Here & Now

Noon Wednesday: Pride for Black Lives

Marisa Wojcik:

Welcome to “Noon Wednesday.” I’m Marisa Wojcik, multimedia journalist with “Here & Now” on PBS Wisconsin. Conversations about systemic racism continue as protesters refused to let their message fade and some are driving the message that the human rights inequities behind the Black Lives Matter movement intersects with those of the LGBTQ community. Joining me today is one of those voices. Dr. Sami Schalk is an associate professor at UW-Madison and her research focuses on intersections of race, gender, and disabilities. She’s also been participating in the area protests. And thank you, Dr. Schalk, so much for joining us today.

Sami Schalk:

Thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

Now, you’ve said, you’re an academic and a writer, but it wasn’t until recently that you became very involved in activism. What changed for you?

Sami Schalk:

I think I’ve been involved in some forms of activism. I think that the writing and education work that I’ve done in the community is part of that. But it’s not until recently that I was involved in really on the ground protests, this kind of really active way in terms of being a part of organizing and supporting. For me, a couple of things changed. One is just my personal life circumstances, so I… you know, well, the pandemic obviously has happened for all of us so I was already at home, working at home, and I wasn’t teaching this semester, this past spring so I’ve had a lot of time just in my house, and I’m currently working on a book on disability and black activism. So, I was actively working on a book about the ways that disability has been integrated historically into black activists’ work and trying to write a book that spoke to both scholarly and activist audiences. And then, as the uprising began at the end of May, early June, it just was a perfect moment where I was like, “I have this time, this capacity, this new knowledge from all the research, I’ve been doing over the past three years, but no real hands-on experience.” It was also helpful that I had recently joined the board of Freedom, Inc. so I was really connected to what they were doing. So, like, my personal circumstances changed in a lot of ways, but I also think that the pandemic has given a lot of us a lot of time to see the ways that the state and the federal government are not providing support and care for people and the inequities that already existed in this country were just really laid bare by the pandemic. So, a lot of us had this time alone to be thinking about it, and then, when there became this time where we could act and act in a way that felt very connected to one another and to community after being so isolated for months, I think that catalyzed a lot of things for folks. So, my personal circumstances allowed me to really throw myself into doing like 6 to 12 hours a day worth of work because I had the break from teaching. And then, I think, again, the world at large really presented us with this moment where it just was so clear that something needed to be done.

Marisa Wojcik:

You emceed the Pride for Black Lives event, which included a mini ball. What did this event mean for you?

Sami Schalk:

Yeah, the Pride for Black Lives event was by far my favorite event. I had never emceed anything in my life and I think I took it on very well. It meant for me a moment to really demonstrate to not just Madison Madison’s a pretty liberal, progressive city or it’s what it likes to perceive itself as. I dont always think that that’s true. But to really demonstrate that the movement for black lives, black lives matter, is a movement for all black people and that includes queer and trans black folks. And I think that historically queer people, trans folks, disabled people and women in black liberation movements have been pushed to the sidelines. Our labor, our care work that is really necessary for any action to occur. We need people who are doing things like making sure there’s food there, making sure there’s security. It’s not just the people who are standing in the front. A lot of us are, our roles have been minimized and dismissed and our ancestors who’ve been doing this work, their names have been forgotten, and so, we now particularly the folks of Freedom Inc. and Urban Triage have really been emphasizing that this is not a movement that excludes queer people. That it matters to us, the queer folks who are being harmed, the trans women, in particular, black trans women, who are being killed. All of this is part of the movement and for me that’s really important as someone who does work on the intersections of gender, race, and disability because I believe that the only way for us to end ableism and end sexism is to also address white supremacy, that these systems are so built up in one another and our freedoms and our liberation depends on one another. So, we can’t have a black liberation movement that is transphobic or ableist. It cannot work. It inherently will continue to do damage to our community. For me, there’s not a lot of spaces that are focused on queer and trans people of color so to have this space where we’re celebrating ourselves being beautiful, enjoying our dancing and everything, that joy is also so important. So that’s why that event, in particular, was so important to me was that we combined the politics and the protests with aspects of joy and pleasure because it’s not just about keeping us alive. It’s about giving us the fullness of life.

