’s Dairyland.] [[link removed]]

HOW WISCONSIN BECAME A BASTION OF WHITE SUPREMACY  
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Emma Roller
October 5, 2020
The New Republic
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_ If Democrats want to win Wisconsin this fall—a big “if”
still, according to Democrats on the ground—they will have to face
down the ugly, and still largely unacknowledged, legacy of white
supremacy in America’s Dairyland. _

Illustration By Richard A. Chance // The New Republic,

 

On the night of October 23, 2004, Milwaukee police officer Andrew
Spengler hosted a housewarming party. Katie Brown and Kirsten
Antonissen brought two friends of their own: Frank Jude Jr., who is
biracial, and Lovell Harris, who is Black.

Jude and Harris were the only people of color at the party, and
immediately felt uncomfortable. They left the party five minutes later
with Brown and Antonissen. In that time, Spengler announced that he
could not find his badge, and accused the men of stealing it. 

A crowd of 10 to 15 people from the party—many of whom were off-duty
Milwaukee police officers—rushed outside and surrounded
Antonissen’s truck, where the four were sitting inside. The mob
demanded that they get out of the truck and turn over Spengler’s
badge. “Nigger, we can kill you,” Spengler’s friends told Jude
and Harris. 

The mob eventually dragged them all out of the truck, though they did
not find Spengler’s badge. One member of the mob cut Harris’s
face, but he was able to free himself, and fled. The crowd then turned
its attention on Jude. Spengler put Jude in a headlock against a car
as the mob punched and shouted at him.

Antonissen called 911 on her cell phone. “They’re beating the shit
out of him,” she told the operator. “Hang up the phone,” said a
male voice in the background. Then the line went silent. Antonissen
said when the men saw her calling 911, they wrested the phone from her
and threw her against her truck. Brown called 911 twice before the men
took her phone, too.

Wisconsin, under its veneer of Midwestern Niceness, is home to men and
women who are as animated by white supremacy as in any state in the
Deep South.

The group of off-duty police officers took turns punching and kicking
Jude. Two on-duty police officers then arrived. One of them, Joseph
Schabel, joined in on the beating and stomped Jude’s head “until
others could hear bones breaking,” according to court documents. The
men bent back one of Jude’s fingers until it snapped. Spengler put a
gun to Jude’s head. “I’m the fucking police,” he said. “I
can do whatever I want to do. I could kill you.” 

As Schabel was handcuffing Jude, an off-duty officer named Jon
Bartlett took a pen and stabbed it into both of Jude’s ear canals as
Jude screamed in agony.

Two years earlier, in 2002, Bartlett had shot and killed Larry
Jenkins, an unarmed Black man, as he fled from police. “If justice
had been in my son’s case, the Frank Jude beating would never have
taken place,” Jenkins’s mother, Debra, said in 2008. The Milwaukee
district attorney’s office ruled the shooting justifiable
[[link removed]]. 

After the group was satisfied with their work, Bartlett used a knife
to cut off Jude’s jacket and pants, leaving him naked from the waist
down in a pool of his own blood. Jude was taken to the hospital in a
police wagon. 

Jude’s injuries were extensive: a concussion, a broken nose, a
sprained and fractured left hand, a fractured sinus cavity, cuts and
bruises all over his body, and “gross swelling and bruising” in
his left eye. The day his four-year-old son came to the hospital, he
thought his father was wearing a Halloween costume. “He said,
‘Take off your mask, Daddy,’” Jude said at the time
[[link removed]].
An all-white state jury found the officers not guilty
[[link removed]]. 

The protests this summer in Kenosha over the shooting of Jacob Blake
tapped into deeper frustrations with racial inequality in Wisconsin.
Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images  //  The New Republic
In 2007, a federal jury convicted
[[link removed]] Spengler,
Bartlett, and another police officer, Daniel Masarik, of violating
Jude’s civil rights. “The distance between civilization and
barbarity, and the time needed to pass from one state to the other, is
depressingly short,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in his decision
[[link removed]].

His statement could pass as a verdict on Wisconsin as a state, which,
under its veneer of Midwestern Niceness, is home to men and women who
are as animated by white supremacy as in any state in the Deep South
(I know because I’m related to a few of them). In its folksy,
mild-mannered way, the state’s blithe tolerance of systemic racism
and police brutality foreshadowed the Republican Party’s national
strategy of linking its electoral fortunes with racist demagoguery. 

