Portside

The latest rightwing attack on public schools has been raging for more than a year with angry, screaming parent groups disrupting school board meetings threatening jobs and lives of educators. Those weren’t actually spontaneous grassroots protests.

If Democrats want to win Wisconsin this fall—a big “if” still, according to Democrats on the ground—they will have to face down the ugly, and still largely unacknowledged, legacy of white supremacy in America’s Dairyland.

In this time of heightening crisis, we must be brave enough to use our full imaginations — and listen to those who have been dreaming of and fighting for just cities and communities for years.

The Democratic Party didn’t choose Milwaukee for its 2020 convention because of its radical past. But the city’s history shows how socialism worked in the United States—and could work again.

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There’s no question that social and digital media are transforming the way movements are built and organized. But technology by itself has never overthrown a tyrant nor seized state power. Self-expression is a potent thing, but as a plan of action it’s just a start. Progress demands that the contemporary social media-based resistance overcome its fear and loathing of leadership, organization and ideology.

Single mothers should not be blamed for young people's responses to a city that ignores or criminalizes them. Many of Milwaukee’s Black families have never experienced calm. They have not experienced a city that centers their needs and voices. Black youth fed up with their treatment are not creeps. Should they face unemployment, underemployment, police brutality, and racism—and face it without complaint?

Protesters taking to the streets today say that police violence against black residents of Milwaukee remains systemic. “You see anger, just the anger and the frustration of a community that has suffered atrocities and oppression on behalf of what they deem to be the police oppressive system, that has never seemingly been held accountable for taking the life, like the young man said, of their loved ones,” Muhibb Dyer, a community activist said.

For Wisconsin's schools, Scott Walker's new budget is a blueprint for abandoning public education. In Milwaukee, in addition to insufficient funding, the budget includes a "takeover" plan that increases privatization and decreases democratic control of the city's public schools.

Through outreach, organizing, and advocacy workers can improve their wages, hours, and benefits through direct action and by enacting pro-worker policies. The only reason manufacturing jobs paid well in the first place was because workers demanded that they did decades ago.