Marisa Wojcik:

And it looked like you really lived up to that. It looked like you had a whole suitcase of outfits that you brought, so…

Sami Schalk:

Indeed, indeed, I brought six outfits, wore five.

[laughs]

Marisa Wojcik:

Okay.

[laughs]

On Twitter, you responded to an image of a rainbowed hand, holding up a black fist and said that this image makes you feel embraced. How do you see your identity in both of these communities?

Sami Schalk:

Yeah, I mean, so I’m a queer woman and I’m a queer black woman and these things are really intertwined for me. There is no way for me to talk about queer community or black community without also understanding the ways I fit in in my queerness and in my blackness. This has been something in the Madison community that we’ve been dealing with for a while, in terms of ‘No cops at Pride protests’, which began about two or three years ago. And last year, we had our first completely cop-free pride and so. We’ve been seeing this in the queer community and I’ve been working in the queer community for a while, working with Community Pride Coalition to address the ways that racism exists in the queer community. And so, for me, this image of like, “Oh, now the queer community supports black folks…” One, it erases the presence again of black folks in the queer community and it does not actually-it doesn’t actually demonstrate that support. It is actually about joining us in recognizing the ways that our liberations again are very tied together. And that image, you know, I felt like it didn’t-it demonstrated a disconnect between black and queer community when there’s so many black queer people, but for me the real problem with it was the way that the artists responded when I said, like, I appreciate the sentiment, but this makes me feel [?] as a black queer woman and the response was to be like, “Well, this is my art and it’s about me,” and just delete all negative comments from anyone and then make this account private. that I was like so this is how you show your support is actually if someone says, you know, so it just doesn’t really make sense. If you’re saying, I support you and I say, “Hmm, the way you’re offering the support doesn’t feel good to me,” and you’re like, “Well, screw you. This is about me and how I feel,” and I’m like it’s not support for me then, it is?

[laughs]

Not at all. So, yeah, I think the way that folks want to do the support is like the way that feels good for them and not actually for the community that they’re claiming to support.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, what does it mean to you to have pride and Black Lives Matter protests in the same space?

Sami Schalk:

To me, it’s really powerful and I’ve studied a lot of, again, history of black liberation work for my research and not often-it’s very rare for us to see queer people not only included, but celebrated, put in the center and listened to as leaders. I think it’s really powerful that Freedom, Inc. is led primarily by queer folks of color, by black queer people, and that they put that out there that they are an anti-racist feminist and queer organization. So, it’s not. I think that in this moment what’s powerful to me and important to me is not that just that they say, “It’s okay that you can be here,” which is not even happening in all spaces because we know that there have been trans folks harmed at protests, but that they’re saying, “And you lead us.” One of the ethics of the disability justice movement is that we center those who are most impacted by oppression in our leadership roles because those are the people who know the most about the way these systems operate and the way that they do harm. And so, that’s what’s really important to me is that we need the people who know the most about these systems because they are constantly impacted by them to be the one leading us, to be the ones making decisions about strategies because that means that they’re going to be thinking about all the ways to make sure all these marginalized communities are not only included but again celebrated and protected. My concern with a lot of these protests is that we’re not looking out for our disabled folks or our trans folks or our queer folks who are most likely to be targeted and harmed if they are addressed by police. So, that’s why I think it’s so important in this moment to have black queer leadership.

Marisa Wojcik:

I was going to say are transgender and queer rights being properly represented and addressed in the Black Lives movement and is there transphobia, homophobia present or is that-is that trend going away?

Sami Schalk:

So, I think here in Madison, locally, absolutely queer rights are being addressed and, again, I think that’s because of the kind of leadership we have. Think in other cities that may not be as prominent, but every– the major organizations. So, if you look at the platform for the movement for Black Lives online, which I think is just ‘M’ the letter 4 BL.org but movement for Black Lives, the platform includes addressing issues of sexuality, of transphobic and homophobic violence. Addressing sexism, classism. The movement is so broad and just because protests recently in the past several years have been really focused on police brutality and on abolishing police and abolishing the prison industrial complex, all those things are deeply tied, again, to queerness and to and to gender and to disability. So if you look at the larger platform of what the movement for Black Lives is actually promoting, and really I feel like very few people do that work to go read the larger platform of what the goal is, the long-term goal for change. You see that those things are deeply connected. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t still work to do in terms of addressing homophobia and transphobia within black communities in the same way that it is within white communities and it doesn’t mean that we are not done working on racism within the queer community, as well.

