A stipulation of Act 12, the newly signed shared revenue law which provides Milwaukee with much-needed funding, curtails Milwaukee city and county diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in hiring and awarding contracts. Black Wisconsin Legislator Rep. Kalan Haywood said, “Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts exist to equalize and remedy that past as we move into the future… There is strength in diversity, and we must invest in and foster that strength.”

The DEI movement in the United States began during the Civil Rights Movement to increase acceptance and tolerance of newly integrated institutions after segregation. It has grown to include gender, sexual orientation, religion, country of origin, personality types, disabilities, and other identities, and the goals shifted to creating environments in which different identities aren’t just accepted and tolerated but diverse identities can thrive and feel belonging. 

These imperative DEI initiatives aimed to make historically segregated institutions more welcoming and reflective of the different identities that occupy them for the first time in American history. “'Affirmative action’ means if you come to a party, you can get in the door. But it doesn’t help you once you’re inside. Diversity and inclusion is what happens once you’re inside the door,” said Patti DeRosa, president of ChangeWorks Consulting.

So why are Wisconsin lawmakers opposed to DEI initiatives in Milwaukee and the entire University of Wisconsin system? It’s not just Wisconsin. The Supreme Court recently gutted affirmative action, making it unlawful for colleges to consider race to remedy racial disparities in admissions. Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced legislation to curtail DEI initiatives, leading Politico to call these attacks “the new Red Scare.” In May, both Florida and Texas passed bills banning DEI initiatives in public colleges. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also issued a directive instructing Texas public universities to stop considering DEI statements in their hiring practices, a move that the UW System preemptively adopted. Why is there a “new red scare” around DEI initiatives?

Republican lawmakers, including Robin Vos, argue that DEI campus initiatives increased racial division and “indoctrinated” students. On the hiring level, lawmakers say that DEI initiatives sacrifice merit and efficiency for virtue signaling. Some wrongly tout that these initiatives' goals are for “equality of outcome” and not equality of opportunity, arguing that on campuses and in the workforce, these initiatives hurt institutions rather than helping. 

These are not fair critiques of DEI initiatives. The goal of DEI is not for “equality of outcome” but to attempt to improve the success rate of disenfranchised groups in institutions historically designed solely for white, cis, non-disabled men. Imagine that while playing Monopoly with friends, only one player could collect money for the first three trips around the board. After the first three trips around the board, every play can collect money, but that first player has an advantage, and the consequences of the formerly rigged game still make the game unfair. That is the long-lasting impact of America’s former racist policies. It gives white communities, and specifically white cis-men, an advantage. This is why DEI initiatives are imperative to create environments that will allow others .Most of these policies don’t exist today, but the implications of their implementation are generational. Today, communities of color are underrepresented at every UW-System campus but two, according to fall of ‘21 semester enrollment.  It was merely two generations ago that the Black People’s Alliance organized to improve recruiting at the UW-Madison campus, and less than 100 years ago, UW-Madison’s population of Black Students was 15, according to Velma Bell Hamilton’s Master thesis. Wisconsin also lags significantly behind other states in Black and Latino homeownership and possesses one of the country's most significant racial wealth gaps. A 2020 UW-Milwaukee report found that Milwaukee ranks near the bottom for various metrics comparing racial inequality in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. 

DEI programs don’t indoctrinate college students or employees but may make them feel uncomfortable. Exposure to new ideas isn’t indoctrination, it’s necessary exposure to the realities of the world and the different experiences that inhabit them. Research has found that university-led efforts to address racism directly led to less racist beliefs and discrimination in the student population. Two studies conducted in 2017 and 2020 found that exposing people to more diverse environments leads to more unity and less discrimination. 

Diverse communities are better communities and DEI initiatives help to protect and maintain diverse communities. Lawmakers should support initiatives that bring different constituents together and form better outcomes. It is counterproductive to the betterment of Wisconsin and the United States to oppose DEI initiatives.

