David Michael Miller
One thing seems all but certain about Madison: We don’t want to be racist. Peek in on one of our schools’ teacher trainings or any number of organizations’ meetings around the city and you’ll see that we don’t really shy away from the topic of race. We’ll rename schools after people of color. Our city alders will officially proclaim days of the year to be dedicated to Indigenous people and then pass resolutions to reaffirm that we’re still dedicating that day to Indigenous people. Some of us even post yard signs meant to make people of diverse backgrounds feel welcome in our neighborhoods, just as long as they don’t make too much noise as they pass on through.
But when it comes time to make the real substantive decisions, the results of which won’t just memorialize our positive intentions but actually impact Madisonians of color, suddenly we find ourselves vacillating. We white people don’t want to be racist, but we’re more committed to maintaining a status quo we believe is serving us well. Though is it?
Two issues up for discussion highlight the difficulty that some of us have in supporting meaningful change. One, the decision of whether the Madison school board should pay for a police officer in each of the district’s main high schools, is provoking conversation that’s waking parents all over the city to the problems inherent in having police in schools. The stark racial disparities in arrests force the question of whom it serves to criminalize incidents that were, not long ago, matters of school discipline.
And on June 6 the Dane County Board is expected to vote on whether the county should spend a mind-boggling sum to build a new jail. The Personnel and Finance Committee approved a plan May 28 that, counting interest, will cost $225 million for which the average county household will pay $1,000 over the next two decades.
At the heart of the liberal-elite support for the pro-incarceration stance on both of these issues lies a fundamental ignorance not just of structural racism but of history itself. The belief that incarceration is a sound investment ignores the harm caused by not investing substantial sums in housing, education, mental health, and other community supports whose purpose is explicitly pro-human, and it is also based on a misunderstanding of why the American carceral system exists in the first place.
It is crucial information that the origins of American policing lie in the creation of a force intended to protect the property of wealthy white men, especially their slaves, and to control the rest of the “dangerous classes” (women, Natives, religious dissidents, and striking workers) in the interest of “order” and a stable environment for business. Likewise, it matters greatly that, for instance, according to a Madison police detective quoted in “The Ku Klux Klan in Madison, 1922-1927,” a 1974 article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, most police officers in Madison 100 years ago were members of the KKK. When we know critical facts like these, we are no longer surprised by what goes on today: That, according to the ACLU, which has written extensively about the problems of having police in schools, police officers do little at best to prevent shooting tragedies. Or that, according to David Graeber of the London School of Economics, 90 percent of police time is spent not on “crime” but on administrative violations like loitering. Or that, as statistics from the Wisconsin Department of Justice show, when police do arrest people, the vast majority of the time it is not for anything related to violence. Or that, as researchers Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary note in an October 2015 study, there isn’t persuasive evidence that the police have any impact on violent crime. Or that, as Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow, people are more likely to commit a “crime” when they leave prison than they were before they went in.
We’re no longer shocked by racial disparities when we understand that they are exactly what the police and prison system was birthed to create. And we can no longer be surprised when those disparities persist if we continue to see punishment as a solution to what ails our society and our town.
Well-intended Madison and Dane County residents have some choices to make right now. Do we really believe that black lives matter, or do they only matter if they politely tolerate the status quo? Are we willing to listen to organizations like Freedom Inc. and the voices of those impacted most by racialized capitalism and over-policing who are shouting about these issues as if their lives depend on it? Or are we vilifying them for not using their indoor voices and going along with the “civilized” political processes that have failed them for centuries?
If we know our history, we understand that these structures are failing the rest of us, too. Racism has divided and conquered us from the time of slavery to the era of Trump. What if we stopped letting it? There are good reasons that Madison doesn’t want to be racist. Let’s quit talking and having meetings and passing proclamations just to come back to the same old status quo. Let’s make real change — starting with getting police out of our schools and investing not in a jail, but in people.
Allison Bell Bern is a parent of young children in Madison, her hometown.
