Uppity Wisconsin

To the Madison City Council:

White supremacy is alive and well in Madison, Wisconsin, but you just don't get it.

    Remember when those rich guys from the auto plants flew to Washington in private jets with their hands out for public money. It was too late but they promised to come to the next meeting in gas upped Pintos and collapsible Corvairs.  But the public kept saying they just don't get it. Then there were rumors of luxurious private parties and lavish Vegas gambling jaunts. Once again, the public said, they just don't get it.
    Well, it looks like you sitting there in your, made in china chairs, and  just don't get it. When you drive around town, who do you see working. When you drive past a street?  did you notice not one black man is on that crew? When you walk though a road construction site paid for with tax incremental financing of federal dollars, who do you see working? You do not see a black man working.  When you see a building construction paid for by federal tax dollars  at one of ten sites on campus, who do you see working? When you see a private company using tax dollars to buy land and build buildings, you don't see a black man working on the project or in the building working after its completed.
    When you deny DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS the power to enforce the hiring of black men, you just don't get it do you?  Seventy percent of the black middle class works for the government. Yet, you just don't see the nepotism that takes place in private business. Sure, Findorf, Vogel, Staff Electric, Forward Electric have a right to hire qualified personnel, but when qualified black men are continually turned away from advertised jobs; you just don't see the pattern of discrimination; you don't hear the cries for empathy, you don't speak out against apathy. You just don't get it.
    You just don't get how a small business owner or a company that receives public funds could reject a qualified black man. You just don't get it, do you. You just don't get how a company could do business with the city for 20 years and never find a qualified black man to hire. You, like me, should walk though the hollowed halls of city, county and state government offices with the published list of empty seats reserved for blacks that human resources can never find. This list of missing black employees has grown longer, not shorter over the last 20 years.
    You don't get how the city has been lying to blacks about seriously understanding how a black man could apply for a open position and not get hired.  Because if you did you would see how the streets of our city are being built by the brothers, classmates, drinking buddies, hunting friends, uncles, sisters, and cousins of company owners who would willingly pay a small fine and still not ever hire black men to work on a federally funded project.
    I'm sure some of you heard about the white women who claimed two burly black men kidnapped her and stole her child. As intelligent representatives of the city, you may ask yourself how could anyone come up with such a cock and bull story.  But the fact of the matter is, this is not the first time that a city's police department has been mislead to believe that black men were the perpetrators of a car jacking or other violent crime. But this is the first time the police did not do a massive roundup of black men as the usual suspects based on racist ideology.  Police fought against this built-in bias against black men and correctly assumed that over 70 percent of crimes where a black man was a perpetrator was a race conscious lie. This woman assumed no one would question her despicable beliefs. What do you do or say when your friend, relative, neighbor, co-worker spouts sardonic hatred? Empirical research shows that most whites are congenial about racism and its effects upon society.
    A company recently decided to search for police records of black applicants. To the surprise of the human relations department, none of the black applicants had police records. Previously, the director had assumed that all blacks have criminal records so why even accept applications from black applicants. You too, have denied the truth of institutional racism that denies a black man a right to work in order to support his family, his community, and his city.  You see the truth, but you can't handle it, do you dismiss it.
By denying the civil rights office this power you just don't get it. You are complacent about the pre-conceived notions of black men that each of you have consciously or unconsciously inherited from family, friends, and co-workers. These biased insinuations handed down from generation to generation are endemic of people who deny the holocaust and deny 400 years of slavery.
    It is disingenuous to think 400 years of institutionalized scientifically applied slavery, Jim Crow laws, housing discrimination, job discrimination, health care discrimination, and education inequity is going to be fixed in 60 years by businesses rolling over and volunteering to be good Christians. The fact that over 51 percent of local businesses are small businesses does not preclude the fact that some are working on city projects funded by federal funds. Funds that by law should help employ the generations of unemployed black men in Madison. The predetermined criminal record of a black man is because 3 out of 4 black men have had encounters with police.  Police stopping men who are driving while black is a national phenomenon that people just don't get. Racism is a disease and the cure is the law. Trickle down policies predicting that employers will follow their conscious works, if only the employer has a moral conscious.
    You cannot be blind, deaf, and silent about the factual systematic incarceration of black men by police, judges, probation officers, parole boards, jail guards, and juries purposely and publicly display their disdain for black men. This tool of right wing recruitment is cannon fodder for extremism mayhem. This includes denying DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS the right to enforce rules that protect all Americans from their ignorant anti-Semitic racist prophesies.
