Goodman's Jewelers
The city council voted down proposed assistance for State Street businesses that sustained damage during protests in late May and early June.
I admit that I haven’t looked it up. But I’m pretty sure that if you found “no-brainer” in the dictionary the definition would read something like this: Make $250,000 available to State Street businesses to help them recover after a night of looting and months of hard times due to a pandemic.
But if you thought that your city government trying to do something to help struggling, mostly locally owned, small business owners on Madison’s most iconic street was, in fact, a no-brainer, well, you’re not one of 14 members on the city council.
In a move that just takes your breath away, the council voted 14-6 last week to reject the relief program, at least for now.
As quoted in the Wisconsin State Journal, Ald. Rebecca Kemble, who represents District 18, called State Street “the whitest neighborhood in the city” and said that providing this assistance is “quite literally institutional racism.”
It’s hard to know where to begin with statements like those, but let’s start with the facts, which she has wrong. The downtown is not the whitest neighborhood in the city. According to the city’s own Neighborhood Indicators project, the neighborhoods around State Street are a little over 80% white. In fact, about two dozen neighborhoods in the city are even less diverse. And the whitest neighborhood in the city? That would be Cherokee at 94.6%. Kemble should have known that as Cherokee is in her own district.
And, in fact, many of the small businesses on State Street are owned by women or people of color.
In the same story the Journal quoted Miar Maktabi, owner of the Dubai Mediterranean Restaurant and Bar on State Street and a Syrian immigrant, as saying that his business sustained $39,000 in damage in one week. Speaking in favor of the city assistance he told the council, "You guys are burying us.”
In fact, according to information from the downtown business improvement district, there are 25 people of color and 38 women who own stores on State Street. The council’s own resolution noted that these businesses comprise no less than 62% of all businesses on the street. No matter. What was important to the council majority was not doing anything practical and useful on the ground to help heal some wounds, but to make some abstract point about institutional racism.
The State Street assistance was put on hold in part because a second part of the proposal to provide $250,000 for Black business development downtown was thought by some alders to be insufficient. The original proposal would have provided $500,000 for State Street business relief but that was amended to reduce that program by half and provide $250,000 for a series of initiatives to encourage more Black-owned business in the downtown.
It seems significant that three of the council’s most senior and respected Black members — Council President Sheri Carter, Ald. Barbara Harrington-McKinney and Ald. Samba Baldeh — were among the six members who voted for the compromise to provide assistance for both State Street and Black-owned businesses. The others were downtown Ald. Mike Verveer and Alds. Paul Skidmore and Michael Tierney.
This vote says a lot about where the majority of the Madison city council is at the moment. They are not about healing wounds, making genuine progress or doing anything constructive in real neighborhoods. Instead, it’s all about grievance, retribution and abstract academic race theory. The council won’t help struggling local small businesses because their neighborhood is the whitest in the city, never mind that it’s actually not.
But I’m not clear why that should matter even if it were true. Some local small business owners are hurting and could use a lift from their city. What difference does it make if they’re white, brown or Black?
The council could have simply approved both programs now and started to do some good right away while it worked on other initiatives. Instead, it voted to help no one while it dithers about the absolutely most politically correct response. It’s as if the city is being run out of the faculty lounge at Oberlin College.
Right now the city is in the worst shape I’ve seen it in four decades of living here. To be fair, we’ve sustained terrible blows not of our own making. But rather than rolling up their sleeves and trying to pull us all together to make things better our city leaders are dividing us and making everything so much worse.
The whole council is up for reelection in April. If this is really the course Madisonians want their city to take, that’s the time for them to confirm it. If not, it’s the time for change.
