Said Eileen Harrington, "former chairperson of the now-dissolved Task Force on Government Structure," quoted in "Madison voters widely support City Council term limits; reject full-time body, longer term lengths" (Wisconsin State Journal).
[Harrington's] work prompted the advisory questions.... In a report to the council in early 2020, the task force concluded the current system is “fundamentally unfair,” particularly for people of color and low-income residents, and one that favors people with the time, resources and knowledge to participate.
Harrington said she felt there wasn’t a “meaningful effort” from the council to educate the public on the task force’s work before the vote. Among its various recommendations, the task force suggested moving to a full-time, 10-member council with members paid $67,950 annually and elected to four-year terms.
The one thing that passed — by a lot (71% to 29%) — was the proposal for term limits. The article doesn't make it clear, but I don't think term limits was one of the committee's ideas. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like everything the committee wanted was soundly defeated. [CORRECTION: The committee did recommend term limits.]
And I think what Harrington is implying is that the Madison voters hadn't gotten the message that we needed to vote for the proposals to be anti-racist. We weren't meaningfully educated, so we just ambled into the polls, read the referendum questions as written, and decided city council members shouldn't have higher pay and 4-year terms. And then we went for term limits!
Was that racist? The article quotes former mayor Dave Cieslewicz: “I hope Madisonians don’t just see this as something they rejected but also as something they support. I hope there’s a renewed appreciation for their neighbors who step up to work on the council for little money or recognition, but just to serve the community.”
As a CRT-steeped Madisonian, I've got to ask: Is that white supremacy? Is the low-pay, part-time service ideal part of whiteness? And would we have voted the other way if only we'd been sufficiently educated on that score? Or did we know we were voting for systemic racism and that's why we did it?
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FROM THE EMAIL: Noting the language from the article that I quoted above — "the task force concluded the current system is “fundamentally unfair,”
particularly for people of color and low-income residents, and one that
favors people with the time, resources and knowledge to participate" — Greg writes:
Originally I thought perhaps the highlighted sentiment was simply the author of the article’s inarticulate summary, but no – that phrase is taken from the text of the task force’s report.
Indeed, the report uses that exact phrase ["people with the time, resources and knowledge to participate"] three separate times. Seems to me that it is racism of the highest order to assume that people of color don’t have the time, resources or KNOWLEDGE(!!!!) to participate in municipal government.
Unrelated, but while I believe we could all be classified as racist to some degree (it’s unfortunately a part of the human condition in my view), I have long held the belief that most people – certainly not all, but a substantial majority (>70%) – are not racist in any meaningful way. Perhaps I am simply wrong or naïve, but that has been my experience.
Conversely, I find those who hyperventilate about racism (and seem to be able to find evidence of it anywhere and everywhere these days) often meet the textbook definition of a racist. Very Orwellian.
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