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2021-11-24 03:07:26 By : Ms. Molly Chen

On the evening of October 23, 2004, Milwaukee Police Officer Andrew Spengler hosted a housewarming party. Katie Brown and Kirsten Anthonyson brought two of their own friends: the biracial Frank Jude Jr. and Blake Lovell Harris.

Jude and Harris were the only people of color at the party and felt immediately uncomfortable. Five minutes later, they left the party with Brown and Anthonyson. At that time, Spengler announced that he could not find his badge and accused these people of stealing it. 

Ten to 15 people from the party-many of them off-duty Milwaukee police officers-rushed outside and surrounded Anthonyson's truck with four people sitting inside. The mob asked them to get out of the car and hand over Spengler's badge. "Nigga, we can kill you," Spengler's friend told Jude and Harris. 

The mob eventually dragged them all out of the truck, although they did not find Spengler's badge. A member of the mob cut Harris' face, but he was able to escape. The crowd then turned their attention to Jude. When the mob punched and kicked him, Spengler locked Jude in the car.

Anthonyson used her cell phone to call 911. "They beat him up," she told the operator. "Hang up." A male voice came from behind. Then the line was silent. Antonissen said that when these people saw her calling 911, they snatched the phone from her and threw her into her truck. Before these people also took her phone, Brown called 911 twice.

This group of off-duty policemen took turns beating and kicking Jude. Subsequently, two police officers on duty arrived. Court documents show that one of them, Joseph Schabel, joined the beating and stomped Jude's head with his foot, "until the others could hear the sound of the bone breaking." The men bend one of Jude's fingers backwards until it breaks. Spengler pointed a gun at Jude's head. "I'm the fucking policeman," he said. "I can do whatever I want. I can kill you." 

When Schabel handcuffed Jude, an off-duty police officer named Jon Bartlett picked up a pen and pierced it into Jude's two ear canals, while Jude screamed in pain.

Two years ago, in 2002, Bartlett shot and killed unarmed black Larry Jenkins while escaping from the police. Jenkins’ mother Debra said in 2008: “If my son’s case is just, then the assault on Frank Jude would not happen.” The Milwaukee District Attorney’s Office ruled that the shooting was reasonable.  

After the team was satisfied with their work, Bartlett used a knife to cut off Jude's jacket and pants, and let him dip naked in his blood from the waist down. Jude was taken to the hospital by a police car. 

Jude’s injuries were serious: concussion, broken nose, sprains and fractures of the left hand, sinus fractures, cuts and bruises all over the body, and "severe swelling and bruises" in his left eye. When his four-year-old son came to the hospital, he thought his father was wearing a Halloween costume. "He said,'Dad, take off your mask,'" Jude said at the time. An all-white state jury found the officers not guilty. 

In 2007, a federal jury found that Spengler, Bartlett, and another police officer, Daniel Masaryk, violated Jude’s civil rights. "The distance between civilization and barbarism, and the time it takes to get from one state to another, is frustratingly short," Judge Frank Eastbrook wrote in his decision.

His statement can serve as a verdict on Wisconsin as a state. Under the appearance of Nice in the Midwest, this is the home of men and women. They are inspired by white supremacy like any other state in the South (I know, because I Is related to some of them). The Republican Party’s tolerance and tolerance of systemic racism and police brutality in an approachable and gentle manner foreshadows the Republican Party’s national strategy of linking its electoral destiny to racist incitement. 

The protests that broke out in Kenosha in August this year when the police shot and killed Jacob Black not only marked anger at the bloody record of Wisconsin police brutality, but also expressed anger at the deeper racist shift in state politics. This shift helped Wisconsin switch to Donald Trump in 2016. If Democrats want to win Wisconsin this fall—and according to local Democrats, this is still a big “if”—they will have to face the ugliness and to a large extent of white supremacy in the American dairy industry. On the still unrecognized legacy.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was notorious for failing to visit Wisconsin after losing to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. She became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose Wisconsin in 32 years-even Michael Dukakis could avoid this fate. Clinton wrote in his campaign memoir "What Happened": "I think it's possible to travel to Saginaw a few more times or show more ads in Wakosha and get thousands of votes here and there," but She added that "contrary to popular belief, we have not ignored these states." 

After the 2016 election, many post-mortem analyses attributed Wisconsin's right turn to simple voter indifference or Trump's ability to exploit the "economic anxiety" of disgruntled white voters. What is less known is the state Republican Party's attacks on voting rights over the years, the purpose of which is to make it more difficult for blacks and other people of color to vote. Nearly 90% of black Wisconsin residents live in six counties in the southeastern quadrant of the state. According to a 2017 study conducted by Kenneth Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the state’s voter ID law blocked or blocked the state’s two most populous counties (which also happen to be the two counties in the state) The majority of over 25,000 registered voters in Liberty County) began voting in 2016. Trump won Wisconsin with only 23,000 votes.

"Unfortunately, Wisconsin has become a typical representative of many of the worst abuses, which completely violates our progressive good government tradition," former Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin told me.

