In a recent interview with Diverse Issues in Higher Education, UW-Madison’s Jerlando Jackson attributed long-standing racial inequalities as causes for recent protests in Kenosha, Wis., after the shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, by a police officer.
Jackson is a Vilas Distinguished Professor, Chair of the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, Director and Chief Research Scientist at Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory and the co-founder of the International Colloquium on Black Males in Education.
In the article, written by Sara Weissman, Jackson provided commentary arguing that historical patterns of racial inequities in Wisconsin and the Midwest ultimately led to the current sociopolitical environment, in which violent demonstrations ensued following the shooting of Blake, a Black man, and the deaths of two protesters at the hands of a 17-year-old from Illinois.
“Wisconsin isn’t a ‘sexy place to discuss’ so it, along with the rest of the Midwest, is regularly glossed over in national conversations on racism,” Jackson said. “But we should not be left off any policy discourse when it comes to policing, and particularly policing Black males.”
Jackson referenced a 2013 study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee showing that the Black men were more likely to be imprisoned in the state than anywhere else in the country. The research showed that Wisconsin’s 13 percent incarceration rate for Black men nearly doubled the national average.
Jackson described the state as a “laboratory for understanding what’s wrong with policing” and “a laboratory for recognizing that you can live among it and not even know it exists” but emphasized the fact that “you don’t get to be the worst at something by accident.”
The findings indicated that 1-in-8 working-aged Black males in Wisconsin are in state prisons or jails. More research from the same study showed more than half of all Black men in their 30s and 40s residing in Milwaukee had been incarcerated at some point.
The high incarceration rates pulls a large population out of the job pool, which contributes to Milwaukee’s reputation as a city boasting one of the biggest gaps in income between Black and white residents, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Only six percent of the Wisconsin population identifies as Black, and 90 percent of Black residents can be found in six counties located in Southeastern and Southern Wisconsin, including Kenosha, Milwaukee, Dane, Racine, Rock and Waukesha. On a countywide level, Milwaukee County has the highest percent of African American population at 25.6 percent, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
As protests continued in Kenosha after Blake was shot in the back seven times by a Kenosha police officer on Aug. 23, Jackson views the unrest as a “cry to be seen after years of neglect” according to the article.
This is the result of “many, many decades of pent-up frustration — to be in a place where perhaps you’re living under conditions that you know are among the worse in our country, and no one is really talking about it,” Jackson said.
At the same time, Jackson offered support to the demonstrators in addressing societal problems that still persist.
The protesters are “continuing being ignored, continuing being overlooked but also carrying on the same energy — and might I add, positive energy — to bring this greater awareness [that] racial discrimination and inequality needs to stop in our country,” Jackson said.