Marisa Wojcik:

Earlier this month, two black trans women were killed and as you said transgender women are disproportionately targeted by violence. Do you think these issues overall are getting enough attention in the media?

Sami Schalk:

Not at all. I think that violence against trans women is really-not just ignored, but it’s downplayed particularly because it’s often intimate partner violence or violence from men who are just like on the streets sometimes, but it’s because it’s not coming as consistently from state violence from police brutality because it’s not always on camera in the way that a lot of these incidents with police are, people seem to care less and again, the transphobia writ large in our community and in our in our society allows us to just care less about trans lives, and that’s why we have to insist again that like all black lives matter, black trans lives matter and we have to make that important in this movement so that’s, I think, the role of those of us who are bridging these communities as black queer people and black trans people to say that both the queer community and black communities need to support folks who are living in those intersections, and most at risk for violence and we need to lift those names up. People can name so many more black men who have been murdered by police than black trans women.

Marisa Wojcik:

You have a big social media following, and some Madison organizers have said that the local media aren’t getting the story of the area’s protest right. Would you agree with that?

Sami Schalk:

I think so. I think a lot of folks, are first of all, hesitant to talk to media outlets so that’s part of the reason that often when I’ve seen interviewers and media folks at events, they’re just kind of picking a random person. So, they’ll be like, “Hello, random child,” like, “Let me ask you a question,” and that person may have just shown up with no real knowledge of all that organization, all the work that’s gone behind it. No real knowledge of the platform. So I think that maybe folks aren’t able to find leadership or find the leaders or be willing to kind of wait for leaders to be available to speak. So, that’s a real problem with not finding leadership and I think the other problem with local media right now is yeah, there are ways that people are really stuck in the ways that they report and not examining their own biases. So there’s this emphasis right now on peaceful protests. Right, so we have had, it’s nearly 25 days now, I think. I was just looking at my calendar, nearly 25 days of protests and almost every day there is something. We had a whole week of consistent action every day, right at the start of June and the vast majority of these protests have been what the mainstream media would call peaceful and the second anything changes, that’s when people are like, “Oh, now it’s out of control,” but we’re not being listened to. When we walk in the streets quietly, carefully, not disrupting anything that’s not helping. When we marched in the streets and do disrupt traffic, people are trying to run us over with their cars. I was blocking traffic for one protest and a White man came up to my window of my car, banged on it and called me an effin’ Nazi for blocking traffic, which is, I’m pretty sure, exactly what the Nazis did was block traffic, you know. So, we are being constantly faced with all this negative attention, even when we do the exact thing that they’re saying is the right way to do it. There is no right way to protest at this point because we’re not being listened to. Everything we do right, when Kaepernick was kneeling, people are like this is bad. When people wouldn’t stand for the Pledge, they were saying, “Well, that’s not the right way to protest.” There have been so many ways that folks have tried and they’re not being listened to and they’re very, very frustrated. I wasn’t on the ground last night, but I’ve been on the ground for a while now and for the past week, I’ve been feeling the energy shift, that people were tired of there being absolutely no real response beyond some nice language, but no real change. The Madison School Board president, Gloria Reyes, said that she was willing to change her position in terms of cops in schools and then isn’t putting it on the agenda to vote so people are done. People are done with what’s happening right now with the lack of response, and so I don’t think that protests are going to get any more peaceful with the lack of response from local government, you know.

Marisa Wojcik:

Now that you’re out active at these events and protesting, do you feel safe?