It is impossible to talk about Wisconsin politics without addressing Wisconsin’s deep-rooted racism. As a state, Wisconsin is still much whiter than the rest of the United States. Only 6.7% of Wisconsinians are black, compared to 13.4% of the American population.

According to a 2018 study by the Brookings Institution, Milwaukee is the most segregated metropolitan area in the United States. According to a 2013 study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Wisconsin has a higher rate of incarceration of blacks than any other state. The study found that 13% of working-age blacks in Wisconsin go to jail, compared to a national average of 6.7%. .

Black tenants in Wisconsin have also suffered disproportionate evictions. In his 2016 book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in American Cities, Matthew Desmond found that in three years, more than one-eighth of Milwaukee renters were forced to involuntarily Moving, whether through eviction, landlord foreclosure, or construction condemnation. As in many American cities, race and class follow similar fault lines. According to a 2018 report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 79% of black households in Milwaukee County are poor or low-income, compared with 39% of white households in the county.

If you don’t know how many white Republican grandpas here like AM Talk Radio, you can’t understand Trump’s support in Wisconsin. In the past 30 years, two names have dominated the conservative talk radio market in Wisconsin: Mark Behring and Charlie Sykes. Since 2016, Behring has doubled the role of Badger State's own Rush Limbaugh, treating Trumpism like a lake. Sykes is a more interesting case. He is probably best known for expressing racist dissatisfaction about the welfare queen living on white hard-earned taxes. In 2013, Sykes published a book called A Nation of Moochers, arguing that “those who plan and act wisely are asked to rescue the prodigal.” Two years later, Sykes renamed himself #NeverTrump Republican, for the past five years, he has been shocked and disgusted by the racism of the Republican Party.

Republicans in the state designed a system to make black and other minority voters as powerless as possible. The Democrats may not have "ignored" Wisconsin as Clinton wrote, but they have been overwhelmed by a ruthless and effective Republican campaign that began in 2010 when Scott Walker won the governorship. .  

Walker is notorious for being calm and even bored, mainly because he likes ham sandwiches that look sad. But this description concealed the damage Walker caused during his tenure as governor. Wisconsin became a laboratory sponsored by Koch, and we saw the same retrogressive and anti-democratic policies nationwide during the Trump era. Walker smashed public officials’ unions, eliminated environmental protection, and cut funding for public education. This agenda is wrapped in the language of white resentment, in the "WOW" counties-Washington, Ozark and Waukesha-three white suburbs and suburbs-adjacent to Milwaukee County, and has historically served as the state The engine of white people wronged the politics. But his most harmful work was the passage of voter ID laws and regional maps designed to weaken the voting rights of people of color.  

In the past 10 years, Walker and his allies in the Wisconsin legislature have mastered the dark art of racial discrimination, deprivation of voter rights, and general nonsense. "I think the Trump era began in Wisconsin in 2010," Wisconsin Democratic leader Ben Wikler told me. "You can see from the way Republicans here operate in the state legislature that the Trump era will not end after Trump leaves. The persistent pursuit of power at the expense of basic democratic norms is deeply rooted in In the Republican political culture here."  

2010 was the year when Ron Johnson of the Tea Party ousted Feingold, the left-wing reformist champion. Unfortunately, 2010 is also a census year, which means that Walker and Republican lawmakers can draw one of the most absurd congressional maps in the country. Michael Lee of the Brennan Justice Center wrote in April: “The map of Wisconsin is so messy that Republicans can win close to an absolute majority of seats in the House of Representatives even with a few votes.” 

Ten years after the tea party wave, the Wisconsin Republicans did not even try to hide their agenda. After the 2018 midterm elections, Robin Worth, the leader of the state assembly, almost regretted the fact that people living in the city were allowed to vote. â <"If you exclude Madison and Milwaukee from the state elections, we will have a clear majority," Voss said. The midterms saw the election of a Democratic US senator and the end of Walker's reign, but gerrymandering was key to the GOP's ability to hold on to the state Assembly and its seats in the House.

All of this means that no matter how bad Trump’s response to the pandemic is, how severe the recession is, no matter how much Joe Biden leads the polls, the Democrats face a structural disadvantage in Wisconsin, and this disadvantage It's the Republican Party's dislike of people of color based on the state. This disadvantage will only be exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis.

In 2017, I flew back to Milwaukee from Washington to visit my parents. For Democrats in Congress, this has been a difficult week as the Republicans are again trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. After landing, I took my luggage out of the airport and gave my mother a hug. I heard a voice behind me say gloomily: "I need a hug." I turned to see Representative Gwen Moore. He was the only person of color in Washington representing Wisconsin. He and I took the same flight home. "I'll give you a hug, Gwen Moore!" my mother said. I watched Moore and my mother-two proud Milwaukee women born the same year-hugging him on the sidewalk of the airport.

When I told Moore this story in a telephone interview, she laughed nervously. "Oh, I'm so scared that it was me," she said. Moore regrets the way Covid-19 has prevented people from truly embracing each other. "I became another person who didn't hug," she told me. "This does require some adjustments for me."

Like other Wisconsin Democrats, Moore is determined to rebuild the so-called "blue wall" that collapsed in 2016. But even state party leaders are uncomfortable with this possibility, largely because of voting barriers caused by the pandemic. 