The protests that erupted this August in Kenosha over the police
shooting of Jacob Blake signaled outrage not only over Wisconsin’s
bloody record of police brutality, but also over a deeper racist turn
in state politics—one that helped swing Wisconsin to Donald Trump in
2016. If Democrats want to win Wisconsin this fall—a big “if”
still, according to Democrats on the ground—they will have to face
down the ugly, and still largely unacknowledged, legacy of white
supremacy in America’s Dairyland.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton infamously failed to visit Wisconsin after
losing the state to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. She
became the first Democratic presidential nominee to lose Wisconsin in
the general election in 32 years—a fate that even Michael Dukakis
was able to avoid. “I suppose it is possible that a few more trips
to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha could have tipped
a couple of thousand votes here and there,” Clinton wrote in her
campaign memoir _What Happened_
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but she added that “contrary to the popular narrative, we didn’t
ignore those states.” 

After the 2016 election, many post-mortems attributed Wisconsin’s
right turn to simple voter apathy
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Trump’s ability to tap into the “economic anxiety
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of disaffected white voters. Less noted was the state GOP’s
years-long assault on voting rights
[[link removed]],
[[link removed]] the
purpose of which was to make it harder for Black people and other
people of color to vote. Nearly 90 percent
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Black Wisconsin residents live in just six counties nestled in the
state’s southeastern quadrant. According to a 2017 study
[[link removed]] conducted
by Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, the state’s voter ID law deterred or prevented
more than 25,000 registered voters in the state’s two most populous
counties (which also happen to be its two most liberal counties) from
voting in 2016. Trump won Wisconsin by just 23,000 votes.

“Unfortunately, Wisconsin’s become sort of a poster child for many
of the worst abuses, which is completely contrary to our progressive
good government tradition,” Russ Feingold, the former Democratic
senator from Wisconsin, told me.

It’s impossible to talk about Wisconsin’s politics without
addressing the state’s deeply entrenched racism. As a state,
Wisconsin is still much whiter than the rest of the country. Just 6.7
percent [[link removed]] of Wisconsinites are
Black, compared to 13.4 percent of the U.S. population.

Milwaukee is the most segregated metro area in the country, according
to a 2018 Brookings study
[[link removed]].
Wisconsin locks up
[[link removed]] Black
men at a higher rate than any other state, according to a
2013 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study
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which found that 13 percent of Black men of working age in Wisconsin
are in jail or prison, compared to the 6.7 percent national average.

Evictions also fall disproportionately on Black tenants in Wisconsin.
In his 2016 book
[[link removed]] _Evicted:
Poverty and Profit in the American City__,_ Matthew Desmond found
that more than one in eight
[[link removed]] Milwaukee
renters were forced to move involuntarily, either through eviction,
landlord foreclosure, or building condemnations, over the course of
three years. And as in many American cities, race and class follow
similar fault lines. Fully 79 percent of Black families in Milwaukee
County are poor or low-income
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compared to 39 percent of white families in the county, according to
a 2018 UW-Madison report
[[link removed]].

You cannot understand what Trump support looks like in Wisconsin
without understanding how much white Republican grandpas here love AM
talk radio. For the past 30 years, two names have dominated
Wisconsin’s conservative talk radio market: Mark Belling and Charlie
Sykes. Since 2016, Belling has doubled down on his role as the Badger
State’s own Rush Limbaugh, taking to Trumpism like a muskie to lake
water. Sykes is a more interesting case. He’s probably most famous
for airing racist grievances about welfare queens living large off
of whites’ hard-earned tax dollars. In 2013, Sykes published a book
[[link removed]] called _A Nation of
Moochers,_ arguing that “those who plan and behave sensibly are
being asked to bail out the profligate.” Two years later, Sykes
rebranded himself as a #NeverTrump Republican, and he has spent the
past five years expressing shock
[[link removed]] and disgust
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GOP’s racism.

 

Reince Priebus (left), Paul Ryan (center-left), and Scott Walker
(right), pictured here campaigning with Mitt Romney in 2012, are the
faces of Wisconsin’s aggressive rightward tilt in recent years.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images  //  The New Republic
Republicans in the state have engineered a system to keep Black and
other minority voters as powerless as possible. Democrats may not have
“ignored” Wisconsin, as Clinton wrote, but they have been overrun
by a ruthlessly effective Republican campaign that began with Scott
Walker winning the governorship in 2010.  

Walker has an unearned reputation for being placid and even boring
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mostly because of his love of sad-looking ham sandwiches
[[link removed]]. But that
characterization obscures the damage Walker inflicted during his time
as governor. Wisconsin became a Koch-sponsored laboratory of the same
regressive, anti-democratic policies that we’re seeing enacted all
over the country during the Trump era. Walker shattered public
employee unions, rolled back environmental protections, and gutted
funding for public education. This agenda, wrapped in the language of
white resentment, played well in the “WOW” counties—Washington,
Ozaukee, and Waukesha—a trio of white-flight suburbs and exurbs that
neighbor Milwaukee County and have historically acted as the engine of
the state’s white grievance politics
[[link removed]].
But his most harmful work was passing the voter ID law and district
maps meant to dilute the voting power of people of color.  