Sami Schalk:

Most of the time I feel pretty safe. We’re in a big group. We take care of each other. I’ve been trying to spread a lot of information about what it means to be safe at a protest, right. So that means that me and the folks that I work with we have battery packs. We are in communication with each other through like text threads the entire time. We’re keeping track of each other. We text to confirm when we get home. We’ve got people who are keeping eyes out for folks who either seem like undercover cops or seem like folks who might be here to do harm, to take pictures, to dox people. We’re taking care of each other. The times that I don’t feel safe is when a random white man comes scream at me in my window or when cars are coming at us. So there’s so many people who have been-last night, I heard of at least six separate instances of cars hitting protesters, and this was a moving march so generally during a moving march, you will not be stuck more than 10 minutes, 10 minutes and any time there’s an emergency vehicle, we make sure that it gets through, but people can’t wait 10 minutes and instead they’re willing to hit people with their cars. So, that’s when I don’t feel safe is when somehow a car has kind of like gotten through whatever blockade we tried to have and they’re-and we just don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know if people are going to go slowly, if people will stop, or if they will suddenly accelerate and really do harm to people and so, yeah, multiple people were hit by cars last night, who refused to just simply wait 5 to 10 minutes.

Marisa Wojcik:

In response to the protest last night at the Capitol, you tweeted this morning, “People in Madison clutching their pearls as if folks haven’t been protesting and marching in the streets shouting no justice, no peace.” You don’t seem surprised by the events last night and you spoke to this a bit, what do you kind of expect going forward?

Sami Schalk:

Yeah, so, I mean, I anticipate that there will be a wave of repression so I anticipate-Governor Evers already said that he’s prepared to put out the National Guard. Any time the state kind of tries to push back, people are going to push back more. So rather than saying, “We hear you and we’re going to do something to address the problem that you are so upset about, that you have been so harmed by” Instead, there’s this mass suppression and whenever that happens, people are going to act out even more. When you put more violence on the people who are upset about violence, you’re going to get violence back. And I don’t personally believe that property destruction is violence. I think that it is a way that people who have been disempowered and have no other way to express their power other than to tear something down express their power. Right, there are things that the mayor and the governor could be doing, but individual people, these like 17-to-25 year old folks out in the streets, what power do they have besides to scream in the streets and to pull down a statue to say, “We’re here and you need to listen to us.” So, I anticipate that’s going to keep happening until things shift in terms of the way that the city responds, and the city has really been responding with these placating measures and then going behind our back. I mean, that video that came out of the mayor speaking to the police, No one trusts her now. No one believes that she’s on our side in any way whatsoever, and so, yeah, the trust has really been broken in the city between folks who I think really wanted to believe in the liberal progressive ethos of Madison that really thinks of itself as this like special little gem, so different than the rest of Wisconsin and we see that it’s all just a faade. So folks are really fed up. So yeah, I anticipate that what we saw last night is not the end of that and I think that there will be more pushback from the police and from the National Guard. I anticipate that there will probably be gassing occurring again and rubber bullets because this is the way they respond to people exercising the little bit of power that they have.

Marisa Wojcik:

Now, the two statues torn down were examples of property and obviously you guys are speaking to-you folks are speaking to some physical threats that you feel from people but State Senator Tim Carpenter was punched and kicked by protesters when he tried to take a photo. What do you say to that?

Sami Schalk:

Yeah, I mean, I personally wouldn’t punch and kick him, but the thing is, what I was told and again-I’m not, I wasn’t on the ground-but folks were really trying to discourage any photographic evidence of destroying state property, right, because we know that the state will respond swiftly against these individuals and these aren’t people that like have a whole bunch of money to get lawyers and things, right, so they had asked for no photos. They had asked for no videos. And then, if you show up as a white man, as a representation of the state, as a state senator, you are not to be trusted in that space, you are literally an arm of the state and you’re trying to take photos against people’s wishes. He was warned multiple times and he didn’t stop and so, again, when you push people, when they feel like the only power they have left is to push you back, to physically push you back, then that’s what they’re going to do. It doesn’t mean that it’s great, but it means that people have been pushed to their limit. And I think that people in the city have been pushed to their limits. So yeah, sorry he got hurt, I guess, but he didn’t- like, why did he need to be out there taking pictures? There’s no reason. He went out of his own accord to take pictures and potentially risk folks who are out protesting being harmed, being doxxed, and didn’t listen to the people there. So, if you are not there to be protesting. if there to observe, you are putting yourself at risk ‘cuz you’re not with what’s happening and so you can’t be trusted and right now, folks who work for the state really are not trusted at all, at all.

Marisa Wojcik:

So, you’ve said that you are hoping for real substantive long-term change as an outcome of all of this. What does that look like specifically to you?

