A Culture of Unaccountability: Republicans turned away from personal responsibility long before COVID
“It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions,” declared Ronald Reagan at the 1968 Republican National Convention. By the time he became president 12 years later, this idea – that individuals can be trusted to act...
Milwaukee Notebook: The 1879 scandal over rotten food and abuse at Milwaukee’s House of Corrections
In 1879, Milwaukeeans were shocked to learn of abusive treatment at the county-operated House of Corrections. Inmates, they learned, were routinely fed rotting meat, physically and verbally abused by guards, and could be punished with solitary confinement in a small,...
How the Capitol attack inquiry reveals the depths of White Supremacist ideology in Trump’s supporters
As the Capitol attack inquiry began with emotional testimony by police officers who came face-to-face with Trump’s racist and proto-fascist mob, one cannot help but draw the conclusion that what happened on January 6, 2021, a day that will also live in infamy,...
Suffering that sells: When society would rather pay to bury us than support a life in which we are thriving
They say that sex sells, but more and more, it seems like trauma has taken its place. As a Black femme, I was taught from an early age that I shouldn’t ask for help until I absolutely, positively had no other choice. Being a child of immigrants from Haiti only...
A Mismatched Workforce: Wisconsin’s jobless struggle to find lost jobs after COVID-19
Ideally, the 65-year-old would return to her old job of digitizing government documents for Data Dimensions in Janesville, Wisconsin. But she can’t. The company laid her off in March 2020, temporarily at first, when COVID-19 struck. The layoff became permanent last...
Twelve years of stagnation: Wisconsin’s essential workers continue fighting for $15 minimum-wage
Years ago when he was working for the discount retailer Kmart, Gary Lemke saw the cost of low wages: high employee turnover. Lemke estimates as many as half the workers would leave in a year. That meant more than just having to hire and train new people. He is...
Avoiding mob rule: Why the Second Amendment does not protect vigilantes who masquerade as militia
By Eliga Gould, Professor of History, University of New Hampshire When a federal judge in California struck down the state’s 32-year-old ban on assault weapons in early June 2021, he added a volatile new issue to the gun-rights debate. The ruling, by U.S. District...
A well regulated White Militia: America’s obsession with guns remains rooted in the subjugation of Blacks
A series of slave revolts terrified White residents and helped fuel the rationale for gun ownership. Bodies are piling up all over the second amendment as two of America’s pandemics converge. The “plague of gun violence” and the inability to mount an effective...
An inadequate safety net: America has not changed how it measures who is poor since LBJ’s War on Poverty
By Mark Robert Rank, Professor of Social Welfare, Washington University in St Louis In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously declared war on poverty. “The richest nation on Earth can afford to win it,” he told Congress in his first State of the Union address. “We...
Celebrating a Black Greek-Nigerian immigrant who won the NBA title while stoking anti-immigrant fear
The Bucks made history, and Giannis Antetokounmpo, the son of Nigerian parents who migrated to Greece, made the American Dream his reality. Unfortunately, that’s a dream that now hundreds of thousands of immigrant people in the United States feel is unobtainable, and...
Avoiding Politi-Speak: How activist jargon obscures more than it clarifies
If you had asked me six years ago to write a call to action to inspire people to participate in my social justice group, it would have gone something like this: “The United States of Amerikkka has always been and will always be an ecocidal White supremacist...
From Servant to Sellout: Why the racial stereotype of “Uncle Tom” remains a political weapon
By Cheryl Thompson, Assistant Professor, Creative Industries, Ryerson University Published nearly 170 years ago, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe had a profound impact on American slavery. But Uncle Tom is not a relic from the 19th century,...
