A little firsthand insight and context, for those interested.
My husband and I were in that march, but we were far enough back in the phalanx that we didn't see the incident when it played out. We knew there had been a commotion but we didn't know what it was. We had to walk around the woman's car, which was parked perpendicular to the street and blocking all lanes. The march continued on for another mile -- we marched 7 miles in all, through Shorewood and other North Shore communities -- and my husband and I then walked home from Atwater Park, where the march began and ended. It wasn't until we got home that we realized what had happened. The woman was not taken into custody at the time. She was taken into custody the next day, after the subsequent incidents outlined in the link in the OP.
The previous weekend, a large Black Lives Matter march came north from the city and tried to cross the invisible "border" between Milwaukee and the Village of Shorewood at around 10:00pm. A coalition of North Shore police from Shorewood and several surrounding suburbs set up a perimeter and turned the group away, diverting them west and south. We could hear the sirens late into the night both Saturday and Sunday, May 30 and 31. The Village President instituted curfew on Saturday night that took a number of marchers by surprise. There was tension between the marchers and the police; a few arrests were made. On Monday, I started looking into the #MilwaukeeProtest hashtag on Twitter to see what was being said. The consensus was that the white suburbs didn't want the protests in their Village, which, of course, is the very reason they should be here. Just a few days before the May 6 incident, there was a "kneel-in" at the intersection of two busy streets in Shorewood. For 9 minutes, a few dozen of my neighbors and friends knelt in memory of George Floyd. A middle-aged white man, inconvenienced by the brief traffic stoppage, got out of his car and started shouting at the group. A 14-year-old girl stood up and confronted him. A picture ran in the news the next day of this angry, hateful white man screaming in the face of an African-American child.
Here's a little background on the Village of Shorewood. This is a northern suburb of Milwaukee that sits right on Lake Michigan. We have our own school system, our own police, fire, and rescue squads, our own Village Board. Downtown Milwaukee is a short bike ride along the lake shore from here. It's a small Village geographically, with about 13,000 residents packed inside a 1.6 mile area. We're considered an affluent suburb of the city, but I've always felt that was a bit of a misconception. Yes, we do have a fair number of lakefront mansions and other very large, expensive properties. But we also have a large number of middle-income homeowners and renters and students from UW-Milwaukee, which is just a few streets south of the Village. I will concede, absolutely, that our average income is much higher than the average in the city, but I suspect it's skewed by a small number of very high income families. As a Village, I believe we have voted heavily blue in every recent election. So that's what we are. A bit well-to-do, a bit well-educated, thanks to the proximity of the UW campus and the wealth of great universities in the area.
What we are not ... is diverse. And because of that, we've had our fair share of growing pains. A few years ago the Shorewood High School AP Art class created a mural about what it was like to be a student of color in that school. It was made up primarily of quotes from students about their experiences of being stopped by Shorewood cops, being looked at askance by their white teachers and classmates, being tailed through the high-end boutiques that line Oakland Avenue, where the June 6 incident happened. The mural was only public for a few days before someone in a position of authority at the school, and I do not recall who, whitewashed it. Literally whitewashed, as in, painted over it with white paint. It caused a row that rose and flowed and ebbed, and we eventually all moved on with our lives ... many of us more angry and self-righteous about the mural's destruction than about what the mural was really trying to say.
More recently the high school drama department tried to mount "To Kill a Mockingbird," but the play was scrapped at the dress rehearsal stage. I'm unclear as to exactly why it was nixed; I believe it was because some of the students of color had protested the language of the play, and how uncomfortable they were hearing those words come out of the mouths of their peers and friends. Honestly, though, my daughter had graduated by then and we were much less attuned to the pulse of the school system. So, to my chagrin now, I didn't follow the story at all.
All of this is to say that we've had our share of problems, and we've been trying to grow as a community so that we can support our neighbors who are people of color. As a Village, we've had forums on race, we've had open meetings, we've tried to stay cognizant of our privilege and watchful for the injustices that privilege often engenders. Saturday's march, to me, felt like a high point in this group struggle. Many hundreds of people turned out. I was astonished by the size of the group, and honestly very proud. Even though my young adult daughter thinks that mostly white folks marching through mostly white suburbs is "performative" rather than revolutionary and refused to participate (she marched with the BLM group downtown instead), I was glad I turned out for what was a truly uplifting, positive, and powerful demonstration.
Until the end, when the incident happened, and I came back to earth with the realization that there is still so, so much work to be done ... right in my Village, right on my street, right in my own backyard.
The incident is still playing out here. The young man is very much supported by the whole community. The community message boards and forums continue to light up with debate and discussion. I'm finding out more about the way the Village Board operates than I ever knew, and I'm hopeful that this incident, as ugly and gut-wrenching as it has been, will inspire self-reflection that leads to real and positive change.
So there's your insight from someone who was there. I hope you'll keep the young man in your thoughts. He's an amazing young man with an amazing family, living in a community that is learning, sometimes painfully, how to do better by him.
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..Oh..indeed!
If she was black, she would have had the crap beat out of her, probably.
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