Heg statue on ground
When the statue of abolitionist Col. Hans Christian Heg was torn down from the Capitol steps, some progressives were suddenly turned off by the movement for Black civil rights.
These past few months have been a reflection of how fragile and vulnerable Black lives are in America. We’ve seen that Black freedom has never truly become whole. Even though there are no longer rusted chains around our wrists, they still exist across neighborhoods, in our schools, and in our legislative chambers. This weekend, we saw the worst form of human depravity when a Kenosha police officer shot a black man, Jacob Blake, in the back seven times at point blank range in front of his children. We saw Kenosha burn in the fire of injustice and Wisconsin reckon with its deep history of police brutality — as it has done before, time and time again.
While we mourn, cry, and hope for Jacob Blake’s survival, we must understand where we are in our nation’s history.
Wisconsin has become the most segregated state in the country, and yet complacency and complicity have shaped the roles of our lawmakers, our public officials, and our neighbors. It is here that we find ourselves at a juncture in our progressive struggle.
As Madisonians, we are at a point where we must decide to hold ourselves accountable for our past and forge our future into one that holds all of us in love and opportunity. It is without argument that our present reflects the reality that Wisconsin’s promise of forward has not encompassed Black and Brown communities, so what are we going to do about it?
The tragedy of racism is not only in its violence, but in the deep, unnatural silence that follows it. As human beings, our intrinsic response to injustice is empathy; it’s built into us to feel for our fellow humans when something hurts them. So when a Black man is murdered for no apparent reason aside from the color of his skin, our default reaction should be one of loud mourning. We cannot stay silent in the face of injustice.
In the protests after George Floyd, Madison saw both peaceful and destructive unrest. Though both were justified, there was more vitriol aimed at those who brought down statues than those who have harmed Black bodies. During my campaign for Wisconsin state Senate, the dictation by liberal Madison of what was and what wasn’t an acceptable reaction to the institutional murder of a Black man led me to tweet “fuck your statues.” Progressives who were exploring what it truly meant to be anti-racist were suddenly turned off by the movement for Black civil rights because protesters tore down the Forward and Colonel Heg statues in front of the Wisconsin state Capitol.
While it brought a great deal of negative attention to our campaign, the tweet did what I intended it to do: It sparked a continuing discussion on comfortability, the efficacy of protest, and how statues and monuments do not always tell the entire story of our community. Indeed, both Forward and Heg symbolized positive progressive moments in our state’s history, but Wisconsin has not been a comfortable or safe home for many. In fact, for BIPOC, this state has actively operated in oppression and suppression — the symbolism of those statues, anti-slavery and forwardness, is incomplete, hypocritical even, for some.
So why were these statues valued more than George Floyd, more than Breonna Taylor? Why were progressives suddenly denouncing the Black Lives Matter Movement?
It may be that the Black life has been such a target for hate and violence that desensitization is now our default. It may be that we have devalued the Black life so much that it has become unworthy of protest when it is taken. A statue is not an even trade for a single Black life, and yet many of our community have set its value higher than a human being’s.
As protests continue demanding justice for Jacob Blake and protection for our Wisconsinites of color, we must reconcile our comfortability with white supremacy. We must all reach a point in our city, where if each one of us is asked to trade all the statues in the world, all the buildings in the world, to save one Black life, we do not hesitate before we say “absolutely.”
[Editor's note: This story was corrected to note that, according to Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, Jacob Blake was shot seven, not eight, times.]
Nada Elmikashfi recently ran for state Senate, her first race for public office. This is her inaugural post for her new blog, The New Colossus, which will run weekly on isthmus.com.
