Deshawn McKinney sat isolated within the concrete walls of College Library, silently working through his research paper, unaware that the course of his life was about to change as chaos erupted just beyond his quiet studies.
Outside those sturdy walls earlier that evening on Dec. 4, 2014, students rallied at the Kohl Center — some of them were cheering in support of the Badgers basketball team as they took on Duke. Just outside, however, others stood in a silent vigil in reaction to the news that the officer involved in the death of Eric Garner would not be indicted for his actions. Garner died in New York on July 17, 2014, while exclaiming “I can’t breathe” as he was held down in a chokehold, face down on the ground.
Outrage about the news spread across the country, reaching UW-Madison and, later that evening, finding its way to McKinney, whose Facebook disrupted his silence as it blared with posts from friends who recounted the threats they received from students exiting the Kohl Center.
In that moment, McKinney realized he could no longer ignore his belief that people are dying for simply existing.
“Looking around College Library, you see nobody else cares, everybody’s just doing their homework, oblivious to what just happened and what students have to go through and that not everybody can compartmentalize between death and academics,” McKinney says. “If I go home in Milwaukee, or even Madison, I can get shot by a cop at any time for doing whatever.”
McKinney, now a senior, carries pride and love for his identity as a Black man — emotions that are often challenged or diminished, but also represent a great amount of strength and beauty, he says.
McKinney, now a senior, carries pride and love for his identity as a Black man — emotions that are often challenged or diminished, but also represent a great amount of strength and beauty, he says. Although this love for his identity hadn’t previously propelled him to get involved, within a week of the Kohl Center vigil, McKinney mobilized 1,000 students, community members and faculty on the Sunday before finals for a march up Bascom Hill and into College Library, where they performed a die-in – which he describes as “the symbolic recreation of death in attempt to disrupt the normal flow of life and raise awareness of the disparate brutality waged against Black bodies by police and the institutions that uphold them.”
He has found an outlet in the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2012 and is dedicated to rebuilding the Black Liberation movement. According to the Black Lives Matter website, the movement is fighting on behalf of all Black identities while “broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state.”
McKinney’s childhood experiences led to a greater understanding of the movement’s most prominent issue: systemic racism. Growing up in poverty on the north side of Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities in the country, McKinney says he saw what was going on around him, but couldn’t connect it to a larger issue at the time.
“I know what it’s like to not have hot water, I know what it’s like to take showers in the sink before school in the morning, to have to try to sleep when there are roaches around. I know what it’s like to have police raid your home, I know what it’s like to be followed,” McKinney says. “Growing up, you don’t necessarily connect it to this larger thing because you are very much just trying to survive. You can’t really think about systemic racism when you have to pay the rent or need groceries.”
McKinney says it wasn’t until Dec. 4, as all his friends posted on Facebook from the Kohl Center describing people yelling things such as, “I hope the fire department hoses you down” as the protesters stood in silence, that the final piece fell into place. It was in this moment that McKinney says he connected all that he had seen and been through to a much larger issue.
Christina Greene, an associate professor in the UW-Madison Department of Afro-American Studies, says that although Jim Crow laws — which were set in place after the Reconstruction era and enforced until 1965 — have been dismantled, remnants of them still exist. According to the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Jim Crow laws were enforced in Southern states that gave different rights to Blacks than Whites, some of which included restricting Black Americans’ right to vote and the concept of “separate but equal” public facilities for Blacks and Whites. Although American society isn’t as clearly racist as the days when Jim Crow laws were followed, racism is still an underlying thread, Greene says.
“The way in which White supremacy manifests itself is sometimes more hidden. It’s more structural, it’s systemic, so that creates more of a challenge,” Greene says. “In some ways the issues are similar, yet we have a 21st-century manifestation of them.”
Although the manifestation of systemic racism may be more concealed, some statistics are still dismal. Of anywhere in the country, Wisconsin has the largest achievement gap between Black and White students, and Milwaukee Public Schools have particularly low performance. Furthermore, Milwaukee’s rate of incarceration is 13 percent for Black men — almost double the country’s rate.
Having survived and flourished despite his childhood circumstances, McKinney says he often misses home, a place he loves like his Black identity. McKinney says although he feels people are forgotten there, the culture, gestures and vernacular feel like “a handshake and a hug” every time he returns.
“I think that pride and love of the Black identity is similar to my love and pride in the north side of Milwaukee. It is a place where the people are forgotten, intentionally, and left out of the things that make Wisconsin great on ‘best of’ lists and the like, but there is so much greatness there,” McKinney says. “The people are resilient, they are beautiful, and it’s that world that made me into the man I am today.”
McKinney says this love for his culture that is overlooked keeps him fighting for the conversation on systemic racism to continue. It “irks” him, he says, when people say that the Black Lives Matter movement or individual efforts are starting the conversation. This is not a new conversation, McKinney says, but a continuation. If the same issues were being fought in the 1960s and even longer before that, then it is clear that the conversation started long before 2016, he argues. McKinney says there is no way to progress if the conversation is always viewed as just beginning.
