By Kathlean Wolf
An opinion piece

Gather ‘round, children, and I will tell you a fairy tale. A story of abolitionists at the northern end of the Underground Railroad, welcoming escaped slaves into our midst; a story of Black Southern immigrants flocking to the industrial hubs of Chicago and Milwaukee to seek their fortunes in the meat-packing plants and factories that built a nation’s wealth. A story of a shining Capitol building on an Isthmus, a place where progressive governance led the way to education for all, labor unions and equality for all men. And eventually, women. Liberalism thrived; Madison became a righteous place, full of good-hearted, wise people. The End. 

Now for another story, about unicorns, dragons and a wandering Pokemon. 

My expectations for Madison, when I moved here in 2008, were few: I expected it to be a bit expensive, I thought I was moving into a Purple State, and I expected to at last not have to hide the fact that I’m a lesbian. Madison was not prejudiced. Madison was liberal. I noticed something odd, though. Whenever I rode the bus, my fellow riders were as likely as not to be Black. Everyone zipping past the bus-stops in their cars was white. In my first temporary job, providing medical rides to elderly people, I met someone on the west side who commented on “those people,” the Black people on the east side. She narrowly avoided using a racial slur, a sign that she obviously knew her vile opinions were socially unacceptable, although she hedged toward assuming I must agree with her. New friends reassured me; that’s what the west side is like. Eastside Madison; that’s where the liberals all lived. We’re cool here.

For several years, I got used to paying twice as much for the same loaf of bread as I had in Utah; Wisconsin lost its Purple State status and gerrymandering destroyed democracy; and almost no one cared that I was a lesbian. I no longer had to fight a daily battle against an absurd injustice, prejudice based on my short hair, lack of makeup, and preference for tough leather boots and blue-jeans. But despite reassurances from my friends, I continued to see racism, just as thick and heavy over the east side as the west. It was confusing; I see this, but none of my white friends see it. They’re good people, they seem pretty tuned-in to all things social-justice, and they say they’re for racial equality. But that’s not what I see; Black people on the bus, white people in the cars. Black people in minimum wage jobs; white people in professional jobs.

The gaslighting came to an end when, in 2013, a major report about racial inequality in Dane County came out. The Race to Equity report named Dane County as one of the worst counties in the nation when it came to disparities in educational outcomes, segregation, incarceration, poverty, health care and overall well-being. People were shocked by the report; saddened, outraged. I was elated: I wasn’t crazy! Outraged and sad were old news; at last I had proof that the extremity of racism I saw, heard and felt in Madison was really as bad as I’d thought since I’d arrived here. The statistics backed me up. Hard, cold facts.

In the years since, I’ve talked with other white people about the Race to Equity report, and I continue hearing variations on the same theme: “I don’t think it’s that bad. I’ve never seen it.” It continues to blow my mind; the statistics prove what Black people experience in Madison, but still:

Madison isn’t racist. 

This belief, I’ve decided, is the biggest impediment to racial justice in our culture: “We aren’t racist.” It may be the most racist thing anyone can say, not because of their intentions, which are good, but because of the impact it has, of cutting off all self-examination. If you know you aren’t racist, you know there’s nothing else to worry about; mission accomplished. And yet, if hundreds of thousands of white people in Dane County aren’t racist, how can Black people be suffering under the weight of crushing discrimination that’s worse than almost anywhere else in the U.S? 

“We aren’t racist” is a statement of good intentions; it’s a defense of our ego. Racism is a word generally used as an accusation, an attack on one’s character; “You are a backward, ignorant, bad person!” But to have racial bias in our minds is not a choice we make, at first; racism crept into our young minds as we watched movies where the bad-guys were all Black, and there were bad places in cities called “ghettos” where Black people lived. Racism crept in when we saw more Black people’s mug shots on the nightly news, even if more white people had committed crimes that day. Racism crept in as our school textbooks mentioned the freeing of the slaves, but not the crushing of Reconstruction or the institution of policies that returned Black people to the slavery of prison chain-gangs. Racism came in the fact that no one ever questioned why Black people lived in ghettos, as if they chose to live there, rather than being victims of federal policies that prevented them from joining the move toward suburban homeownership.

Racism is like a computer virus that invaded our mental programming when we were too young to notice, creating blind spots and assumptions where we should have been able to see clearly. And like a computer virus, it takes multiple scans with sophisticated anti-virus programs to find and destroy the malignant code. Racism isn’t about me; it’s about that virus. I didn’t choose to get those messages as a child. I don’t need to let my ego get caught up in my non-racism, or feel attacked if someone says I’ve said or done something racist. That painful “accusation” is a scan from the anti-virus program; it gives me a chance to fix my mental computer. 

I didn’t choose to get racist messages into my head as a child; I can choose to evict those messages, one by one, as I find them. Madison would like to be liberal in every way; but the trade unions didn’t allow Black members until the 1970s, and their members are still over 98% white. Madison doesn’t want to be racist, but in the Blount Street Power Station, there is a large cast-iron cooling pipe with a large swastika stamped into its heavy side; the official emblem of Hitler’s Germany. The men who built that section of the power station in 1938, who chose to purchase cast-iron parts from Nazi Germany at the height of its industrial power, are most likely dead now, but the swastika is still embedded permanently into our infrastructure. We would not choose to have it there today, you and I, but we will be wiser if we know that it is there, hiding in the darkness near the ceiling, where workers rarely go. 

Symbolically, the “Race to Equity” website has been scrubbed from existence. You can still find the report, but just like systemic racism, you’ll have to make the effort to search for it. Then, listen to the voices behind those painful numbers; this virus is damaging us all, and it’s past time to root it out. 

Madison, we are racist; and if we can admit it, we can begin to work to change.