By Sikivu Hutchinson
Twitter @Sikivuhutch
Here’s one more reason to rally against the
candidacy of rabid Christian fundamentalist, college dropout and newly declared GOP
presidential hopeful Governor Scott Walker—Wisconsin boasts the highest rates
of suspension
and incarceration
for African Americans in the country. As
a union-busting darling, Walker has emerged as one of the key architects of the
radical right’s “take back the nation” agenda of dismantling civil rights,
workers’ rights, gay rights, women’s rights and abortion rights. But while
Walker’s destructive right-to-work
policies are widely known, Wisconsin’s status as a cynosure for black mass
incarceration and racial achievement gaps is not. Under Walker’s watch, Wisconsin, in which
African Americans represent a mere 6.5% of the population, has over-disciplined
and locked up more blacks than Southern states with two-three times the number
of African Americans. The state is at
the epicenter of the national suspension epidemic in which black children are
criminalized as early as pre-school.
Prison pipelining in K-12 is a precursor to school pushout, adult
incarceration, homelessness and chronic unemployment. Yet Walker’s policies have decimated what
little remains of the social welfare safety net; denying formerly incarcerated
African Americans the prisoner reentry resources they need to get jobs, vocational
training and access to college.
Wisconsin’s draconian sentencing and
zero tolerance discipline policies drive these gross disparities. According
to Gene Demby, “Wisconsin beats the state with the next-highest rate of
imprisoned black men by nearly 3 percentage points—a gap bigger than the total
distance between the second and tenth-place states.” The majority of the state’s incarcerated African
Americans are non-violent drug offenders who come from Milwaukee. The city has
a 40% black population and is one of the most segregated in the nation. While half of all 30-40 year old black
Milwaukee men have been incarcerated nearly half of all black Milwaukee
students have been suspended. By
contrast only 16% of white Milwaukee students were suspended.
As foes of “big government”,
Walker and his states’ rights acolytes conjure up the usual scapegoats of
broken black families, violent neighborhoods, criminal behavior and disrespect
for authority. But the criminal behavior
and practices Walker won’t chest thump about are his administration’s
responsibility for the state’s staggering
racial achievement gap. Walker’s private school voucher program (which
primarily goes to religious schools) has gutted Wisconsin’s public schools. His newly
signed budget would expand the voucher program, cut $250 million in funding
to the state’s university system and slash school districts’ funding. Currently the state is second only to D.C. in
egregious disparities between black and white students in reading and math. High
rates of suspension make black students more vulnerable to being pushed out of
school permanently. And it’s no revelation that disproportionate suspension,
expulsion and push-out correlate with low college preparation and college
access rates among black youth.
Yet this is especially ironic given
college dropout Walker’s bright future as one of the GOP’s leading “visionaries”.
Walker’s white affirmative action ascent is a bird flip to people of color who
don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected to higher public
office without a college degree. Indeed,
black college graduates have higher rates of unemployment than white high
school graduates. Unlike Donald Trump,
Walker is a clear and present danger to the future of social justice in
America, a twenty-first century menace who would, without compromise, destroy every
last vestige of the public sector and turn the U.S. into an even bigger prison
than it is now.
