Race & Law – Page 17 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Culture and Racism: Some Reflections on “Zwarte Piet”

Post author:Irene Ten Cate
Post published:December 6, 2013
Post category:Public Race & Law

I don’t think I will ever forget the look on my roommate’s face when I offered her some pepernoten.

It must have been late October or early November. I was an exchange student in New York and my parents had mailed some much-missed Dutch goodies, including pepernoten, the tiny spicy cookies associated with the Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas) celebration. Saint Nicholas—not to be confused with Santa Claus even though both are white men with long beards who dress in red robes—is the patron saint of children. Historically he was a Greek bishop from Myra in present-day Turkey, but for unknown reasons Dutch children are told he hails from Spain. The Saint’s grand arrival in the Netherlands by steamboat is followed by a few weeks of fun and excitement, which culminate in a big celebration on the evening of December 5.

Historian Tells “Difficult Truths” About Slavery and American Colleges

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:December 4, 2013
Post category:Civil Rights Public Race & Law Speakers at Marquette

“The task of the historian is to tell difficult truths as honestly as we can and to tell help the reader understand both the complexities and the disturbing realities of the past.”

Professor Craig Steven Wilder, head of the history faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offered that thought as part of describing his new book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Eckstein Hall on Wednesday. The book serves the purpose he set forth, describing the painful and long history of involvement of colleges and universities in the American colonies and in the United States with slavery and promotion of “scientific racism,” pseudoscience that promotes the superiority of white people.

Wilder described, both in the book and to the audience at Marquette Law School, how major institutions such as Harvard and Yale had long and close relationships with the slave business. That included recruiting the sons of slave traders and plantation owners as students, benefitting from large donations from very wealthy businessmen who were involved in slavery, and promoting thinking that black people and American Indians were inferior and should be suppressed. It also included the fact that many students in the slavery era brought their slaves with them to campus, including in the north.

Nationally, Police Get Good Marks From Citizens; Locally, We’ll Soon Find Out

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:November 3, 2013
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Milwaukee Public Race & Law

Last week, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission announced that it would conduct its first survey of citizen satisfaction with the police. The results should provide us with helpful new ways to evaluate the Milwaukee Police Department’s performance and identify areas in need of improvement.

Unfortunately, media coverage provides a very distorted picture of police-citizen interactions. What makes the news, of course, are the incidents in which officers become violent or exhibit extreme callousness. When video is available of such incidents, as is increasingly common, the disturbing images may be repeated endlessly on TV or circulate virally on social media. Viewers may be left with the impression that such incidents are the norm. However, the vast majority of police-citizen interactions occur without anything newsworthy happening. Among other things, the Fire and Police Commission’s new survey should give us a much better sense of what happens in the more routine interactions and how those interactions affect public perceptions of the police.

Although data of this sort have not been available for Milwaukee specifically, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics did sponsor a national survey in 2011 regarding police-citizens interactions. The results, released in two reports earlier this fall, indicate a remarkably high level of citizen satisfaction, even among the minority groups who seem to bear the brunt of the high-profile incidents of police misconduct.