At the ACLU of Wisconsin, our focus recently turned to two electoral cycles: the gubernatorial election in November 2022, and the April 2023 state supreme court election. I’m proud to say that there were many lessons learned, capacity built, and positive outcomes that we are happy to share with our teammates in the ACLU universe.

The outcomes of this work include a crucial veto for defending against assaults on our rights and a pivotal turn towards a court that will protect abortion access and democracy.

The collapse of abortion rights in Wisconsin was devastatingly painful — almost too painful to comprehend fully — but it also reminded me that the ACLU exists for moments like these. Even in the most harrowing times, I know that my team will show up and fight alongside our allies. And we have. It is our shared strength, knowledge, resilience, and enduring commitment to operate in service to our communities that drives us forward.

State supreme courts can act as the last defense for our rights, and Wisconsin’s high court is poised, in the coming years, to make monumental decisions affecting voting rights, gerrymandering, the criminal legal system, abortion, and more. The stakes of Wisconsin’s spring supreme court race were clear, and we knew that educating voters was the crucial next step. With that clarity of vision, we — the ACLU and ACLU of Wisconsin — deployed a whole-of-organization approach to ensure every eligible voter had the tools, knowledge, and resources they needed to cast an informed vote.

ACLU of Wisconsin

ACLU of Wisconsin and the ACLU Join Forces To Empower Voters In State Supreme Court Election

The ACLU of Wisconsin and the ACLU launched a joint campaign to engage Wisconsin voters ahead of the state supreme court general election.

Our campaign focused on highlighting the candidates’ positions on abortion and worked to reach voters through radio advertisements on this issue, direct mail, door-to-door canvassing, community outreach, and social media. The ads reached 570,000 listeners over 10 times each. Abortion was the defining issue of this election, and these ads helped people across the state get to know each candidate’s views in their own words.

To educate even more voters, our team sent three flights of mail breaking down the candidates’ perspectives on abortion as well as voting rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and more, while we made calls, knocked on doors, talked one on one with voters, and recruited volunteers. In total, we engaged well over 100,000 additional people through these tactics, and those numbers grow even larger when factoring in other communication channels like social media, web traffic, and mass email communications.

After months of non-stop work, our ACLU staff joined with the rest of the country to await the outcome in Wisconsin on Election Day. From our office we watched the numbers climb to record-breaking turnout for a Wisconsin spring election that didn’t coincide with a presidential primary, and incredibly high engagement from young voters, women, and voters of color. This turnout was an emphatic declaration that Wisconsinites won’t tolerate attacks on our reproductive freedom.

I feel immense gratitude for all the people who poured themselves into the fight for a just future, resisting the worst impulses of our state, and showing up to support communities — especially those who have been historically excluded, advocating from the margins. Their passion and endless pursuit continue to give me strength. Together, we made sure that the peoples’ voice was heard in this vital election.

I hope that the countless hours Wisconsinites invested in getting out the vote will lead to a state supreme court that is steadfastly committed to defending our civil rights and civil liberties. In our enduring commitment to defending democracy, I’m inspired by the tireless effort, dedication, and determined spirit exhibited by so many people across Wisconsin during this critical race.

We celebrate Pride this year in defiance of the almost 500 anti-LGBTQ bills pending or passed in state legislatures around the country. Unsurprisingly, these attacks are turning to the criminal legal system to enforce homophobia and transphobia:

• Bills that would criminalize health care providers and families of trans children for providing necessary and life-saving gender affirming care.
• Bills that would criminalize drag performances.

Queer people have always been over-criminalized and over-incarcerated. This is especially true for Black trans women and other trans women of color. According to the Sentencing Project, LGBTQ adults are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population. Among trans people, 1 in 6 report being incarcerated at any point in their lives — and nearly half of those are Black trans people.

LGBTQ people live in a social reality that makes their lives much more precarious. For example, LGBTQ people are more likely to experience discrimination in housing and employment, meaning they are more likely to experience poverty and homelessness. Because our nation criminalizes people for poverty, LGBTQ people are more likely to be arrested and get trapped in the criminal legal system.