    To deny DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS power is the height of irresponsibility to the Madison citizenry. As politicians, you must know that the current social and economic traumas will unleash the venom of violent extremists. Your pretzel logic to deny this power is unconstitutional. The past few decades has only seen a token increase in the hiring of blacks in government and in private business. Research about a local manufacturing plant tells me how management attends seminars about how to legally not hire blacks without being sued for racial discrimination. Your ultimate obligation is to insure that city, county, state, federal governments, and private businesses do not hide behind a sea of judicial hyperbole that prolongs the anxiety of the black man waiting in the wings to be hired. Is it true what I read about how landlords who are found guilty of housing discrimination can secretly pay a fine and continue to discriminate?  My deep throat tells me city officials are in cahoots with private businesses and human resource staffs who intentionally violent national laws that prohibit all forms of racial discrimination and nepotism.  But as your hiring records show and newspapers have revealed, nepotism plays a role in who is hired; and since no blacks are hired though the back door we can assume that friends and relatives who look like the people in power are quickly hired into these hate circles that share the same racist views. You have not adequately monitored the negative rhetoric that keeps blacks from these jobs, this same stereotyped rhetoric that gets blacks intentionally fired when employers are forced to obey the affirmative action laws that is your civic responsibility to carry out. How do you reconcile the blatant truth of spitefulness and hatefulness that keeps blacks from feeding their families, from paying taxes, from being a citizen in a democracy?
    By not giving DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS absolute power, you are undermining the death of Dr. Martin Luther King and the sacrifice of Rosa Parks. Society allowed the lynching of Emmett Till and the gassing of Anne Frank. Do you represent blacks in society or do you represent businesses who find you a racist compatriot? Are you helping to tie the noose and turning on the gas or just another anonymous liberal hypocrite of freedom and liberty, who watch as the smoke plumes from the gas chambers disappear from your sight and mind. 
    It is disconcerting to know a white politician got the black vote because he likes gospel music, Tiger Woods, and chit'lins.  The silent protests of institutional racism in Dane County by 100 black men of Madison is synonymous with temperance minstrel music. Where is the voice of the Urban League as its new building goes up, where is the voice of the NAACP, the voice of NOW, PETA and other liberal women and men who hold siege to liberalism in Madison. Black men are invisible until the news comes on.  Even a fleeting association with blacks reveals that white resentment is a racist derangement; a dismal attitude attached to mainstream society. There are 10,000 hate groups on line.  Nine hundred and twenty-six white supremacy websites get nearly 10,000 hits a day to celebrate the silent genocide of the black male and Negro/Jew.  Isolated incidents of racism are uniformly destructive but you just don't get it. White supremacy is alive and well in government or why else would it take 60 years and more to resolve what is overt racism and what is courteous impertinence. Both are motivated by the politics of fear and loathing. But you still don't get it.
    This is a struggle between good and evil. You can no longer increase the police budget without seeing the repercussions of decreasing the funding of youth activities that show society does care about them. You must see the liaison between increasing jail space and the increasing education gap. Don't you think black mothers also want their new born sons to have the skills necessary to work on a road crew, to sit in that office cubicle, to finance a loan? Nativity is no longer an excuse when you see no black men at your dinner table, as your co-worker or in your church pews. Some suggest that blacks and Jews should just get over it, but they just don't get it. Racism is a mandate that is consciously or unconsciously supported by your inattention to the truth that the same people deny the Holocaust happened; people also deny that lynching, raping, castrating, and dismembering black men was an instant holiday for white people. (Recently a judge dropped charges against two white men for dragging a black men behind a truck until he was dismembered because there was no usable evidence and black witnesses were afraid to come forward.But you just don't get it.)People deny that prison factory towns are dependent upon the courts to keep the townspeople employed; the probation officer regurgitating inmates also keeps his job and the local police are counterfeiting evidence with propaganda that hides the lowering crime rate. 
    What are your principles?  What is your strategy to right 400 years of scientifically applied racism that kept black men from owning rural farmland, owning their own business, or working like any other man alongside any other man? Well, let me say that I'm disappointed in the intelligence of the council and I'm not going to stand by and watch ignorant selflessness keep black men unemployed. You can join me in the fight against this ingrained evil or you can take the consequences of a retaliatory government.
    The transparency of the Obama administration dictates efficiency. Federal funded projects in the city of Madison can come under the scrutiny of everyday citizens. To emphasize the continued racist hiring policies of private and public contractors, I have enlisted volunteers to apply for jobs with organizations receiving federal funding. As you know, the publication of projects using federal funds allows me to research past and current federally funded projects that historically physically/mentally abuse, while under utilizing, under employing, and under paying black employees.
    Researchers have been assigned to video record working areas for visually accompaniment of DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS/EEO records. Public resources that reveal the number of years and failed attempts at hiring and retaining black men are also available at public and private institutions. I am in direct correspondence with Sharon D. Eller, Director of Civil Rights for the Department of the Interior and Mary N. Whigham Jones, Deputy Director, Departmental Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Transportation, who will be constantly updated about hiring and firing policies of public and private entities who use American Recovery and Reinvestment of 2009 funds. 
    I have social contacts with representatives from the following agencies who report one common unapproved consistency; the unemployed black male:

