In the BBC film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s After the Funeral, a young woman gives a speech to a room full of men and women. Missionary work in Africa is honorable, in light of the poverty suffered by the people there. The camera pans over the high ceiling and mahogany walls, the “prim and proper” faces of the English middle class. Poverty in Africa is unacceptable, and she, groomed as a proper lady, must do what is possible to save these poor people. The audience of the older, wiser applauds while the camera settles on the innocent smile of the resolute young woman.

Surrounded by all those diamonds, all that gold, copper and other minerals - how did those Africans manage to get themselves into so much trouble? Oh, well, off to Africa!

The trouble or problem lies with the victim’s imperialist capitalism, here.

“Take responsibility,” President Barrack Obama tells Black American workers. It is corporate capitalism now. “Make sacrifices,” he tells Wisconsin workers. “Responsibility and sacrifices” do not apply to capitalists bankers or to corporations the U.S. government sees fit to free of burdensome regulations.

Little has changed, except the tables have been turned on liberal middle class in Wisconsin. They are being treated as the problem by Gov. Scott Walker and his Republican regime, and, as a result, the legislation “is poised to strip collective bargaining rights from most of the state’s 175,000 public employees in the boldest step by a new Republican governor and Legislature to solve budget problems by confronting organized labor.”

In itself, Walker’s proposal is an egregious piece of legislation, but over the last 30 years, there has been much equally egregious legislation passed by the U.S. Congress, legislation that has stripped labor rights from Red, Black, and Brown citizens. Unions have been gutted to do as little as possible to protect the rights of Red, Black, and Brown people, albeit written in politically correct language of the post-racial era. But only now do the liberal media from inside the state of Wisconsin call out to the world - CRISIS! A workers’ crisis! Only now is Wisconsin insisting that the crisis is a question of labor rights.

I can imagine what the Wisconsin liberal middle class feels like - since they are predominantly not Black and therefore not...

I am sure Wisconsin is cheering for the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya. The liberal middle class in Wisconsin would find it easier to identify with people in “foreign” nations rising up against repressive and authoritarian regimes. The liberal media has even proclaimed the Wisconsin protests the workers protests. - in Wisconsin. As we know, Wisconsin proclaims itself to be the home of the Progressive Movement, the bastion of liberals.

We should see a huge democratic mix of all races of workers in Wisconsin - outside the bus or carloads of Black and Latino/a workers from Chicago or other cities. We should see more than one or two “Black” union representatives or HNIC of security departments. We should see a flood of Wisconsin’s own workers of color.

It is a CRISIS of the workers, after all! Progressives believe in Democracy!

But most of Wisconsin’s Red, Black and Latino/a populations cannot join the protesters. The 23,112 prisoners statewide, most of whom are disproportionately Black, are not “workers” but slaves in the new age of Jim Crow, and provide employment for many city and mostly rural workers, 2010. In 2001, more Blacks were in jail or prison in Wisconsin than in any other state. The “rate of imprisonment was 11.6 times the white rate of 350 per 100, 000,” according to The COWS Issue, “Black Wisconsinites and Economic Opportunity” report, 2005. Under the Democrats, the city of Racine lost 13,500 manufacturing jobs 1979-2007. But in 1980, Racine built a new prison at the cost of $30 million to house more inmates than the previous prison, according to the website Wisconsin Prisoner Voice.

This was not a crisis!

And it was not a crisis for Wisconsin when COINTELPRO murdered and imprisoned Black, Latino/a, and Indigenous populations. It was not a crisis when under Reagan and then Clinton, the prisons swelled with Black, Latino/a, and Indigenous populations. Wisconsinites still attended the annual pow wows. They are good at missionary work, too, in Africa and South America - as long as they do not have refuges from Katrina dirtying the town of Madison.

But not a crisis!

Sixteen percent of Black men in Milwaukee are unemployed, 3 times that of white men (AllBusiness.com). Blacks make up 6 % of the state’s population, and represent 4.2 % of the workforce. But Blacks “earn substantially lower wages than whites [and] they also are much more likely to hold ‘poverty-wage’ jobs,” according to The COWS Issue, “Black Wisconsinites and Economic Opportunity” report, 2005. Between 2003 and 2005, the poverty rate for whites in Wisconsin was 10%, The Report continues - the national white poverty rate was 12%. But for Blacks, the poverty rate was 48% and the national Black poverty rate was 33%. Wisconsin tied with Iowa and Maine for the largest gap between white and Black poverty rates in the country.

The underemployed rate for Blacks in Wisconsin, according to the Report, is 17.1 percent, “2.2 times the corresponding rate for whites at 7.5 percent.”

