Last year, I assigned the play Sweat by Lynn Nottage, to my Theatre Appreciation course. I assigned the play because its characters, situations, and the inevitable violence in the play resonated powerfully with me. Sweat is perhaps the most important piece of contemporary Drama written in the past ten years, because it precisely reveals the forces at play that intersected to give us our current nightmare America. While the play is set in a small town in Pennsylvania, it could just as easily been set in my home town of Kenosha.
I grew up in the aftermath of the closing of the local Chrysler plant. Back in the day, if you decided to settle down in Kenosha, you either worked for or supported the auto industry and that specific manufacturing plant. You were Union. You could live a whole life working the assembly line, and it would be a good life. And when Chrysler pulled out of Kenosha, they left economic, spiritual, and emotional devastation in the wake of their departure. The anger, the cynicism, the desperation — it was palpable, and it affected everyone in just about every walk of life. The city has been expanding in recent years, but in a way that plays mostly to the service economy. If you drive around the city, the houses are the same as they ever were, just older and rotting. It’s an upper Midwest landscape that might fit into a Tennessee William’s play with a few well placed Southern Gothic flourishes.
The people I grew up with needed someone to blame, it was all too easy for opportunists to divide the labor movement along racial lines (those divisions were in many ways already present). There’s a certain breed of blue-collar Wisconsin union worker that voted Democrat for decades but listened to Rush Limbaugh every day on the way to work. That voter — the bitter young man trapped in an aging, work-worn body — once had a palace of their own making. A place of affluence they carved out with the strength of their back and the soreness in their hands. And when it went away, and when the world never really mended for them, they needed something to blame. Right wing hate radio and empty nationalism gave it to them.
When I went to my tiny private Catholic high school, the racism was ever present. The first Black person I met came to our school because our basketball coach had gone to Illinois to recruit them. We did a production of Big River, and had to hire someone to come play Jim because no Black people showed up for the audition. People in my class who grew up to be fairly prominent local Kenosha people were brazenly racist, all the time.
And then there’s the police. Kenosha PD officers have always acted as if they are above the law, and they have always treated BIPOC people like dirt. This was true when I was a kid there, and it’s true today. My experience with law enforcement there is old, but I doubt it’s changed much.
When I was 12 or 13, just before high school, a neighborhood Evangelical friend of mine asked me to come join a program called Explorers. It was like the Boy Scouts, he told me, only they got to work with the Police. What Explorers was, however, was a right-wing evangelical Youth program that puts young boys into training situations with local white evangelical police officers. My first night there, they had us fight. They had this sort of platform that was set up to lurch one way or the other (think about that scene from Flash Gordon). They gave us these padded quarterstaves to fight with. If you got knocked down you were mocked. If you knocked the other boy down, you were praised. The police came to talk to us. We got to go on “ride alongs”. I didn’t last long in the program. I didn’t see it at the time, but the link between Evangelicals, the police, and white supremacy was right there under my nose. There weren’t any Black or Brown kids in the program at the time. Just white kids, and white cops. It was a toxic, abusive, indoctrination program for both white Police power and Evangelical conservatism.
The Police in Kenosha are cut largely from the same cloth as the Union guys. Same nationalism. Same right-wing conservatism. All of it. They have a history of corruption and violence, especially against People of Color, who have long suffered injustice from institutions in the city. It seems it’s only got worse since I left.
Kenosha is America. The city is racially diverse, but white supremacist in it’s institutions. Kenosha is fueled by a work-till-you-die-from-it mentality, but private interests have largely gutted the ability for working people to make a good life for themselves. There’s a Catholic church and a bar on every other corner and a huge extremist right-wing evangelical compound on the way into the city. It’s a city that has a lot of Democrats that listen to a lot of Rush Limbaugh and think he’s got a lot of smart things to say. It’s a place that’s suffered the consequences of generational economic devastation from the closing of the Chrysler plant, and a place where those same disenfranchised white men were convinced it was secretly all the Black and Brown people that made their lives so hard.
If you want to know why Trump got elected, look no further than Kenosha. Sweat may as well have been a crystal ball, and it wasn’t just talking about Pennsylvania. It was talking about everywhere in the country where white men had their castle pulled out from under them and instead of going after the bastards that ruined them, they raised a generation of gun-obsessed, racist, angry young white men in their wake. The intersection of our economic policies over the past 30-40 years, institutional racism, and hate-speech radio created the cauldron we see now.
I wasn’t surprised when I saw what those cops did to Jacob Blake. That’s Kenosha PD. I was saddened, and angry, but I wasn’t surprised. Places like Kenosha are where Trump’s message of chaos and hate and violence against Black and Brown bodies takes root and holds form. This is the sort of place where White resentment makes for the Scott Walkers of the world.
We need a plan to address those places if we’re going to come back into the light this November. We can’t ignore these spaces or the complex forces and history that create them. We may not be able to reach these folks that I’m talking about, but maybe we can get enough other people to the polls that their voice won’t carry the day.
But we underestimate their racism, their decades-long cynicism and resentment, at our own peril. They don’t think their own lives have ever mattered, so why should a Black person’s life matter? We don’t understand that when they shout ALL LIVES MATTER back at us, they aren’t just expressing their racism. They’re also expressing their own pain, boiled down to fuel that hate, because the alternative is to admit that they were cast aside and set adrift and used by men who never gave a damn about them in the first place.
