Front Burner - Jacob Blake’s shooting, police violence, and Wisconsin’s history of segregation

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

U.S President Donald Trump visited Kenosha, Wis., this week, following Jacob Blake’s shooting by police, and days of protests. The unrest in the city has become a flashpoint for racial tensions in the U.S. Today on Front Burner, Reggie Jackson tells us how that fits into Wisconsin’s history of segregation. He’s a journalist, educator and co-host of a new podcast called By Every Measure — a series on the history of race relations in Milwaukee.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Kenosha has been ravaged by anti-police and anti-American riots. They have been hit so hard. These are not acts of peaceful protest, but really domestic terror. With Donald Trump's visit this week, the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin,

continues to be a political and social flashpoint in the racial tensions that have rocked the U.S. this summer. It was there just over a week ago that an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake, was shot in the back seven times by a police officer, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. They shot my son seven times. Seven times. Like he didn't matter.

But my son matters. And it's also there that in the ensuing protests, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot and killed two protesters. These incidents are getting a lot of attention right now, but for Black communities in Wisconsin, they've been a lived reality for generations. Today, my conversation with Reggie Jackson.

He's someone who's dedicated his life to teaching Wisconsin's history of segregation. He's a writer and also the co-host of a brand new NPR podcast on systemic racism and the Black experience in Milwaukee. It's called By Every Measure. I'm Josh Bloch. This is Frontburner. Arnburn. Hello, Reggie. Hi, Josh. Thanks for having me on today. Well, thank you for being with us. I want to start with President Donald Trump's visit to Kenosha, which seems to be highlighting the racial tension and divisions in the city and in the state of Wisconsin. He labeled the protests as anti-American and he accused protesters of acts of domestic terrorism. To stop the political violence, we must also confront the radical ideology that includes this violence.

We must also confront the radical ideology that includes this violence. Reckless far-left politicians continue to push the destructive message that our nation and our law enforcement are oppressive or racist. They'll throw out any word. What was your reaction seeing the president in Kenosha this week? Well, you know, I wasn't surprised by what he said. He's staying on message. You know, I know a surprised by what he said. He's staying on message. You know, I know a lot of people in Kenosha. I've spent a great deal of time there doing anti-racism work over a number of years. And I know leading up to his visit that people there were not happy that he was coming.

I know the governor of Wisconsin asked him to not come. In a letter to President Donald Trump, Governor Tony Evers asking the president to reconsider his visit to Kenosha on Tuesday, writing, quote, I am concerned your presence will only hinder our healing. People were not ready to have an already very difficult situation become even more difficult. And he pretty much said what I thought he would say, referring to the protests, which have been mostly peaceful as terrorism, but refusing to refer to the young man who murdered two people in cold blood, allegedly as a terrorist. So it's on message. It's nothing out of the ordinary from what we've heard in the past from the president. And when he was asked by reporters about the issue of whether there was systemic racism within U.S. law enforcement, he denied that fact.

We wouldn't be here without our law enforcement. Even me, I'm here today. I feel so safe. We have to condemn the dangerous anti-police rhetoric. It's getting more and more. It's very unfair. You have some bad apples. We all know that. And those will be taken care of through the system. I've heard this argument from so many people who don't want to talk about systemic racism. They don't want to talk about racism, period. And the fact that racism is systemic in this country is something that a lot of people can't wrap their minds around because we tend to think of racism as individual acts of bigotry. And each time that question is posed to people who don't believe in systemic racism, who want to deny it, they always change the subject. They always try to talk about something completely different. And I've advocated for people to not allow that to happen, to not get sidetracked in these other conversations, keep the focus on the idea of systemic racism so that we can begin to have those types of honest conversations

we need to have. Well, to that point, I mean, how does the shooting of Jacob Blake fit into the story of the relationship between police and Black communities in Wisconsin today? Well, you know, there have been multiple issues with police throughout the state of Wisconsin and the Black community. This is just the latest of many. You know, there have been cases over a number of years here in the city of Milwaukee. Going back to the 1950s, there was a case where a young black man was murdered by a police officer, and it took nearly 20 years before his partner finally confessed that they had actually covered it up.

