This was posted on Facebook on Friday morning, boosting the signal!
An open Letter to Madison:
I’ve been at a loss for words since March 6th when Matt Kenny killed Tony Robinson. Adding another Black life lost to the state, with many more lost to jail cells and to poverty. I am unsure how to explain to white people that want to understand, how they can never understand the anger, the grief, the pain, the sadness that many of us are sitting here with today.
It’s a pain of millions of lives lost, stolen, enslaved, lynched, locked up, and killed by the very nation whose declaration of independence claims equality for all.
What must be understood is that White Madison can never feel that. Just as I in being light skinned, mixed-race man, will never know what it’s like to be a beautiful dark skinned girl, growing up in a world that tells her she’s ugly. Just as one cannot know my own struggles in finding out who I was as a person, I have usually white people telling me that I’m not black enough or that I’m not white enough. Many people have ‘othered’ me in, various, often painful ways. The simplest and most frequent being “I know you’re not white, but what are you?”
However, even if we’ll never fully get each other, there are plenty of conversations and understandings that must be had. But I will leave those conversations to our allies. These talks need to happen- but understanding didn’t abolish slavery, understanding didn’t end Jim Crow, understanding didn’t integrate schools, and understanding won’t be enough alone to end systematic racism in America. So I leave these to them because I am committed to finding solutions. Are you? If you are committed to justice how far are you willing to go to make an impact? I don’t have all the answers but I have some ideas of what they could be.
Chief Koval must be serious about addressing systematic racism and implicit bias in his police force. That means he won’t give the excuse that we’re using the best training and tactics when we’re getting disparate outcomes. Police trainings and tactics were built by the federal government as a way to shut down social uprisings and around the oppression of my people. He will instead work with us to develop community control over the police and to build a better standard for use of force, past “objective reasonableness,” a standard that is neither of those.
Our Mayor must be willing to work with the community through these issues and not just our so called leaders. It means we must be willing to make sacrifices, especially at this time when many of our public institutions are under attack by the State of Wisconsin.
The county must decide not to vote for long-term jail renovations and instead invest in mental health facilities that are not attached to the jail. It means the county invests in community led solutions to keep people out of jail. We need those in power to work with us to free 350 Black people currently in Jail. If systematic racism did not exist, with crime rates about equal across races, then there should be only around 50 Black people in jail at any given moment, not close to 400. It means we must push for the paradigm shift that is needed, together.
As progressives we must pool our resources at this time when we are under attack by the State of Wisconsin. It means that we go to the core of what being a progressive is and that is investing in people not jails, not bike paths, not hotels, or a new unaffordable to most high-rise. Maybe it even means higher taxes for those that can afford it. We must uplift those most oppressed by ourselves, as a city. We must understand that as a city we played a part in these disparities. If we chose to uplift this city in ways that we now tell ourselves we can’t because it’s just not done that way, we can lead the nation in ending structural racism and not be leading it in structural racism.
If you are truly about justice, then join us in that fight and there are many different ways to fight, but still fight. We can chose to end the cycle of institutional racism right here, right now. Radical problems require radical solutions. The ending of slavery and the ending of Jim Crow were both radical ideas once. So we must choose courage, justice, and humanity over an order that has none.
I’ll end with these words, “We declare our right on this earth…to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” – Malcolm- X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz)
-Matthew Braunginn
