Here & Now

Schalk: What Sparked Protest to Turn Violent

Frederica Freyberg:

Tuesday’s protests in Madison is sparking a deeper debate about how far is too far. Dr. Sami Schalk is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the UW-Madison. Her specialty is the intersection of race, gender and disability. She talked to Marisa Wojcik this week on those topics for our online “Noon Wednesday” segment. While not part of Tuesday’s protests, as an activist herself, she also spoke to what likely sparked them.

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. Anytime 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 the streets and to pull down a statue to say we’re here and you need to listen to us. So I anticipate that 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 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 special little gem, so different than the rest of Wisconsin. And we see that it’s all just a facade. 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 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:

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 this city 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 policing with guns and they have way too much power and way too much control. There needs to be a defunding of police and redirecting those resources into the spaces we actually need to make this 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, makes no sense for them to be the ones that are so-called keeping themselves accountable. There is no way to hold people accountable when they’re just doing it within a 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. That’s why again we send our folks who are most marginalized and are most impacted by oppression to understand what needs to change.