Kenosha, Wisconsin, a deindustrialized city of about 100,000 people on Lake Michigan, became a national flashpoint when a white police officer shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back. Blake was opening the door to his SUV at the time. Three of his children were in the back seat. Now, Blake is paralyzed from the waist down.
When Kenosha restructured as a service, tourism, and logistical center, the Black community was shut out from the new sources of economic growth.
The shooting by officer Rusten Sheskey ignited several nights of protests and violence in late August, with dozens of buildings destroyed or severely damaged. Ultimately, about 2000 National Guard troops from four different states were called in to quell the unrest. It also occasioned visits by both major party presidential candidates, as well as Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential pick.
While the city is no longer a fixture of the news cycle, Kenosha continues to face major challenges, including developing a new economic model to provide decent living standards for all Kenoshans, especially the city’s long-neglected Black community.
Kenosha, in the last several decades, has been transformed from a prosperous, highly unionized factory town into a low-wage, non-union service and logistics center where growth is increasingly moving away from the central city. The ongoing marginalization of Kenosha’s Black community is crucial to understanding the uprising after Blake’s shooting, and in setting a course toward a more just future.
Though the shooting of Blake inspired a wave of Black Lives Matter protests, similar to those seen in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the demonstrations also galvanized right-wing militia forces, both locally and nationally.
Two state legislators from Milwaukee, David Bowen (Democrat from the 10th Assembly District) and Jonathan Brostoff (Democrat from the 19th Assembly District), told me they witnessed extensive vandalism by members of white supremacist groups.
The far-right reaction spiraled into a mass shooting when seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, from nearby northern Illinois, traveled across the state line to Kenosha with an AR-15 rifle and a thirty-round clip of ammunition. Rittenhouse proceeded to kill two anti-racist protesters, wound a third, and then blithely walk away past police vehicles. He was later arrested back in his hometown, Antioch, Illinois, on the following day.
Instead of condemning these killings, President Donald Trump aggressively defended them. “He was trying to get away from [the anti-racist protesters],” Trump said of Rittenhouse. “I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would have been killed.”
Validated by the President, Rittenhouse has become something of a folk hero among conservatives. During the height of the turmoil, Wisconsin conservative radio host Vicki McKenna called for “patriots” to get their guns and ammo and head to Kenosha. “Have you cleaned your guns lately? Do you have enough ammo?” she asked. Shockingly, Rittenhouse’s mother was introduced to a standing ovation at a Republican Party event in Waukesha, an affluent Milwaukee suburb.
Although Trump had lavished praise on police authorities in Kenosha, there were strong indications that some Kenosha police officers actively cooperated with militia forces. A video clip, for example, shows a self-styled militia member saying, “You know what the cops told us today? They were like, ‘We’re gonna push ’em down by you,’ cause you can deal with them and then we’re gonna leave.’ ” (A researcher at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right has identified about two dozen instances of police-militia collaboration around the United States from late May through the end of August.)
Trump, after his September 1 visit to Kenosha, promised $42 million in aid to help the city rebuild, but only $1 million represents new funding that had not previously been allocated to the state through other programs.
Black Kenoshans—about 12 percent of the community—have long been consigned to the bottom of the economic and social ladder, with their status maintained by a hostile police department. The poverty rate for the city’s Black households stands at 39 percent, which is three times the rate for whites.
An astonishing 42 percent of Kenosha’s Black males are either jobless or have otherwise fallen out of the active workforce, says professor Marc Levine of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Economic Development.
And, among those employed, median wages for Black males average just 50 percent of those for whites in what is now a low-wage city. The incarceration rate for Black people in Kenosha is also extremely high. Data collected by the non-profit Building Our Future shows that 21 percent of all Black males in Kenosha County were incarcerated at some point in 2010, compared to 1.7 percent for Latinx and 1.5 percent for whites.
The restructuring of Kenosha, much hailed from The New York Times to Business Week, has failed to make it a “rebound city,” as one area paper imagined it. “The ‘reinvention’ of Kenosha post-Chrysler has created a polarized economy,” Levine explains. “The logistics, warehouse, and advanced but small manufacturing sector, with jobs along the I-94 corridor” pay substantially less than the auto jobs that were lost when the Chrysler plant closed in 1988 . “Blacks are generally left out and Hispanics [18% of Kenosha’s population] are disproportionately found in very low-wage jobs.”
Kenosha’s transformation from a high-wage, strongly unionized community to a low-wage economy has shifted jobs largely outside of city limits, and out of reach for some Black people and residents who lack a car.
West of the city, light manufacturing sites and office parks sit alongside giant storage and logistics centers for Amazon and Uline (whose owners Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have donated $1.5 million to Trump’s “America First Action” super PAC, and $20 million to other Republican groups in the 2020 election cycle).
Aiding Kenosha’s decline, local corporate leaders and public officials promoted the deindustrialization and de-unionization of the jobs that had made Kenosha a decent place to live in the first place. But it was precisely that unionized industrial base which heavily benefited African Americans, who were entitled to the same wages, benefits, and conditions as their white co-workers.
From the mid-1980s on, the local Chrysler auto assembly plant provided jobs to 6,400 workers, and about a third of them were Black. At Chrysler, the workers were strongly represented by the progressive and innovative United Auto Workers Local 72, which was established after one of the earliest sit-down strikes in 1933, more than three years before the famous action at Flint, Michigan.
In January 1988, Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca announced the end of auto production in Kenosha. Suddenly, the middle-class living standards of working people of all colors became vulnerable, as Chrysler’s wage levels, typical for the auto industry, had forced other nearby employers to raise their pay scale as well, a sore point for local corporate leaders.
The Chrysler shutdown moved thousands of jobs to Mexico, where the manufacturer already had seven plants.
One Kenosha resident recently told The New York Times that the shutdown announcement was the “second worst week” in Kenosha history—after the Jacob Blake shooting.
When Kenosha restructured as a service, tourism, and logistical center, the Black community was shut out from the new sources of economic growth.
The Kenosha factories that had propped up the relatively affluent Black working class were replaced by a new marina on the edge of sparkling Lake Michigan, catering to tourists and new light-manufacturing and logistics jobs in shiny buildings outside the city’s edge. Instead of the industrial powerhouse it once was, Kenosha is now a low-wage exurb of Chicago. A remarkable 49 percent of workers commute outside the county where they can find work 15 percent to 30 percent higher than locally.
Currently, local activists are pushing for a top-to-bottom rebuilding of the Police and Sheriff’s Departments to transform their relationship with Black and Latinx residents.
At the same time, a fundamental rebuilding of Kenosha’s economic model, which so thoroughly marginalizes African Americans, seems urgent for a stable and equitable future for the city. But some of the most basic steps, like raising the minimum wage and pressuring corporate executives to locate jobs closer to the city, are unlikely to sit well with the city’s economic elite.
To date, a month after Blake’s shooting, no decision has been made on whether Sheskey will face criminal charges. The Wisconsin Department of Justice says it is “in the final stages” of its probe. Pro-police forces claim Sheskey merely made the wrong split-second decision in a difficult situation.
Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether Ritttenhouse, the teenage vigilante, will be convicted of the murder charges he faces.
Rittenhouse’s attorneys are clearly intent on stretching out every phase of the legal proceedings, including trying to block the shooter from being extradited from Illinois.
Moving one or more of the cases to another city would lighten Kenosha’s burden as the site of three incendiary trials for Blake, police officer Sheske, and Rittenhouse. Nevertheless, if unaddressed, decades-long neglect of the Black community will continue to burn like a lit fuse, and will eventually ignite another explosive eruption.