I just spent a few days meeting the people of Waukesha, WI. It’s a lovely town, full of lovely people.
The city, on the Fox river, reminded me of Stillwater, Red Wing, Hastings or Wabasha in Minnesota, just slightly bigger. Beautiful colleges, churches, and wonderful architecture – a very charming city.
I met a delightful Turkish man who runs a French-themed coffee roaster and a very hard working Indian family who runs a hotel complex.
I drove from the Whiterock School through the scenic parade route, past the house where Darrell Brooks was invited in from the cold and offered a sandwich.
Someone had previously called Waukesha police because they were concerned about a Black man on the street who was barefoot and visibly cold.
Brooks was arrested just outside of the sandwich house. He was detained without incident, brought to trial, given competency hearings, was able to exercise his right to defend himself, given ample opportunity to reconsider, and ultimately was given a fair trial.
Barring a man’s outburst for a loved one as the verdict of guilt was read, and a woman sobbing three weeks earlier, there’d been no interruptions from the gallery.
There was not a single protester in need of a blockade, let alone any requirement for armored vehicles or troops as was seen in the Chauvin trial.
Six people from this community died, dozens were injured, thousands of lives shattered and yet everyone was polite to him for the length of the trial. Judge Jennifer R. Dorow treated Brooks with the same deference as any white elementary school teacher might.
He treated her the way he likely treated every one of his elementary, middle, and high school teachers.
Watching Brooks in trial, I saw every negative stereotype of Black men I can think of.
Every. One.
Not far from Waukesha is the University of Wisconsin Madison, where Critical Race Theory was developed by Derrick Bell and Kimberle’ Williams-Crenshaw in 1989. Kate Millett and Kimberle’ Williams Crenshaw’s Intersectional Feminism are common topics of this blog.
Critical Race Theory posits that all of the people of Waukesha were born bigoted and hostile to young men like Brooks or Black college professors like Crenshaw.
Many people take as an article of faith that the people of Waukesha, including the dead little boy and Dancing Grannies, were inherently racist.
You saw many of these people during the Derek Chauvin trial and the Rittenhouse trial. They viewed the people of Kenosha and Waukesha as a certain type of istaphobic monster.
They screamed for justice for George Floyd, and saw his death as a part of the clear systems of oppression that need to be dismantled, by fire, if necessary.
If Millett made “vandalism chic” as Camille Paglia stated, then Bell and Crenshaw put the “fire in fire drill,” as in, George Floyd was just a drill.
I don’t want to think about the violence that happened in Waukesha. I’d rather think of the pleasant memories there.
The George Floyd protestors, both online and in real life, were predictably silent during the Darrell Brooks trial.
People you work with and work for were outraged about the death of a Black violent felon with a drug and counterfeit money problem, who died after passing fake money to a Black owned business.
The people in this white supremacist pseudo-reality don’t give so much as a peep about half a dozen crushed Dancing Grannies or a dead little boy, because he was white when he was alive.
These people live in an insular fantasy narrative nightmare, where they are surrounded by white supremacist monsters.
It’s time we wake them up.
