By David Gordon, associate editor
Martin Luther King’s legacy was the basis for much of Monday’s virtual look at how race and racism affect such topics as antisemitism and the First Amendment.
The online discussions were part of this year’s Martin Luther King Remembrance Day sponsored by Uniting Bridges and six other organizations. Other discussions during the afternoon included a panel on race and religion and a concluding session that dealt with racism, particularly as it exists in the Chippewa Valley.
Audience members carried on their own discussions in the “Chat” feature of the presentations, as well as posing questions for the various panelists.
In the day’s final panel, the participants provided examples of racism they have encountered here and questioned how long they should have to wait before being generally accepted as part of the area’s population. But they also agreed that many in the white community have become more aware of the existing racism and the need to confront it, and gave two main reasons for this progress.
Racism ‘is all around us’
Frank Watkins, Director of Choral Studies at UW-Eau Claire and the panel moderator, said racism is “all around us” even though “there are pockets of Eau Claire that are very open and liberal.” He noted that when he drove to work through “a nearby community,” it was common to see the Confederate flag displayed.
Dang Yang, director of UW-EC’s multicultural affairs office, said that even though he was born in the United States, he often feels like “a perpetual outsider” in regard to the local community, a point that other panelists reinforced.
Lopamudra Basu, a UW-Stout English professor who emigrated from India some 25 years ago, said that when her parents have visited here and gone for a walk wearing normal Indian clothing, it became an “object of a great deal of suspicion” among her neighbors. She added that she would hesitate to take a walk on the UW-Stout campus wearing a sari.
The panelists agreed that events starting last May with George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police have produced greater awareness of racism among people outside the black community. Yang said those events were “a second awakening” for some of his friends who have “been on the sidelines.”
He added that “these semi-woke individuals are ready to do the work now” that will be needed to change societal attitudes more broadly.
Panelist Rod Jones, a UW-EC professor of special education and inclusive practices, said it is “difficult for them not to take action in light of what they’ve seen.” He said that another factor in changing attitudes is the increase in “race mixing” – the acceptance of marriage between blacks and whites.
“I’m no longer an enigma” in many places, he said, and racial myths are being debunked. Racist constructs often “don’t square with what people have seen” of black people, whose “humanity has been affirmed.”
But Yang noted that economic racism still is a serious problem, and Jones cautioned that racism sometimes “is propagated by some of the most brilliant minds” and some of the most powerful people, who stand to benefit from its continued existence.
First Amendment panel
Earlier, panelists discussing “Race, Civility and the First Amendment” stressed the role of protected speech in spotlighting injustices and helping to bring about change on the racial scene and elsewhere. But they also noted that free speech and new technologies have enabled the rapid spread of disinformation.
Tim Shiell, a UW-Stout philosophy professor and director of the university’s Menard Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation, said the line between free speech and harassment – a complex legal area – depends on such factors as the context and location of what’s being said. He noted that interpretations of the First Amendment constantly change in response to social circumstances, which at times can pose problems.
Shiell said that protecting free speech is essential to making successful demands for changes like those that would produce greater racial equality. He also said “civility can be very elitist and very racist” but added: “I’m glad that people were uncivil in reacting to Jim Crow.”
Eric Kasper, UW-EC political science professor and director of the Menard Center for Constitutional Studies, said the public would benefit from restricting the spread of false political information. But, he noted, efforts to do this would be inherently dangerous, in part because even abusive “political hyperbole” has long been accepted as part of political campaigns.
“How do we do it in a way that we don’t create a larger problem than what we’re seeing,” he asked, with a specific reference to the danger of making government the arbiter of “truth.”
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul suggested the possibility of different approaches to the disinformation problem depending on whether that material came from a foreign government or a domestic source. He added that one approach to controlling disinformation from Facebook and other major social media platforms could involve regulating them as public utilities.
Lynette McNeely, who chairs the Wisconsin NAACP’s legal redress efforts, said marginalized communities have been dealing for decades with the fact that they have less First Amendment protection than others do. This needs to be reassessed as part of the “honest conversation” that should be part of collective efforts to nurture democracy, she added.
Note: the First Amendment panel will be broadcast on Wisconsin Public Radio at 10 a.m. on Friday (Jan. 22).
Other programming
The first panel of the day discussed the presence of the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups in the Chippewa Valley . It paid particular attention to John Kinville’s book The Grey Eagles of Chippewa Falls which details the existence of a women’s Klan chapter there from 1924 to 1931. Kinville teaches at Chippewa Falls Senior High School.
Updating that, UW-EC History Prof. Selika Ducksworth-Lawton, president of Uniting Bridges and organizer of the day’s programming, said that people wearing emblems of the extremist Proud Boys group have been seen recently in this area.
Patricia Turner, a UW-EC history professor, traced the history of the relations between the American Jewish and black communities, which reached its zenith in the 1960s, fractured to some degree by the 1990s and is re-emerging in the 21st century. She attributed the current rekindling in part to the emergence of white supremacists as a threat to both groups.
One illustration of the closer ties is the Jan. 5 elections of the first African-American and the first Jewish senator from Georgia, after campaigns that were closely allied, she said.
Several local religious leaders focused on common threads in the different faiths represented on their panel. These included recognizing the inherent value and dignity of every person and treating people as if everyone contains some type of divine spark.
The panelists also wrestled with how to deal with racists and others who don’t treat people that way. They concluded that not everyone is open to change and even those that are must be held accountable for their actions. The panelists’ religious affiliations included Baha’i, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Unitarian Universalist.
The day’s events culminated with an early evening musical tribute to King’s legacy, which was one of several segments broadcast locally on Converge Radio.
Uniting Bridges is a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of under-represented groups in the Chippewa Valley. Others collaborating on this year’s event include Converge Radio, the Pablo Center at the Confluence, UW-Eau Claire, UW-Stout, Chippewa Valley Technical College and the cities of Eau Claire and Altoona.