During unrest, listen carefully to what the community is saying
“He knows that he certainly does not want his children living this way. He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.”
— James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue Uptown,” Esquire magazine, July, 1960
As we continue to see unprecedented worldwide protests after the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, James Baldwin’s words from 60 years ago speak volumes today. Many are struggling to understand the outpouring of emotions that some refer to as anger in the African American community around the country. I’d like to provide some historical context to give clarity to the situation we are struggling with.
First, we must understand that the protests are not exclusively about George Floyd’s murder. There has been an accumulation of trauma suffered by our community at the hands of police over many years, decades and centuries. We are, quite frankly, tired of this nonsense. The emotions on display range from anger to frustration, to disgust, to fear, to sadness as well as contempt for a nation that continues to treat us so horribly. We have not suddenly reached a breaking point; each day is a breaking point for us.
It’s not just about police brutality. It’s about a lifetime of racism, a lifetime of being treated as worthless human beings, generations being forced into segregated neighborhoods, constantly being discriminated against when trying to find a job, and centuries of having the majority population viciously attack and kill us with impunity with no repercussions. It’s already way too much to process.
And then we see another unarmed black man killed by police just after seeing black jogger Ahmaud Arbery murdered by white men in Georgia, police shooting and killing 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor in her house after breaking down her door with a no-knock warrant looking for a man who is already in police custody and another white woman calling 911 on a black man, falsely claiming that he is threatening her.
Trauma is much worse when it is repeated. To walk into a world that tells you something is wrong with you every day of your life is debilitating even when you are otherwise doing well. Even when you are not the victim of the trauma in a direct way, you suffer indirect trauma. I couldn’t force myself to watch the video of George Floyd’s last moments because I see myself vicariously in the video of his murder. I could have been George.
Police brutality is our lived experience
What we are dealing with now is directly connected to the past and the present. It has been a long trail of mistreatment and devaluation of our lives that has led to the emotional outbursts you’ve seen on television. It is the manifestation of the pain we suffer in isolation that too many whites can’t believe or fathom. Whites are just now beginning to see what we see as police across the country brutalize peaceful protesters and media members while the tape is rolling with the support of our local, state, and national leaders.
Police brutality has been our lived experience since slave patrols turned into police departments. Black people have been dealing with police brutality in Milwaukee for decades. We recall the murder of Daniel Bell by police in 1958, the death of Earnest Lacy in the back of a police wagon in 1981, the brutal beating of Frank Jude by off-duty police officers in 2004, the death of Derrick Williams struggling to breathe in a hot police car in 2011, the killing of Dontre Hamilton whose only transgression was sleeping on a park bench in 2014. These things add up to constant distrust and anger at the police department in our city.
Don’t get this confused with someone saying “all cops are bad” as some try to assert. When I hear people make the claim that these protests say that, it is because of selective hearing. You are hearing what you say and not what we are saying. Even though most cops are not committing acts of brutality, far too many of them are.
Those who try to claim we are exaggerating only need to take a close look at how police are reacting to peaceful protesters across the country. Once again, I’m not talking about those who are setting a police station on fire and throwing Molotov cocktails and shooting at police. I’m talking about the vast majority of men, women, and children peacefully expressing themselves, as is supposedly their right according to the Constitution. They face police brutality while protesting police brutality.
In 2009, the late Dennis Green, then coach of the Arizona Cardinals, had just lost a game to the Chicago Bears that he thought they should have won. He famously ranted at the press conference after the game, “They are what we thought they were.” We are seeing this truth about police right now. They are providing the fodder for continuing protests by tear-gassing innocent people, beating reporters, shooting rubber bullets into the faces of civilians, driving police cars into crowds of protesters just to name a few things I’ve seen.
There have been negative actions like looting and setting fires by some after peaceful protests have ended. These are simply opportunists. People will always take advantage of these situations but they are not “burning down” their own community, as people like to say. They are burning symbols of the white community that has oppressed them for so long. People from outside of the community own most of the businesses that are being damaged. Unfortunately, some businesses owned by members of the community are caught in this cycle as well.
‘Language of the unheard’
When people live in oppressive societies there is a tendency to carry around a lot of pent-up emotions toward those oppressing them. We can see how those emotions are being dealt with if we listen to the peaceful protesters instead of focusing on the looters. The messages are crystal clear. We want change. We are tired of being treated like our lives are inconsequential. We in Milwaukee are tired of seeing the billions of dollars being spent on downtown and Third Ward while very little of significance is being done in our communities.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told us in 1968 that “riots are the language of the unheard.” The same things we called for in the 1960s are what we’re calling for now. We need to keep demanding justice because we are not seeing justice. People seem more concerned with protecting property than the lives of the marginalized in Milwaukee and other cities around the country. No one seems to care that more than 70,000 homes, many of them in the black community, have lead water laterals or that lead paint abatement by landlords rarely happens and our children are being poisoned each day. No one seems to be concerned that more than 90,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared — leaving the central city devoid of the high-quality jobs that brought black people to Milwaukee from the 1940s through the early 1970s.
The median family income for blacks in Milwaukee in 1970 when we had access to high-paying jobs was the equivalent of $50,000 in today’s money. Now it is about half that. Our median family income was the seventh-highest for blacks in the country. Our poverty rate was one of the lowest in the country for blacks in 1970 but today is among the highest. Our schools that were well funded when we had family-supporting jobs are now desperate for proper funding because property tax revenues are so low and our state leaders have decimated K-12 education by slashing funding.
More than 60 predatory subprime lenders converged on Milwaukee’s black community during the housing crisis. They convinced many to take out second mortgages and thousands of people lost their homes as a result. Associated Bank, Wells Fargo and Countrywide Financial were each sued by the federal government for discriminating against black and Hispanic borrowers. Associated Bank settled by paying $200 million in 2015, Wells Fargo paid $175 million in 2012 and Countrywide Financial paid $335 million in 2011 to settle “redlining” suits brought by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. American Family Insurance refused to insure blacks in certain parts of the city for years.
The emotions you are witnessing are a result of all of these experiences. Don’t assume you know what this is about unless you listen to what our community is saying. We said the same things in 1965 in Watts, in Milwaukee, Detroit and Newark in 1967, across the nation in 1968 after Dr. King was murdered, in 1992 in Los Angeles after cops were acquitted after unmercifully beating Rodney King, in Ferguson in 2014 after an unarmed Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer who faced no charges.
The messages are the same and, unfortunately, the responses have been the same. Instead of admitting that something is wrong with the way we police, our leaders have unleashed the police to beat us into submission. This will not work. Open your ears and your hearts may follow.
Reggie Jackson, a local historian, is head griot of America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee. He is co-owner of Nurturing Diversity Partners and the senior columnist for the Milwaukee Independent.
Contact the Ideas Lab by emailing David D. Haynes, editor: david.haynes @jrn.com