    * Schools and homeless school liaisons;
    * Workforce centers;
    * employment counselors (welfare to work programs);
    * Property managers, landlord groups, and tenants' associations;
    * Housing courts and legal aid agencies;
    * County veterans' services offices and other veterans' services offices;
    * Multifamily housing associations;
    * Discharge planning departments at jails, prisons, and mental health, chemical dependency, and other institutions;
    * Probation offices;
    * Domestic violence service providers;
    * Food shelves and soup kitchens;
    * The faith community;
    * Housing authorities;
    * Family support centers;
    * Police;
    * Child welfare agencies;
    * Head Start and Early Head Start; and
    * Consumer Advocate Groups.

    The unemployment rate in the black community is twice as high as the general citizenry  because of temporary employment and those who are so disillusioned by the continuum of subtle racism that they no longer look for work. Linking black people with jobs funded by the economic stimulus package will address their other needs and defy the hopelessness, depression, and gloominess that helplessly accompany sustained poverty.
    This is a patriotic mission that begins when I applied for three jobs offered by DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS. I contacted the contractors with a formal application, a resume, and a cover letter. With no forth coming reply I telephoned and left messages. When it was clearly obvious that procrastination of their reply was meant to discourage me, I contacted the DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL RIGHTS office and was told while private contractors doing city work were supposed to hire black employees, they could not enforce the rules and contractors simply ignored the rules because they knew a penalty if any would be slight and hidden from public scrutiny.
    If you think I am frustrated, you are the pompous liberal jerk everyone says you are. I am disillusioned that the prophecies of our Jeffersonian democracy have almost soured by 36 years of bitter Brownshirt behavior towards blacks that was sanctioned by Democrats and well meaning Republicans.   Because of the new King of the hill, I do believe that messages of inclusiveness will be welcome by this cabinet. But unless someone takes responsibility to insure that tests are multi-intelligent; that police do not stereotype perpetrators, and that city governments spend federal money according to the Constitution and the by-laws of the tax-stimulus package, I guess it will be moi' looking over your shoulder for continued proof of your infidelity to humanity. Because three years ago I wrote and commented on the discrepancy in hiring policies by city contractors, but you failed to see the decades long pattern. You just don't get it.
    If you wish to receive copies of testimonials sent to dept of interior and dept of transportation, please contact a local social service agency listed above.  Because reporting discrimination reports are binded by time constraints, technical jargon, and job loss retaliation that dissuades victims from filing discrimination reports, I cannot promise victims will allow the release of their names to local officials. Nevertheless, you will not torpedo Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity programs on my watch. Obama has received hundreds of death threats, black Americans have experienced thousands upon thousands of hate crime; are these individual acts a coincidence or unorganized conspiracy?  Pro-business does not mean anti-black, otherwise you would of insisted that business tax write-offs include obeying federal hiring policies when using federal funds.(I refer you to the Home Security Report on Domestic Surveillance)

Some of us water our horse at the same trough, but you have made the waters murky with your proposal to stand against evil.. If you look closely upon the waves of change, you will see the image of Emmett Till looking up at you from his open coffin with a truth, that all black men still experience Jim Crow in the 21st Century.  If you open the book of Anne Frank, you will smell survival filling the air with or without your consensus. 

Thank you for your time.

thomasjasengardner
thomasjasengmail [dot] com