"We should plan a knife-edge election," Ben Wickler told me. "In Wisconsin, things have become so tense, so fast, so frequent, you have to organize, as if every vote may be the key to the outcome of the vote." 

This fall will actually be the second statewide pandemic in Wisconsin. In April, as Covid-19 spread across the country like wildfire, Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin refused to postpone the state Supreme Court election. When Democratic Governor Tony Evers issued an order to postpone the election to ensure the safety of voters, Republican leaders challenged the state’s ultra-conservative Supreme Court, which ordered the election to continue as planned. As a result, Wisconsin faced a shortage of nearly 7,000 voting staff in the April election.

"To understand what happened in April, only when you consider the context of all these 10 years of attacks," said Feingold, who now leads the non-partisan American Constitution Association. 

Although the Democrats eventually won the April election, Wisconsin may take the bait again in November. In mid-September, Wisconsin set a new daily record since the pandemic began, with more than 1,500 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the state. Earlier that week, the state Supreme Court-the state Supreme Court showed new judicial negligence by canceling the state's "stay at home order" in May-temporarily delaying the sending of hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots to voters. Threw another incendiary bomb at the voters. An election that is already chaotic.

Complicating all this is that 2020 is the year of the census. If Republicans maintain control of the state legislature and the Senate, it seems almost certain at this point that they will once again redraw the map in their favor, effectively selecting their own voters in the next 10 years. If Republicans win a vetoable majority in the state legislature, the governor will not have the power to reject the new map. "The map we draw next year will define our ability to complete work in ten years (that's a long time)," Evers said in August.

What happened here is very frustrating, because although Wisconsin’s history is as full of injustices as the rest of the United States, it also provides one of the country’s strongest liberal legacy. Without Wisconsin, especially Milwaukee, you cannot tell the story of the American Progressive Movement. In the early twentieth century, Milwaukee elected not one but three socialist mayors. These "sewer socialists"—so called because Mayor Daniel Hoan is committed to improving the city's sanitation system—ruled Milwaukee for 38 years. During this time, they created the city’s park system and fire department, advocated public education, raised the minimum wage, led public vaccination campaigns, purified the city’s drinking water, and struggled for the eight-hour working day. 

The socialist leaders of Milwaukee "call on their compatriots to have a higher concept of common interests, put cooperation above competition, and mutual benefit above naked self-interest," said local historian John Gulda. Written in 2010. "They believe that a government based on these ideals is mankind's best hope for the future."

Wisconsin has a long history of environmentalism, beginning with the state's indigenous tribes. Environmentalists from John Muir to Aldo Leopold ignited their love for the natural world at the University of Wisconsin. In the 1950s and 1960s, Democratic Governor Gaylord Nelson and his Republican successor Governor Warren Knowles made protection a top priority during their tenures. 

Organized labor was once the cornerstone of the European immigrant community in Milwaukee. My grandfather George Prijic has been a card member of the Milwaukee Bricklayer Workers Union for more than 50 years. His daughter, my mother, has been a proud member of the Wisconsin Public Teachers Union for more than 30 years. In the spring of 2011, she joined thousands of educators, state staff and students to protest against Scott Walker's union undermining legislation in the State Capitol. 

Unfortunately, Wisconsin is also the birthplace of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the state’s recent political history has been shaped by a group of white men (and occasionally white women) participating in the conservative cultural war that stopped McCarthyism. . They cleared and laid grass on the grounds that became Trump’s golf course, while insisting that they were not participating in the game. Take a look at Scott Walker, who co-authored a guidebook for the party's voter deprivation strategy with other Republican governors in North Carolina and other states. Take a look at Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff. After six months of work, he slipped out of the West Wing of the White House without even having a contract for a book. In 2019, Vice President Mike Pence was sworn in Priebus as a second lieutenant in the Navy Reserve—a rank that is usually reserved for recent college graduates rather than 47-year-old political agents. Priebus defeated 37 other candidates to become Navy Human Resources Officer, even though he had no previous military experience. 

Or look at Paul Ryan, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, a self-mythological machine, who puts a smile on the party’s dissatisfaction politics while persuading the Washington press team that he is just a humble nerd. Ryan likes to tell friendly reporters that the only reason he stayed in Washington after Trump's election was to protect the nation from the president's own worst impulses. Grenades (an act of self-sacrifice that requires a windfall for the richest man in the country). Nowadays, Ryan is as difficult to be captured by the camera as the mythical Hodag. He has hardly commented on police brutality, black people’s fate, or Trump’s racist appeals, even in his own area of ​​20 years. The same was true when Kenosha caught fire. 

This is not always the case in Wisconsin. However, when powerful people feed on the dark forces of racist politics in this country and are willing to take power from the workers in any necessary way, many things will quickly change. If it can happen here, then it can happen anywhere. However, I must believe that my hometown can return to its liberal roots. Otherwise, it would be a shame to my grandfather, who made bricks and mortars for a better future.

Emma Roller's work has appeared in Jezebel, Teen Vogue, In these Times, The Intercept and the New York Times. She lives in Milwaukee.