New Republic
Emma Roller/October 5, 2020
How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy
The Badger State is designed to keep Republicans in power, at the
expense of the minority vote. Can Joe Biden overcome these structural
disadvantages?
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.
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.
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. An all-white state jury found the officers not
guilty.
In 2007, a federal jury convicted 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.
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, 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 or Trump’s ability to tap into the “economic
anxiety” of disaffected white voters. Less noted was the state GOP’s
years-long assault on voting rights, the purpose of which was to make it
harder for Black people and other people of color to vote. Nearly 90
percent of Black Wisconsin residents live in just six counties nestled
in the state’s southeastern quadrant. According to a 2017 study
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 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. Wisconsin locks up Black men at a higher rate
than any other state, according to a 2013 University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee study, 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 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew
Desmond found that more than one in eight 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,
compared to 39 percent of white families in the county, according to a
2018 UW-Madison report.
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 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 and disgust at the GOP’s racism.
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,
mostly because of his love of sad-looking ham sandwiches. 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. 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. “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 congressional 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.
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 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 at the state’s hyperconservative Supreme Court, which ordered that
the election continue as planned. As a result, Wisconsin faced a
shortage of 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 since 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 the 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 in 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. 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. “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, 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,
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 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
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 37 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. Ryan
likes to tell friendly reporters that 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). These days, Ryan is as difficult to catch on
camera as the mythical Hodag, 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 @emmaroller
Emma Roller’s work has appeared in Jezebel, Teen Vogue, In These Times,
The Intercept, and The New York Times. She lives in Milwaukee
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