McKinney has many outlets to generate conversation, including the written and spoken word. As a creative writing major and member of the seventh cohort of First Wave, a multicultural artistic scholarship program offered by the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, McKinney continues to break down the reality of racism in America through his poetry and rap. With First Wave, McKinney has been able to travel the country and engage in conversations about racial issues using spoken word. This outlet has proven to be one that some audiences are more receptive to; they hear about the issues in a different way and can come to understand what’s being done to address them. But spoken word is also an important component of Black communities, something McKinney describes as the “backbone” for discussion in urban communities and an outlet for the people there.
“There has never been a time in U.S. history when Black folks have not resisted the tyranny of oppression,” McKinney says. “We are the sword and the shield, and I’ve come to a point in my life that I have chosen to stand rooted firm in the truth, supported by all the ascension in my culture, inherent in Blackness.”
McKinney says although campus demographics differ from those of his hometown of Milwaukee — Milwaukee’s population is 40 percent Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, while UW-Madison’s student body is less than 3 percent Black as of fall 2013, according to the Office of the Registrar — he says the issues remain the same. Madison has a long history of political activism, and McKinney has found that students are receptive to issues, although they may not understand all of the tactics activists take to generate conversation and incite change. Yet he has found that majority students don’t always engage in the conversation because they have the ability to leave campus at the end of the semester without the burden of fighting for equality. Not all students face the same threats that members of the Black community do.
“Majority students don’t have to worry about this, they don’t have to worry about police stopping them, or they don’t have to worry about getting killed just for getting pulled over, or walking down the street,” McKinney says. “So a lot of people don’t engage with it. It’s a difficult thing to engage with, I understand that. I don’t think it’s right. I think it’s an easy way out, but that’s a part of White privilege to be able to do that.”
Although McKinney says microaggressive behaviors on campus are common, he doesn’t often face blatant racism from fellow classmates, which he attributes in part to a certain level of male privilege. But he has received scrutiny from the broader Madison community. McKinney says this stems from an inherent fear of an image — a caricature — of the Black man with natural hair in a hoodie, an image almost equated with devilish characteristics.
“I look like the worst kind of nightmare,” McKinney says.
McKinney continues to fight to live in a world where he doesn’t have to worry about what he looks like in a hoodie, an image that McKinney says has somehow justified death in our present-day society. But even on a campus with under 3 percent of students identifying as Black, it can be a challenge to choose one way to fight this inherent racism. McKinney says that the structures to create leaders have been dismantled, leading to a multitude of voices and opinions on how the Black Lives Matter movement will reach its goals.
When people think of the Black Lives Matter movement, they think of rallies. McKinney says rallies generate buzz but don’t achieve change — change that only tedious effort to get legislation and policy passed does.
And it’s working. As a direct result of activism at UW-Madison, campus leaders took suggestions from students on changes that should be made, which has resulted in plans for a Black cultural center, a move to hire more mental health professionals of color and a revamp of the ethnic studies curriculum, just to name a few. McKinney admits that things have changed on campus since that night in December 2014. It no longer feels like the administration is the enemy, and avenues to interact and improve campus for people of all origins continue to open, he says. Real, tangible change is being achieved. But many of these initiatives are in a stage of “infancy,” as McKinney says Black students haven’t yet been significantly impacted by the change.
Even combining his activism with his creative nature, McKinney says this fight to be recognized as human, to make people see the same greatness he sees in his own culture, isn’t work he likes to do, nor is it work he believes anyone should have to do. Instead, McKinney feels an obligation to continue his activism and use his unique skills to continue the conversation.
“As long as I’m a Black man living in America, and America is what it is, then I’m doing the work,” McKinney says.
And the work he’s done and will continue to do has been recognized nationwide. In April 2016, McKinney received the Truman Scholarship, an award based on a person’s record of public service. Most recently in November, McKinney was named a finalist for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, an accomplishment he says means a lot to the communities from which he comes, revealing to those who come after him that they can reach great heights. In lieu of being a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, McKinney accepted the Marshall Scholarship, which will take him to the London School of Economics in fall 2017 to obtain a master’s degree in public policy and administration and a master’s degree in social policy.
“Even without becoming a Rhodes scholar, I think having my work elevated to such a level is always a positive,” McKinney says. “I was able to honestly represent who I am and who I’m fighting for, and why, in a space that hasn’t historically been privy to such issues.”
With the end of his undergraduate career on the horizon, McKinney trusts the path he is on. With all his experiences, all he has overcome having grown up in poverty, all the people he has met and all the change he has already achieved, one goal holds true: he intends to remain dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, McKinney says, he can remain true to all the dimensions of his identity as an artist, an activist and a Black man in America. No matter what the future holds, McKinney says he will never have to sacrifice any part of this identity.
“I hug my Blackness a little tighter, because we are what keeps our communities afloat while the massive waves of oppression try to drown us, quite literally, in some cases,” McKinney says. “We hold onto each other, and we dance, and we rap, and we cry, and we shout and we push. We always push.”
Madeline Makoul
Since she was young, Madeline has been infatuated with the written word. After a childhood where her head was always buried in a book, Madeline decided to become a storyteller herself. She obsesses over current events, pop culture, old Youtube videos of Chelsea Lately, fashion, but most importantly, bagels. As a Chicago native, Madeline is ready to journey outside of the Midwest to pursue an editorial position at a major publication in New York City.