Over the past 10 years, Walker and his allies in the Wisconsin state
legislature mastered the dark arts of gerrymandering, voter
disenfranchisement, and general ratfuckery.

Over the past 10 years, Walker and his allies in the Wisconsin state
legislature mastered the dark arts of gerrymandering, voter
disenfranchisement, and general ratfuckery
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“I sort of think of the Trump era as starting in Wisconsin in
2010,” Ben Wikler, the head of the Wisconsin Democrats, told me.
“You can see in the way that Republicans here are operating in the
state legislature that the Trump era will not end when Trump is gone.
The obsessive pursuit of power at the expense of basic democratic
norms is just deeply embedded in the Republican political culture
here.” 

2010 was the year that the Tea Party’s Ron Johnson ousted Feingold,
a left reformist  champion. As ill luck would have it, 2010 was also
a census year, meaning that Walker and Republican lawmakers were able
to draw one of the most absurdly gerrymandered
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maps in the country. “Wisconsin’s maps are so gerrymandered that
Republicans can win close to a supermajority of House seats even with
a minority of the vote,” the Brennan Center for Justice’s Michael
Li wrote in April
[[link removed]]. 

Ten years after the Tea Party wave, Wisconsin Republicans aren’t
even trying to hide their agenda. After the 2018 midterm elections,
state Assembly Leader Robin Vos all but lamented
[[link removed]] the
fact that people who live in cities are allowed to vote. ​“If you
took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would
have a clear majority,” Vos said. The midterms saw the election of a
Democratic U.S. senator and the end of Walker’s reign, but
gerrymandering was key to the GOP’s ability to hold on to the state
Assembly and its seats in the House.

All of which means that, no matter how badly Trump flubs his response
to the pandemic or how deeply the economy sinks, and no matter how
much Joe Biden leads in the polls, Democrats face a structural
disadvantage in Wisconsin that has been built on the state GOP’s
antipathy to people of color. And that disadvantage has only been
exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis.

 

In 2017, I flew home from Washington to Milwaukee to see my parents.
It had been a rough week for Democrats in Congress, as the GOP had
once again tried to gut the Affordable Care Act. After we landed, I
rolled my carry-on out of the airport and gave my mom a hug. I heard a
voice behind me say, gloomily, “I need a hug.” I turned around to
see Representative Gwen Moore, the only person of color to represent
Wisconsin in Washington, who was on the same flight home as me.
“I’ll give you a hug, Gwen Moore!” my mom said. I watched Moore
and my mom—two proud Milwaukee women born in the same year—hug it
out on the airport sidewalk.

When I told Moore this story in a phone interview, she let out a
nervous laugh. “Oh, I’m so scared that was me,” she said. Moore
lamented the way Covid-19 has kept people from literally embracing
each other. “I’ve become this other person who doesn’t hug,”
she told me. “It really is taking some adjustment for me.”

Like other Wisconsin Democrats, Moore is determined to rebuild the
so-called “blue wall” that crumbled in 2016. But even state party
leaders are uneasy about the odds, in no small part because of the
obstacles to voting created by the pandemic. 

“We should plan for a knife’s edge election,” Ben Wikler told
me. “In Wisconsin, things tighten so much, so fast, so often, you
have to organize as though every vote could be the one that tips the
result.” 

This fall will actually be Wisconsin’s second statewide election of
the pandemic. In April, as Covid-19 was spreading across the country
like wildfire, Wisconsin’s GOP lawmakers refused to postpone a state
Supreme Court election. When Democratic Governor Tony Evers issued an
order to delay the election to ensure voter safety, Republican
leaders challenged it
[[link removed]] at
the state’s hyperconservative Supreme Court, which ordered that the
election continue as planned. As a result, Wisconsin faced
a shortage
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almost 7,000 poll workers in the April election.

“The way to understand what happened in April is only if you think
about the context of all these attacks that have been going on for 10
years,” said Feingold, who now leads the nonpartisan American
Constitution Society. 

While Democrats ended up prevailing in the April election, Wisconsin
is at risk of stepping on yet another rake in November. In
mid-September, Wisconsin set a new daily record
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the pandemic began, with more than 1,500 confirmed Covid-19 cases in
the state. Earlier that week, the state Supreme Court—which in May
showed new levels of judicial negligence by striking down
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state’s stay-at-home order—temporarily delayed hundreds of
thousands of absentee ballots from being sent to voters, lobbing yet
another Molotov cocktail into an already chaotic election.

