Author: Reggie Jackson

”We even got the black kid to throw it up.” – Baraboo Wisconsin School District @GoBaraboo parody account Last May a group of about 60 Baraboo High School students from the senior class of 2019 stood in front of the Sauk County Courthouse building to pose for prom pictures. It should have been just another innocuous photo of high school students. But something made this particular picture stand out. About 30 of the students were giving the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute. The photographer has claimed they were not. The photo has gone viral and brought attention to the school...

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” – Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Letter From a Birmingham Jail I write this essay with a heavy heart. I have had to console so many friends over these past few years that suffered tremendously due to hate-related gun violence. There have been too many unnecessary deaths because of hatred that it makes me want to cry. I saw close friends from the Jewish community shed tears...

“You’ve got the words to change a nation, but you’re biting your tongue, you’ve spent a lifetime stuck in silence, afraid you’ll say something wrong.” – Emeli Sande Hollywood is finally getting over its fear of telling the story of black America honestly. I sat in the majestic Oriental Theater on October 10 as part of a multi-racial, multi-generational audience, to see a film about race. It was surreal. “The Hate U Give” was an extraordinary film that took the audience on a journey into the lives of African Americans and our fraught relationship with the criminal justice system....

Common Sense: the ability to use good judgment in making decisions and to live in a reasonable and safe way. As Americans we take pride in being very sensible people and think that most of us are in the same boat as everyone else when it comes to common sense. Those lacking common sense are see, as oddballs. I have proposed for years that common sense is not very common. My contention is that we make many decisions based on our sense of belonging to a specific group. We try our best to do what benefits the group we...

As a first year teacher I was unprepared for something that my students would ask continuously. For everything I asked them to do, they would ask the same question. Why? For a while it really irritated me because I did not have an answer other than, “because I told you so.” After a while I began to think about the inquisitive nature I had as a young person. For me and those I grew up with, questioning authority figures was not something we were allowed to do. The teacher and all other adults pretty much ruled over us and...

“The greatest tragedy of segregation, not merely what it does to the individual physically, but what it does to one psychologically. It scars the soul of the segregated as well as the segregator. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority while leaving the segregated with a false sense of inferiority.” – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As I have explored the ways in which Milwaukee’s metropolitan area has become the most segregated in the nation, I have grown to understand segregation as something much more than what people think of it as. Segregation is much more...