Governments criminalize queer people’s mere existence — and Black trans women and trans women of color are especially vulnerable. Police use laws criminalizing sex work to target trans women of color for “walking while trans.” For example, The New York Times reported in 2016, police used the extremely broad “anti-loitering” law to profile trans women of color as sex workers, including based on their appearance: they were “arrested while wearing short dresses or high heels or tight pants and, in one bizarre instance, that well-known symbol of sexual seduction: a black pea coat.” The law was repealed in 2021.

A relic of the moral panic around the AIDS epidemic, the majority of states still criminalize people living with HIV. These laws are based on discrimination, pure and simple, not on any valid public health rationale.

Ending mass incarceration and over criminalization must be, and has always been, a central part of the movement for LGBTQ liberation. Indeed, what we celebrate at Pride is an uprising against police violence and harassment, where queer and trans people asserted their right to live freely.

Credit: Eric O. Ledermann / Shutterstock

Because the criminal legal system is a tool for oppressing and controlling Black people, people of color, low-income people of all races, and queer and trans people — our shared freedom lies in significantly reducing the footprint of mass incarceration while investing in the resources our communities need to thrive and to be safe.

At the front end, that must mean supporting bail reform and pretrial release. On any given day in the United States, 427,000 people are incarcerated in our more than 3,000 jails despite not having been convicted of a crime. Many of these people are inside because they can’t afford their freedom. And, as a number of our lawsuits have shown, wealth-based pretrial detention is not only contrary to safety and justice, it is unconstitutional.

Even a few days in pretrial detention can have devastating impacts on a person, depriving them of their safety and stability. People in pretrial detention often lose their jobs, housing, or custody of their kids. They are separated from their families and community support networks — who scramble to figure out childcare and come up with the money to bail out their loved one. And conditions in jails are almost universally abysmal.

For LGBTQ people, pretrial detention carries additional risks. LGBTQ people often are held in solitary confinement to separate them from the general population “for their safety” — even though solitary confinement, even for short periods of time, has profound and irreversible psychological and physical effects.

Trans people generally do not have a choice about whether they’d feel safer in a men’s or women’s jail, do not receive access to gender-affirming health care or clothing, and face greater risk of violence, including sexual violence, from other people in the jail and jail staff.

The tragic and preventable death of Layleen Polanco is a case in point. Ms. Polanco was an Afro-Latina trans woman who could not afford $500 in bail. She died in solitary confinement at Rikers Island Jail in May 2019.

A report from the city agency with oversight of the jail found the Department of Corrections’ policy not to house transgender women with cisgender women contributed to the decision to put Ms. Polanco in solitary — even though she had epilepsy, a serious medical condition that should have exempted her from isolation. Her death was determined to be the result of medical complications due to epilepsy.

Bail funds like the LGBTQ Freedom Fund and SONG’s Black Mamas Bail Out Action center the intersectional experience of low-income, Black LGBTQ people and bail them out.

Jurisdictions that have adopted bail reform — whether through legislation or because of legal action — have seen significant positive impacts on safety and justice. A recent study of 11 jurisdictions with bail reform found eliminating cash bail had significant positive impacts for individuals, families and communities, in terms of relieving the financial burden and keeping families and communities intact. Those studies found crime and bail reform are not strongly linked — despite baseless fearmongering to the contrary.

The enormous efforts hostile state legislators and elected officials are taking to harm queer and trans people and pursue failed punitive policies only offer us fear and a lack of imagination, love, or empathy. If we want justice and safety for all of us, we need to reject punishment — and reject those who offer us punishment and call it safety.

Instead, we can demand investments in communities of abundance, where everyone has what they need to thrive: affordable housing, economic opportunity, health care access, well-resourced and affirming schools, and freedom from incarceration and violence.

Queer and trans communities offer us an expansive vision of love, safety, and justice. It is one where the streets are safe for all of us, no matter who we are or what we look like. It is one where we take care of each other. That is the world we want to live in, and that world is within reach.