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Jarrett English, an experienced professional organizer in Milwaukee, weighs in on the many breakdowns he saw in the Strauss Brands saga in Century City. He points out underlying problems that were on full display, from political disconnection to racism to short-sidedness.
First off, this is NOT about a slaughterhouse.
This is about black people, in a plurality black metropolis, in a community that has been violently, intentionally, economically and politically marginalized, in a city and state where political and business leaders have failed miserably in their duty to bring sustained, accessible, equitable, opportunity to those most in need.
This is about the people and a fundamental disconnect between themselves and their government.
When you have a population that is actively and historically disenfranchised as black folks are in Milwaukee, you get politicians doing what they want for their own ambitions (and elections) rather than what the people want.
When you have a system like this, you get elected officials who think they are their own boss. The truth being, their “boss” is distributed in the persons of hundreds of thousands of people.
These officials treat the people as fools incapable of knowing what’s best for themselves, their families and communities. This is striking because it’s not unlike the way plantation owners treated the human beings whose freedom they stole. Most of you can extrapolate from there, but for those who can’t, it seems Milwaukee is run like a plantation, where people without privilege have as little input as possible.
“Accessibility” and “equity” it seems are the dirtiest of words to some folks in our government.
Second, the mayor’s office and administration made a fatal mistake.
The fact is, development that’s not community centered from the start is a failure from the start.
Period.
The mayor’s office got too bold, trying to hit a home run like the Menomonee Valley Partners did. Rather than reflecting and engaging with the community — the Valley folks have had hundreds of meetings with community folks and other partners — they kept going under the false assumption that Century City was a blank slate in the same way the colonizers of old looked at the land. They didn’t even consider the desires and needs of the people already living there until they were called out.
I’m reasonably well connected in the community and I personally didn’t hear about any community meetings regarding Strauss Brands before it was in the Business Journal. And if the mayor’s office did have meetings, did more than 10 people show up from a community of thousands? What time of day did it happen? What input and thoughts did the community have? Where are the notes?
You know the answer. They are nowhere to be found.
So what’s the lesson? If you’re the elected chief executive of city government in a participatory democracy, you’ve got to act like it. In every neighborhood, regardless of its makeup, all the time. That’s not what happened and the mayor should know better after 15 years, right before an election.
Third, white folks from both city and suburbs need to get their priorities straight. Regardless of their widely differing political persuasions and beliefs, they have inadvertently conspired to put themselves in a position to make a choice that’s not theirs to make and to make life harder for the residents of Century City and 30th Street Corridor.
It’s a privileged, implicitly racist position, regardless of your politics, to go to a majority black community that is not yours and demand that something be stopped just because you want it to be. Damn the needs, desires and opinions of the people who already live there.
That’s called being a colonizer.
Y’all (white people) have done this to the detriment of the entire world for the last half millennia.
You need to stop. Milwaukee is a great place to start.
If you were being true to the values you profess, you would have helped create a community-centered alternative from the beginning. If you truly desired to see something there to benefit the people of that community, you would have organized for it 20 years ago alongside them as their livelihoods were being stolen and jobs were hemorrhaging from the area.
I, personally, am not a fan of slaughterhouses, but we have people who can’t even feed their families or who are currently living on the street. If you all want to do something, HELP the community do something about that. No more dictating.
It’s telling that a group of five or six white folks can stop a $60 million development in a black neighborhood with a one–week campaign, but literally hundreds of black, Latino, and Asian people organizing the #LiberateMKE effort have to mount a yearlong campaign just to get the city to consider reallocating $25 million to community development and youth employment.
The folks who stopped this thing aren’t better organizers.
They’re just white.
The Strauss saga is a failure all around and a perfect example of how and why Wisconsin is 10 years behind where it should be.
The same site was also prevented from building high-speed trains not long ago. High-speed service would have started in 2017.
The most impacted people — the black people of the Century City community — need to be at the direct center, driving any decisions being made about their neighborhoods.
And I am personally ready to throw down with them to make sure that happens.
Justin Brown says
Perfectly clear
Jay says
Solidarity. Thank you for this illuminating perspective !
For a city that has suffered from racist redlining, awful urban planning which helped create an ecologically unsound suburban myopia of whiteness, de-industrialization impacting mostly communities of color, and years of chronic structural racism – you would think the self-proclaimed leaders of this City would start listening to the people most impacted by years of cycles white supremacist capitalist extraction – but they don’t. They pay lip service to equity and racial justice, but they appear owned by corporate elites, who rob and pillage through wealth extraction, allowing our common infrastructure, our public health, and our schools to rot. Their only answer is more cops, more punitive prisons, more environmental destruction, more of the same. We need real structural change and a world based on cooperation rather than competition, greed, and corporate oligarchy.
Emily says
Thank you so much for writing and submitting this. This article was exactly what I needed to hear, from all perspectives–personally; as a white person; professionally; as someone who works in the neighborhoods directly around 30th St Corridor; as someone who has to describe these repeated situations to other white folks; as a writer. It’s not about me. But this still absolutely deserves a biased praise. Thanks, NNS, for also publishing this.
Justin says
It’s fine let it sit empty for another 50 years. That will show em.
Lucy Cooper says
Was it really the white anti animal slaughter people who killed the project? I thought the Alderman was willing to stand up to them. But when an African American woman with a WNOV radio show took up the attack the Alderman – Kalif Rainey – folded and Strauss left. Turns out the radio host is tied closely to Mayor Barrett’s political rival State Senator Lena Taylor. She is running against him for mayor.
Seems to me you have left out important parts of the story to support your own anti white views.
At the end of the day this looks like a promising development that got derailed by hardball mayoral politics. Now we are back to square One with an empty lot all taxpayers have subsidized redeveloping. We all lose.
Jay says
I think it’s quite unfair to call Jarret’s position “anti-white”. The fact of the matter is that Milwaukee is a city built on white supremacist alliances that were forged through colonialist expansion, and after slavery was abolished, redlining, white covenants, racist urban planning, capital flight which disproportionately impacted communities of color, and a mostly white police force & local government have created some of the worst systemic social ills in the country. Mass incarceration of black men from 53206 is some of the highest in the country, as well as high eviction rate that again, disproportionately effect communities of color are two of the biggest social ills here – not to mention aging, toxic lead infrastructure. White people need to think critically and move beyond white fragility, accept the structural racism that is inherent in the capitalist political economy and look for ways to eradicate racism, and classism.
Jay says
Black migration to Milwaukee did not occur enmasse until the 1970s. What about the immigrants before them? Italian, Irish, German, and Polish (largely caucasian) immigrants lived in ghettos in Milwaukee for generations before blacks left the fields in the south for the factories in the north. The issue at hand is not simply racism. Racism is a tool used by the aristocracy to divide the working class. The working class is not just black and brown.
Not only is Jarret’s article racist and anti-white, so is your comment.
Nathan says
This project was a win/win situation for both the neighborhood and Strauss.
Strauss is a growing company that is ALREADY in Milwaukee County.
Misinformation spread by PETA about odor and the environment kept giving bad PR to Strauss. Shocked the Mayor or other major political figures wouldn’t stand up. This is an area we need to help grow and facilitate better opportunities. Milwaukee is only as strong as it’s weakest areas.
Meanwhile Strauss will continue to to look for a different location in the area and we still have vacant land in Century City.
Looking back, maybe the Mayor and other local cities leaders should have visited the current locations spread better information.