REFLECTIONS/Jonathan Gramling
The Fight Is Never Over
“The fight is not over and young people in the African American community especially need to engage this fight for it is their future freedom that is at risk. If you think conditions today are bad, things can get much worse. Freedom is not guaranteed!”
I wrote that back in 2012 for my Juneteenth Day column and I couldn’t have said more prescient words as I look at the political landscape today
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for his own political ambitions, is leading the conservative wave in his quest for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. He’s trying to turn back the clock to 1950 or before when education and everything else was segregated. Now he hasn’t declared that the schools should be segregated, but he is doing his best with his efforts to banish the truth about America’s slavery and segregated past from the curriculum of Florida’s schools. It only takes one — read conservative — parent to object.
And then DeSantis is trying to sanitize higher education in Florida. The banning of “critical race theory,” whatever that is, really means that anyone can have removed curriculum that doesn’t reinforce a white supremacist view of America and its history. I mean what are they going to start saying about slavery? That African Americans are “immigrants who gladly jumped onto slave ships in Senegal where they would be stacked like timber for the long voyage to America where they would work long hours in cotton fields for no pay and being the object of any white person’s last if they felt like it?” Wait someone already tried to push that immigrant concept.
Pretty soon, the Civil War will be referred to only as the War of Reunification and had nothing to do with ending slavery. Or maybe they will be saying that the Confederate Army actually won the Civil War. Or that the freed slaves just didn’t like to vote and the Ku Klux Klan reminded them that they didn’t like to. Where does this BS contrived by conservative Republicans end?
And I was actually shocked when Assembly Speaker for Life Robin Vos proposed the elimination of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programming at UW System universities. He stated that these programs created too much division and hostility on UW campuses.
Isn’t Vos blaming the victim here? Excuse me, but I always observed that it was the micro-aggressions and blatant racist “free Speech” that always created problems on campus and that DEI Programs were necessary for students of color, especially Black students, to have some sense of safety while they pursued their degrees.
I never hear about groups of UW Black students going around shouting racial epithets at white students and white students claiming that UW-Madison has a poor campus climate because of those angry Black students. No I observe them going to UW football games, enjoying Greek life, sailing on Lake Mendota and enjoying some of the best years of their lives.
But I do hear Black students complaining about the climate, that they have to keep their guard up because they never know when and where — unless they are in the Black Culture Center — the next racial slur or micro-aggression is going to come from.
Vos is blaming the victim and then wants to take away the very things that help them survive while they attain their UW-Madison degrees. Back in the 1990s, I think the enrollment percentage for Black students was around two percent. And then PEOPLE, Posse, First Wave and scholarship programs were instituted or expanded. And so what is the Black percentage today? Around two percent. What does Vos want to do, reduce it to 0.50 percent even though Blacks represent close to seven percent of Wisconsin’s population? Through gerrymandering, Vos and the Republicans have guaranteed themselves control of the Wisconsin legislature and continue to introduce policies and legislation detrimental to the Black community, especially in Milwaukee County. It is time to consider a class action suit against Vos and the Republicans for trying to deny the Black community the vote and then further reduce the Black presence on the UW-Madison campus. How evident does it need to get?