The liberal middle class never thought of themselves as members of the working class. Class warfare could not be discussed in college classrooms, particularly if the professor is Black and a radical thinker. Teachers’ unions maintain a plantation full of slave-wage earners without health care benefits and job security. The budget! The budget! Under the Democrats, “the budget” was PC for the purging (democratic?) of the insolent or the radical (troublesome) perspective. Who needs a history of racial repression in the U.S. when Black students need remedial programs and Black prisoners are busy laboring!

CRISIS? Not for Wisconsin!

The liberal middle class in Wisconsin proclaims itself victim, workers, amid a labor crisis - Please, Mr. Walker, what did we do wrong? Cut our high wages, but let us stay among the privileged! We have been obedient facilitators of capitalism!

And in Wisconsin, they have been effective - in the tradition of U.S. liberal middle class politics.

Historically, the role of the liberal middle class in the U.S., has been to support reforms rather than radical change and to legitimize the ruling class, Chris Hedges argues in The Death of the Liberal Class. Return to that history, so threatening to the liberal middle class. The liberals, Hedges writes, collaborated in the purge of radicals in the 40s and 50s and again in the late 60s and 70s. Rather than challenge the “sanctity of the capitalist system,” he continues, the liberals, craving “careerism” and desiring “prestige and comfort,” took up the mantle of “commercial culture’s hedonism,” exhibiting a “love of the spectacle and [a] preoccupation with the self.”

Hedges points out that the liberal tradition has served “history and power” rather than human beings. Acknowledging Malcolm Cowley’s argument in Exile's Return, Hedges continues:

Wisconsin would have you believe the Republicans are the culprits of this newest crisis when it is only natural for the Righteous to make themselves visible as they take control of the reigns of power after years of liberal capitulation to that power. No Russ Feingold can save them now. It is no wonder that liberal journalists in Wisconsin did not see the train coming.

The crowd protesting at the Capitol in Madison is growing larger by the day but not necessarily more democratic, since the arrival of workers of color from out-of-state is evidence of temporary spectacle of solidarity in which the liberal middle class, ever preoccupied with itself, is calling itself “the workers of Wisconsin”!

The liberal middle class protesters of Wisconsin are the French protesters of last year who sought to maintain the pensions, health care benefits and privileges, rather than challenge the capitalist system that yearly produces the impoverished fleeing refugees from North Africa or the unemployed among long-time residents in Paris’s poor suburbs. The people in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, and Bahrain are challenging capitalism’s repressive hierarchical structuring of human beings and their work. They are challenging the system that is racist at its core.

Wisconsinites are not exactly walking like Egyptians!

The integration of race and class warfare in a state like Wisconsin is as real and as brutal a warfare as it is in Arizona - maybe more so in the Upper South (Wisconsin). There are few of those labeled “extremists” holding signs and screaming No Coloreds, but there are plenty who at every opportunity chose the familiar, deep-seated, fundamental response to issues surrounding justice, equality, racial, and class disparity. If you are Black, and your livelihood depends on the good progressives of Wisconsin, then know you are required to forfeit your life. There are so many Black workers mere ghosts in Wisconsin where the Jeffersonian model of slaveholder and promoter of “liberty” and “democracy” is the norm, not an inconsistency. “In the final analysis,” Dr. Martin Luther King said in his “The Other America” Speech, April 14, 1967, “racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide…if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.”

Make no mistake, Wisconsin is a state that has long been in the homeland-security-mode!

Not long ago, I told a fellow Black tenant that I had lived in Wisconsin, and she respond: “I didn’t know there were Blacks in Wisconsin.” A facetious comment, but for Wisconsinites, patrolling the borders of its states is serious business. The statement is a compliment - in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin’s liberal middle class is experiencing an expansion of what the ruling class calls now austerity measures - poverty-made-simple-for-white-liberals-to-digest! Like the budget, stupid!

Are the Wisconsin labor protests worth emulating? If you want to emulate the worse example of justice, the brutality of racism and greed, and the grotesque configuration of democracy, then by all means pack your bags, banners, and posters and head for the pines of Wisconsin where the native liberals’ dazzling innocence will mesmerize you. (Just a reminder: Most residents of Madison do not particularly care for certain residents from Milwaukee and Chicago. Madison worries about crime.)

What will the natives do when they are made to feel like niggers? I guess they are doing it.

Protest, Hedges reminds us, is the real work of “disturbing manufacturing or the system run by the power elite” (Death of the Liberal Class). But who is left in Wisconsin to remember? “The militancy of previous generations [has] been erased from collective consciousness.”

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.