Forums, talks and initiatives on Madison, Wisconsin's southwest side continue with commendable objectives: Peace and understanding.
Yet, these efforts in Madison's Meadowood and surrounding neighborhoods (Mosiman, Wisconsin State Journal) are doomed unless stakeholders aka people, acknowledge a reality: Many white people simply do not like the sight of young black and brown adults walking, driving, laughing and certainly not running in public.
Secondly, we live in a police-prosecutor state where the careers of police and prosecutors thrive as they generate good statistics of imprisoning Americans, innocence or guilt of crime not relevant.
Taking away someone's liberty should be the very last resort, but in America it's the go-to action of police.
This absurd spectacle of society is sustained by local citizens who don't like living in the same neighborhood as them, just how much can a white Meadowood and Jamestown resident take?
There's a name for this social pathology: Racism.
I see it most everyday.
Young black and brown folks live it everyday.
To create a healthy, friendly community, you have to treat all members of the community as equals and ask them to join in the fight to make their city, neighborhood, and community to be the best place possible, (Mal Contends). Can anyone seriously suggest this occurs today?
When a major political party, the Republican Party, is working at cross purposes to this objective, success is difficult at best.
Racism is so pervasive and virulent that many black folks with whom I talk adopt the same taboo morality about young minorities: Well, 'she was cussing and swearing.'
That's important? Jail is the answer?
As for the Madison police who fill the Dane County jail with minorities daily, (targeting black drivers on Raymond Road and Whitney Way for example), they don't help matters by the contemporary, robotic and for all-occasions your-papers-please demand to citizens: Your name and birthday.
The correct response to this demand in a Constitutional republic is 'none of your fucking business.'
Yet, consider what this would get a black man 'talking back' to the 'man.'
Racism is the foundation of myriad problems.
Racism's twin—the mindless, authoritarian and imperial bearing of cops towards the citizenry even when they're not arresting them—is baleful, foolish and contemptuous of the traditions of this country founded upon fending off police-military incursions upon human rights.
Composition of police remains the result of self-selection: Civil liberties, peace activists, and intellectuals are not found in abundance under this process. Racists and dumb cops are.
As a Washington Post column argues today: Take the cops out of school for christ's sake (St. Germain, Post), they have no place there and further the school-to-prison pipeline, an obscenity worse even than the breathing-while-black pipeline to jail.
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