Geographic and Economic Racial Disparity in Wisconsin

Black people comprise 12.3 percent of the population of the USA, but only 6.3 percent of the state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin outside of the City of Milwaukee, is actually only 2.5 percent Black – less than one-fifth of the percentage of Black persons in the population of the USA as a whole. That’s the kind of statistic that harbors and attracts explicitly racist white enclaves. If, compared to other states, Wisconsin were a great place to live, with equitable opportunity for all, more people of color would be living here by now.

70 percent of all Black citizens of Wisconsin live in Milwaukee County. 94% of all Black residents of Milwaukee County live in the City of Milwaukee. Less than 6 percent of all white persons living in Wisconsin live in the city of Milwaukee. But two-thirds of all Black persons living in Wisconsin live in the city of Milwaukee. Are you getting the picture? Wisconsin has never been particularly welcoming to people of color, and has always kept the races separated, with people of color oppressed and in poverty. 

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Racial Disparity, Mass Incarceration, and the New Jim Crow

Racial Disparity + Police Brutality + Mass Incarceration = Violation of Human Rights + Intimidation + Individual and Community Impoverishment and Disenfranchisement

first researched and published in Feb. 2005; updated in Dec. 2014

 

The USA now imprisons a higher percentage of her people than any other country on earth. This distinction, acquired around the turn of the 21^st century, is largely due to a huge escalation in incarcerations caused by drug law enforcement. The escalation is not due to increased use of illegal drugs. It is a result of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ waged selectively and with markedly different tactics in different communities, since the 1980’s. 

The Universal Invasive Species is bound for Planet “B”

From his brimstone bed at break of day
A walking the Devil is gone,
To visit his snug little farm the earth,
And see how his stock goes on.

Samuel Coleridge

[First published on Groundhog Day, 2016, this significant revision was posted in January 2017]

About a billion years or so from now, changes in the sun’s energy output will end the ability of the now 4.5 billion year old Planet Earth to support life. We don’t yet know how or if we can deal with that far-into-the-distant-future problem. But today we are facing an imminent threat to life on Earth and we’d better not put it off. The incessant, increasing activities of human civilization are rapidly depleting and despoiling existing ‘natural resources’, and are simultaneously accelerating the degradation of the ability of this beautiful planet to sustain life. These unprecedented changes include widespread continuing destruction of natural life and ecology; damaging alterations of the planet’s oceans, surface and ground water; and the ominous increase of human produced toxins and global warming “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere. Despite that, human beings are not the universal invasive species, and we can stop and repair the damage.