Police officer Louie Krause said he saw his partner shoot a black man and then plant a knife on his dead body. Did you ever complain to anybody? Who are you going to complain to? Who would you complain to? The chief? He was probably just as prejudiced as the guy walking the beat. There have been cases in the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s.

Every decade we have cases. In recent years, there's obviously the case of Dontre Hamilton, who was shot and killed by a Milwaukee police officer after sleeping on a park bench in downtown Milwaukee. It is hard to fathom how Mr. Hamilton, under the circumstances, could be shot 14 times and killed by someone cooked with authority to uphold the law. We had the case of Tony Robinson, who was murdered by a police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, our capital. We had the case of Saville Smith, shot and killed by a police officer here in Milwaukee,

three blocks away from my home, which led to a lot of protests and civil unrest back in 2016. So this is really kind of par for the course. It's nothing out of the ordinary. These are things that we've been fighting against for decades here in the state of Wisconsin. And, you know, it looks like the fight will continue moving forward. The question that we have,

that we charge America with today is, how many more examples of police brutality do we need to effectuate change? How many more examples of police brutality do we need to effectuate change? How many more? How many more marches do we have to partake in to get change? And just to give a bit more context here, Wisconsin is a Midwestern state that has a relatively small black population. It's just 6.7% of the state's total population.

And like several of the neighboring states, Wisconsin is highly segregated. It's, in fact, by several measures, one of the most segregated states in the country. And Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities. What does that mean on the ground? I mean, what does segregation look like in Wisconsin today in 2020? What does that mean on the ground? I mean, what does segregation look like in Wisconsin today in 2020? Well, you know, segregation is highly correlated with life in the Midwest. As Blacks were leaving the South during the Great Migration and moved to places on the West Coast and the East Coast and the Midwest, white people reacted to it in a way that they showed Black people that, okay, you can come to these states, these cities, but we don't want you living anywhere near us. And so they use practices and policies like racial restrictive covenants, which kept blacks out of neighborhoods and really helped to create very

segregated all white spaces. Here in the state of Wisconsin, we're considered to be the second most segregated state. Metropolitan Milwaukee is the most segregated metropolitan area in the country. And what it looks like when you come to Wisconsin, you recognize very quickly that about almost 70% of Black people who live in the state of Wisconsin live in the city of Milwaukee. Over 80% of Blacks who live in the state live in Southeast Wisconsin. There aren't a lot of places outside Southeast Wisconsin where you go where you're going to see a significant number of Blacks. I've been traveling around the state over the last three years doing work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I visited 35 different communities talking to people about these issues. And, you know, when I go to those places,

whites that I talk to always say, well, you know, we don't have a whole lot of people of color here to talk to and engage in conversations about these topics. And they ask, well, why is that the case, Reggie? So I go over with them the history of segregation, how the federal government, state and local governments really helped to facilitate segregation over a long period of time, many decades. And it's going to take a very long time to alleviate that. Tell me more about racial restrictive covenants. What exactly are they? Racial restrictive covenants were tools that were created in the early 1900s attached to the deeds of property. So if there was a new subdivision being built,

they would covenant this subdivision with language that said literally that the only people that could live here are white people. This is what they sound like. literally that the only people that could live here are white people. This is what they sound like. No persons of any race other than the Aryan race shall use or occupy any building or any lot. Neither shall said property be transferred or leased to a colored person. If they violated the terms of it, if they rented or sold to people of color, particularly blacks, then they could be sued by their neighbors and lose that property. These covenants were used to keep people of color out of white neighborhoods,

to keep them as white as possible over a long period of time. For decades, they were used until they were challenged in the Supreme Court case. Shelley v. Kramer in 1948 said that these covenants could no longer be legally enforced. So that meant that the police could no longer come in and evict families who were living in houses as a result of those covenants. But it didn't stop people from writing the covenants that, you know, Supreme Court decision wasn't really upheld by very many people. They continue to discriminate. And finally, the pass of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act made those completely unconstitutional. But the damage had already been done. You had created all white spaces around the country. And those spaces that were very white back in the day are

still exceptionally white to this day. It's a very persistent myth that northern cities never had formal segregation. The South had Jim Crow, and look at those signs. Well, racial covenants did the work of Jim Crow in the North, all over the North. I'm curious to know about your own experience growing up in Wisconsin. I mean, I understand you moved from Mississippi when you were a kid, and some people might assume that, you know, northern states were more progressive and more integrated. What was your experience? Well, you know, it's interesting. I left Mississippi in 1973.