Sami Schalk:

Yep, that looks like getting cops out of schools immediately. That’s an immediate thing that we can do. It’s summer. Before the school year starts, we sign no cops, absolutely no cops in schools. It means defunding the police in the city to set and redirecting those resources to other areas to provide the kinds of support that we need. We understand in the movement that some of the jobs that cops do are necessary, right, like we need people who can block traffic sometimes when things are happening. That doesn’t need to be a police officer with a gun. There’s no reason for it. We’re doing it ourselves with our cars. It’s fine, right. So we understand that those resources, some of those resources need to be redirected into safety and to making sure that there are things to help folks who are having mental health crises. All of that needs to happen, but it doesn’t need to be police with guns and they have way too much power and way too much control, so there needs to be a defunding of police and redirecting those resources into the spaces that we actually need to make the city safe and usable for a whole lot of folks. So, those are the main things. And then, community control, that even when we develop those safety committees, or whatever, it’s going to look like to create safety, it has to be under community control, Meaning that individual people, not paid members who are, like, working for the state, but individual members of the community are able to say, “We fire you or we reprimand you or whatever.” That they have to be accountable to the community, not to themselves. With the police union, the only people that can reprimand police are people who are police. That makes no sense for them to be the ones that are so-called keeping themselves accountable. There’s no way to hold people accountable when they’re just doing it within the group, so there needs to be community control of police. They need to be out of schools and they need to be defunded. That’s our first kind of major thing, but of course, there are all kinds of other things that we would like to see to make sure that we live in a world where people, all people, including white folks, including straight folks like y’all. We want y’all to be okay, too. But in order for that to happen, we have to be okay, and that’s why, again, we send our folks who are most marginalized and are most impacted by oppression to understand what needs to change.

Marisa Wojcik:

Does this movement look like anything that you’ve studied before or experienced before?

Sami Schalk:

Absolutely not. There’s a couple of things that make a real difference. So, of course, I think the other civil rights movements that have occurred since the civil rights movement. so the ways in which the feminist movement, queer rights movements and disability rights movements have emerged and come into their power means that we have movements that are not single issue focused anymore, that understand the relationship between oppressions, that understand that in order to address capitalism, we have to address racism, right, that understand the connections. So, I think that’s one thing that has really changed, that many different identity and liberation movements have occurred. And then, of course, the major change is Internet and cell phones. It makes things so different. Organizing can happen like that. People can get together so quickly, right. That call last night for the protest, I think it went out around three or four o’clock on Facebook that someone said, “Yeshua’s been arrested. We’re going to the jail.” And within two hours, they were like 300, 400 people. This wasn’t an official planned thing. It happened so fast. So, I think the Internet and the ability for people to communicate so quickly, organize so quickly, really changes the way that activism and protests happen in this moment. It also means that sometimes things are a little rougher, right, because they’re being done real last minute. We might not always have all the preparation that we need to make sure that there’s like enough cars to protect people, but I think that those are the things that are really different. The real emphasis on multiple identity groups, multiple issues at once, and the ability for folks to organize very quickly, and the other thing I’ll say is that I think young people have always been leaders in liberation work. But I have been really amazed and astounded by just the incredible political astuteness of young folks out there, right. We had on-what day was I out? Sunday. When I was out on Sunday for a protest, there was a 14 year-old on a bicycle who was saying things that, like, I expect my students that, you know, my college students to be talking about, right. So, there is a political astuteness to young people right now, again, I think facilitated by the Internet, and their ability to say I’m not being taught this in school, but I can log on to YouTube and get this lesson right here, right, so they are smart and attuned and aware of just how messed up everything is in a way that I just-I don’t know that we’ve seen before so I get a lot of hope by seeing the way that folks in, you know, under 20 often just are really super, super powerful in their analysis and their willingness to risk, to really take some risk, and I think that comes from a moment right now where it feels like everything’s falling apart anyway, so they might as well risk it all.

Marisa Wojcik:

Alright, Dr. Sami Schalk, thank you so much for joining us and telling us more about your experience and research.

Sami Schalk:

Absolutely, thanks for having me.

Marisa Wojcik:

For more from “Here & Now” and PBS Wisconsin, you can visit PBSWisconsin.org and thank you so much for joining us on “Noon Wednesday.”