The Tall Tasks Before Us

August 17, 2022

by Matthew Rothschild, Executive Director

(This is the prepared text of a speech Matt Rothschild gave at a August 16 webinar on “Taking a Faithful Stance on Racial Equity,” co-sponsored by Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice, the Wisconsin Council of Churches, WISDOM, and MICAH.)

Thank you, Rabbi Bonnie, for that sweet intro, and thank you for all the amazing work you’ve been doing, with the faith community and with the whole coalition of groups that are working together to advance racial, social, political, and economic democracy here in Wisconsin.

And thanks to all of you, on this zoom, for all the work you all have been doing on the crucial issue of racial equity.

It’s an honor to be with you.

I’d like to talk to a bit about my book, especially the chapters that relate to racial equity. And if I got time, I want to briefly discuss the anti-democracy movement in Wisconsin and around this country, which is so toxic right now.

In my book, I tackled some of the issues we wrestle with every day at the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

One of those issues is gerrymandering.

Now racial gerrymandering, the rigging of the maps to deprive Black people and other minority groups of fair representation, has been deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court since 1960.

But partisan gerrymandering, the rigging of district maps to favor the political party in power, has never been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional. In fact, Chief Justice Roberts, in 2019 in the Rucho vs Common Cause case, acknowledged that partisan gerrymandering was “incompatible with our democratic principles,” but refused to do anything about it. In fact he said, no federal court can rule on this, so go home and don’t ever come back.

As a result, racial gerrymandering can return. Here’s how: Republicans have made this argument in Wisconsin when they jammed as many African American neighborhoods in the Milwaukee area into as few districts as possible. They said they weren’t doing so because those folks were Black. They were doing so because they were Democratic.

It's just an old trick with a new label on it.

Another issue we deal with all the time is campaign finance reform. We track and expose big and dark money in our politics. Here again, the issue of racial equity arises because people of color are greatly underrepresented among the big donors. A couple years ago, we listed the top 50 donors on the Republican side, and the top 50 on the Democratic side in Wisconsin, and only 1 of the 100 donors was a person of color. (Richard Abdoo of WE Energy). As you know, super-rich donors have much more of a say as to who gets elected, what laws are passed, and what policies are pursued than you and I do.

So when people of color are underrepresented in this big donor class, they’re underrepresented in the State Capitol.

Then there’s the issue of voting rights. In the last session of the Legislature, we saw Republicans passing one restrictive voting rights bill after another. Thankfully, Gov. Evers was there to veto them. But now we have a Wisconsin Supreme Court that just threw out drop boxes!

For people in urban areas , this is going to be a problem. Milwaukee, for instance, used 15 drop boxes in November 2020. Now they can’t use any. So the lines are going to be longer on Election Day, and the lines are going to be longer at the clerk’s office the day or two before, when people are rushing to hand in their absentee ballots. This is going to discourage some voters in urban areas, who are disproportionately voters of color, and that’s the point.

Another voting rights issue and racial equity issue is the disenfranchisement of former felons. In Wisconsin, there are 64,000 people who’ve served their time and have been released from prison but still can’t vote. They can’t vote because they’re still “on paper,” as it’s called. They’re on probation, parole, and extended supervision. And that time can extend for 5, 10, 15 years. That’s outrageous. And since our prison population is disproportionately of color, you can see how this is a racial equity issue.

Then there’s the issue of prison gerrymandering. This, too, lies at the intersection of voting rights and racial equity. Prison gerrymandering, which I didn’t even know about until I came to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, works like this: Say you were living in Milwaukee and you were arrested and convicted and sent to Waupun in December 2019. The Census of 2020 counts you as living in Waupun for the whole next decade, even though you’ve already moved back to Milwaukee in January of 2022 because you served your two-year sentence. So Milwaukee is undercounted in the Census and Waupun is overcounted. As a result, Milwaukee, with the largest concentration of Black people in the state, is underrepresented and under-resourced, and predominantly white Waupun is overrepresented and over-resourced.

Wisconsin is lagging a lot of states on these issues. Some states are banning prison gerrymandering. Many states are allowing former felons to vote. Two states allow people in prison to vote right now!

Pop quiz. Which two states are they?

Maine and Vermont.

But not Wisconsin. We’re falling further and further behind.

And we won’t get ahead until we confront racism square in the face.

I have a whole chapter in my book called “Root Out Racism.” That’s one of the 12 ways to save democracy in our state. You bet it is.

And the roots are deep. For my book, I went back and read part of the proceedings of the state constitutional convention in 1847, and there was a whole lot of ugly racism there when the question arose as to whether Black men could vote. (Remember: Only men could vote back then.) A delegate named Mr. Ryan called Black people an “unfortunate class of men” and said it would be “an injustice to place the two races in the same scale of social equality.” And so Black men didn’t get the right to vote until 20 years later.

I sketch the history of racism against Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in Wisconsin, and I note the vast disparities in income and wealth that exist here, and the appallingly low quality-of-life rankings for people of color in Wisconsin.

And then I discuss some solutions, which won’t be new to you, I’m sure.

They include:

I know: This is all a tall task, but we’re in the tall task business.

And speaking of tall tasks, we must take on the full-fledged anti-democracy movement in Wisconsin and this country.

This is the scariest moment for our democracy since 20,000 Nazi supporters gathered in Madison Square Garden under giant red and black swastika flags in 1939.

And what does this anti-democracy movement consist of?

The Trump cult. Tens of millions of Americans still think he’s the greatest thing since the SOS pad.

White Nationalists . These racists are armed and dangerous. They wear shirts that say, “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” They’re referring to the old Chilean dictator who overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende. Pinochet’s forces killed several thousand people and tortured tens of thousands more. The white nationalists also wear shirts that say, “6 Million Wasn’t Enough,” and by that, they mean, disgustingly, that Hitler should have killed more than 6 million Jews.

The anti-democracy movement also consists of highly irrational people: The election deniers of 2020, the COVID deniers, the QAnon conspiracy crowd – all impervious to facts, evidence, and reason. It’s hard to have a functioning democracy with this level of irrationalism in the bloodstream.

Another crucial part of the anti-democracy movement is the leadership of the Republican Party, which has thrown in with Trump. You remember: The head of the RNC called Jan. 6 “legitimate political discourse.” Those are the three most obscene words I’ve heard in the more than 40 years I’ve been covering politics.

And the final element of this anti-democracy movement is the rightwing media infrastructure thatfeeds poisonous propaganda to tens of millions of Americans as if on a 24/7 IV drip. It’s garbage in, and garbage out.

We must defeat this anti-democracy movement, and how do we do that?

Well, here’s a short list:

None of this will be simple. So my advice is always to do the work with a community of friends, which you are doing already. It’s so much easier that way!

I want to leave you with this wonderful quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates: “History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not because you are guaranteed of victory but because you are guaranteed of an honorable and sane life.”

So keep struggling, and keep living your honorable and sane lives, and together, with a little luck, we’ll get through this treacherous time and we’ll arrive at a more perfect union.