My last year in Mississippi was second grade. The federal courts had ordered the state of Mississippi to integrate their schools shortly before I left. And so I had white classmates in Mississippi. You know, this was, you This was many, many years after Brown versus Board of Education. They finally complied with that order. But moved to Milwaukee. I started third grade in Milwaukee. And from third grade through eighth grade, every school I attended was all black, not a single white classmate in Milwaukee. So I leave a very segregated state in Mississippi, which has that reputation. I had white classmates there come to Milwaukee and all the way through eighth grade.

I have none. It wasn't until I went to high school and I caught the city bus all the way to the south side, which is the white part of Milwaukee, to go to school at a school there. And that was the first time I had white classmates in Milwaukee. first time I had white classmates in Milwaukee. So I oftentimes refer to Wisconsin as Wississippi because it's, you know, racism may look a little bit different in Wisconsin than it does in Mississippi, but it's as strong and as powerful here as it was in Mississippi. You talked earlier about the fact that you travel around the states and give talks about the history of racism in Wisconsin to largely white audiences. And I'm curious to know what kind of reactions you hear from people when they learn about the history of segregation, the history of systemic racism in their state.

Well, you know, Josh, people are very surprised to hear the details. You know, they know a little bit about it, but to hear the intimate details, to hear the role that the federal, state, local governments played, the role that banks played, the role that real estate agents played and National Association of Realtors played, those intimate details really tell them two things. It tells them how segregation was really created, that it wasn't this idea that people wanted to self-segregate with the exception of white people. They wanted to self-segregate. They had the tools to create segregated spaces. No one else did. And the other part of it is, is they begin to understand why their communities look the way that they look.

look. And they have, after that, after learning those things, they have what I call productive conversations, conversations about the current state of affairs, where they understand the history of how we got to where we are. Because in most cases, when people talk about, you know, the current state of affairs, particularly race issues, they don't know enough about American history to have productive conversations. They think they do, but we've all been cheated in our history classes. We've all been cheated out of really learning about all of the ugly parts of American history. We learn about all the wonderful things, but we leave out all of the ugly things. And when we do talk about them, it's a very brief conversation. So when they are able to get that information, they have the types of conversations that lead them to want to work across these divisions that

we have to really collaborate with communities of color, to really network with organizations that are doing racial and social justice work. They can find a space to do that that is a comfortable space because they have more ammunition to work with. They know then how to have conversations with people who push back against those ideas, because now they have factual information about American history, and they're not going off of what they think they know. They're going off of, okay, now I really get it. I understand how these disparities that we see were created and are maintained. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income. That's not a typo.

50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. It's interesting, you know, Wisconsin, like many states over the summer, has seen many Black Lives Matter protests over the course of the last few weeks and months sparked by the killing of George Floyd. How much support are you seeing for the movement from the white population in your state? There's been a lot. I've been quite surprised that folks in small rural communities around the state have reached out to me and sent photographs and newspaper articles about protests, Black Lives Matter protests that are taking place throughout the state.

There was the local paper in town reported maybe about a month ago that there were at least 45 communities in Wisconsin that had had, you know, Black Lives Matter protests, some very small communities that are mostly white. You know, Wausau, Wisconsin, across Wisconsin, a lot of small communities have seen people come together, even in communities where there aren't a whole lot of people of color. Whites have marched, you know, alongside other whites and said, listen, we're tired of this stuff. We want changes to happen. We really do not want this to be representational of our state. We don't want our state to look this way in the eyes of the rest of the country. We want to show people that Wisconsin isn't as bad as some people think it is. And they're fighting very hard. You know, they're risking a lot by protesting. But I also say this to those folks that are protesting. I said, this is the easy part. You know, protesting, being out there with

Black Lives Matter t-shirts on, having those signs in your yard and businesses, those are the easy things. The hard things come when you have to begin to actually do the hard work of making those changes within the institutions. Those are the things that could be most challenging for those white allies. So following the shooting of Jacob Blake, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers proposed a slate of police reform measures. It included things like limits on use of force and a ban on chokeholds. The duty to act rests on all of us and perhaps most importantly on us as elected officials. These are common sense policies that transcend political debate. The special session that was convened was actually shut down by Republicans after less than a minute.