What’s happened here is so disheartening because, while
Wisconsin’s history is steeped in the same injustices as the rest of
America’s, it also provides one of the strongest liberal legacies in
the country.

Compounding all this is the fact that 2020 is a census year. If
Republicans maintain control of the state assembly and senate, which
looks all but certain at this point, they will once again get to
redraw the maps in their favor, effectively hand-picking their own
electorate for the next 10 years. And if Republicans win a veto-proof
majority in the state legislature, the governor will be powerless to
reject the new maps. “The maps we draw next year will define our
ability for a decade—that’s a long time—to get things
done,” Evers said
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August.

What’s happened here is so disheartening because, while
Wisconsin’s history is steeped in the same injustices as the rest of
America’s, it also provides one of the strongest liberal legacies in
the country. You can’t tell the story of the progressive movement in
the United States without Wisconsin, and especially not without
Milwaukee. At the start of the twentieth century, Milwaukee elected
not one but three socialist mayors
[[link removed]]. These “sewer
socialists”—so-called because of Mayor Daniel Hoan’s dedication
to improving the city’s sanitation system—governed Milwaukee for
38 years. During that time, they created the city’s parks system and
fire department, championed public education, raised the minimum wage,
led public vaccination campaigns, decontaminated the city’s drinking
water, and fought for an eight-hour workday. 

Milwaukee’s socialist leaders “called their fellow citizens to a
higher conception of the common good, one that placed cooperation
above competition and mutualism above bare self-interest,” local
historian John Gurda wrote in 2010
[[link removed]]. “They
believed that a government based on those ideals was humanity’s best
hope for the future.”

Wisconsin has a strong history of environmentalism, starting with the
state’s Native tribes. Conservationists from John Muir to Aldo
Leopold kindled their love for the natural world at the University of
Wisconsin. In the 1950s and 1960s, Democratic Governor Gaylord Nelson
and his Republican successor, Governor Warren Knowles
[[link removed]], each made
conservation a top priority while in office. 

Organized labor was once the bedrock of Milwaukee’s European
immigrant community. My grandfather, George Prijic, was a
card-carrying member of the Milwaukee bricklayer’s union for more
than 50 years. His daughter, my mother, was a proud member of the
Wisconsin public teachers’ union for more than 30 years. In the
spring of 2011, she protested Scott Walker’s union-busting
legislation at the state Capitol, shoulder to shoulder with thousands
of fellow educators, state workers, and students. 

Unfortunately, Wisconsin is also the birthplace of Senator Joseph
McCarthy, and the state’s recent political history has been shaped
by a group of white men (and occasionally, white women) who have
picked up the conservative culture wars where McCarthyism left off.
They cleared and sodded the field that became Trump’s golf course,
all while insisting that they weren’t involved in the game. Look
at Scott Walker
[[link removed]],
who, with other GOP governors in states like North Carolina,
co-authored the instruction manual for his party’s voter
disenfranchisement strategy. Look at former White House Chief of Staff
Reince Priebus, who slunk out
[[link removed]] of
the West Wing after six months on the job without even a book deal to
show for it. In 2019, Vice President Mike Pence swore in
[[link removed]] Priebus
as an ensign in the Navy Reserve—a rank usually reserved for recent
college graduates rather than 47-year-old political operatives.
Priebus beat out
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other candidates to become a naval human resources officer, despite
the fact that he had no prior military experience. 

Or look at former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a self-mythologizing
machine who stuck a smiley face on his party’s grievance politics
while convincing the Washington press corps he was but a humble wonk
[[link removed]].
Ryan likes to tell friendly reporters
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the only reason he stayed in Washington after Trump’s election was
to protect the nation from the president’s own worst impulses. By
Ryan’s telling, he acted as the noble statesman, throwing himself on
the grenade of the Trump presidency (an act of self-sacrifice that
entailed securing a tax windfall for the country’s richest people
[[link removed]]).
These days, Ryan is as difficult to catch on camera as the
mythical Hodag [[link removed]],
offering little to no comment on police brutality or Black Lives
Matter or Trump’s racist appeals, even as Kenosha, his own district
of 20 years, went up in flames. 

Wisconsin hasn’t always been this way. But a lot can change,
quickly, when powerful people, feeding off the dark forces of this
country’s racist politics, are willing to wrest power away from
workers by any means necessary. If it can happen here, it can happen
anywhere. Still, I have to believe my home state can return to its
liberal roots. To think otherwise would be a disgrace to my
grandfather, who laid brick upon brick toward a future better than
this.

_[EMMA ROLLER’s work has appeared in Jezebel, Teen Vogue, In These
Times, The Intercept, and The New York Times. She lives in
Milwaukee. @emmaroller [[link removed]]]_

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