The top issue in most of the local races this spring for mayor, city council and school board is racial equity and inclusion.
It’s a vague concept, but the basic unassailable idea is that Madison is a pretty great place to live, but not for everybody. Equity is the notion that we should set things up so that the wonderful side of Madison is accessible for everybody. After that it gets a little foggy in terms of policy detail, but the goal is hard to argue with.
I grew up in the inner-ring-Milwaukee suburb of West Allis. These days when I go back home I see something that I never saw as a kid there and still don’t see today in my Monroe Street neighborhood: diversity. Frankly, there’s a whole lot more diversity in West Allis than there is in Madison. For a lot of white liberal Madisonians, diversity is something that they study in special classes. For most citizens of West Allis, it’s something they live every day.
Which brings me to jelly donuts. Last week Tuesday marked the day before the start of Lent. In New Orleans that means Mardi Gras. In places like West Allis, which was once heavily Polish, it means Paczki Day. A jelly donut is a just a jelly donut, but a paczki is a jelly donut with prune filling. Don’t be fooled. If anybody tries to sell you a raspberry paczki it’s no paczki at all. Refuse delivery and insist on the genuine article.
Last week The New York Times ran a story about Paczki Day in a place that in many ways is much like West Allis, the Detroit industrial suburb of Hamtramck. Hamtramck was also once heavily Polish, but in 2015 it became the first American city with a majority Muslim city council reflecting its new demographic. They still have a Polish mayor in Karen Majewski, but then they’ve always had a Polish mayor in Hamtramck — an advantage any American city would do well to emulate!
But even before there was a Muslim majority in 2004 the city granted permission to the local mosque to broadcast the call to prayer throughout the city. Contrast that with the resistance of some Madison neighborhoods to the broadcast of “third and 10” drifting through their streets.
And Paczki Day in Hamtramck is bigger than ever. People line up outside of bakeshops for them in the wee hours. A Yemeni grocery store sells them by the box. Bands play. It’s a day-long celebration of the donut, which brings us all together.
It’s hard to find a real paczki in Madison. I gave up looking years ago, but Kyle Nabilcy, who writes about restaurants and beer for Isthmus, says that they can be found at Lane’s and maybe a few other places. For my money National Bakery in Milwaukee has the best paczki anywhere. This year I was in the North Woods, but I travelled 30 miles to Eagle River where they sell them at Trig’s and they weren’t bad. They weren’t like National’s, but they were all right.
The serious point in all this is that Madisonians — and affluent, educated liberal communities pretty much everywhere — spend an incredible amount of time talking about theories of diversity. But it could be places like Hamtramck and West Allis where people learn to get along by living together in their neighborhoods and congregating in their mosques, synagogues and churches, and even in bakeries.
Where you can find a good prune donut amid mosques, you’ve probably got a pretty healthy community.