But that kind of incremental reform has been criticized by activists for not going far enough. What do you make of that? Well, you know, I think it's pretty common that the reforms don't go far enough, whether it be from Governor Evers or any other elected official. I think, you know, from my perspective in particular, I think that what we don't talk about enough is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we police. The fact that we kill over a thousand people in this country every year, police kill over a thousand people consistently. That's something very wrong with that. The fact that

police use deadly force so often, regards to who the victims are, whether they're black, white, Asian, Native American, Latino, whatever, the excessive use of force is part of the way policing is done. There was this little girl, maybe about two or three years old, they were sitting up on the second floor. And as we were walking by, the little girl says, there's the police. They're here to kill us. What did you think of that? I just, it just shocked me that you could hear your child say that and not correct them. This is nothing new. I'm not sad. I stopped crying years ago. I have been watching police murder people that look like me for years. We've accepted it. We

protect the police officers from it. There's a blue wall of silence where other officers protect, you know, their peers. You know, we had court decisions that protect police officers. So the reform that I talk about is different reform than just, you know, changing a few things here and there. It goes to depths that I don't think people are willing to really have a conversation about, because ultimately, at some point, we have to realize that all of the things that we think about the way police do their jobs, we get mostly from

watching cop shows on television, right? But when you talk to police officers, they tell you that, no, that's not the reality of how our jobs work. I've talked to current as well as former police officers. Those who are former police officers who are retired talk very openly and honestly about the racism within police departments. They talk about the difficulty of being a snitch. You're jeopardizing your career. There are very strong limits on what you can say in your contract as a police officer. So to me, the reforms have to be much deeper than what Governor Evers and others have talked about. But here, the biggest battle Governor Evers has is obviously even with those reforms that

he talked about, without the Republicans who run the Assembly and the Senate in the state of Wisconsin cooperating, there's nothing he can really get done. How hopeful are you that with the Black Lives Matter protests happening across the country, sustained protests now going on for weeks, even months, that some of these changes can indeed come about? Well, you know, there's a part of me that's very happy that we're, as a nation, we're pushing for those changes. But I always say this to people, I'm waiting to see the real changes happen. I can read what you say you're going to do. I'm waiting to see you do it. I can read what you say you're going to do. I'm waiting to see you do it.

I'm waiting for real reforms to happen because ultimately, you know, people can talk a good game. But when the rubber hits the road, are they really going to put those types of reforms in place? And it's not about police training. You know, I'm tired of hearing about de-escalation training and all these other things. Those things don't go very far because they don't get enough hours of de-escalation training to counter the number of hours they get of putting hands on people and using lethal weapons. So, you know, you could give a police officer eight hours of de-escalation training a year. But how does that compare to the, you know, dozens and dozens of hours of training that teaches them to control people physically?

of training that teaches them to control people physically. So I hope that things change, but I'm not going to be foolish enough to believe that the protests, regardless of how big they are, regardless of the fact that they spread around the country, regardless of the fact that there are a lot of white allies involved, that that's going to change America. We've been here before. We've seen protests. We've seen activity related to asking for reform of police for decade after decade after decade. And we've heard a lot of empty platitudes about police reform, but we haven't seen those changes happen. And as I said earlier, there's something fundamentally flawed with the way we do policing. And unless we as a nation are willing to admit that, then real changes will never happen, Josh. Reggie, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Yeah, it's been a story that we've been covering. Despite a growing list of concerns about the Governor General's office, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is standing by Julie Payette. We have an excellent governor general right now, and I think

on top of the COVID crisis, nobody's looking at any constitutional crises. Trudeau defended Payette yesterday in an interview with Red FM in Vancouver. This was his first public defense of Payette since allegations of bullying and harassment at Rideau Hall first surfaced. The Privy Council's office is currently investigating the matter. That's all for today. I'm Josh Bloch. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.