Last week, the Department of Justice released its report detailing the depravity and enormity of Ferguson, MO's police and courts. Relatively far down the list of abuses was the revelation that many flatly, profoundly racist emails were shared among Ferguson's "law enforcement," with no repercussions at all.
A summary of these emails can be found here.
Referring to the emails, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in "The Gangsters of Ferguson" that "Bigoted jokes are never really jokes at all, so much as a tool by which one sanctifies plunder... [t]he "joke" is in fact an entire worldview that reveals that the agents of plunder, the police, are in fact not plundering anyone at all. They are just making sure the reprobates pay their fair share."
No wonder Scott Walker's staffers were laughing at the same email as Ferguson's police... a full year before it slithered its way to Ferguson.
One of the emails released in February 2014 (as part of the "John Doe" probe into Governor Walker) was this gross find from April 2010: Walker's deputy chief of staff receiving, and heartily loving, a "Dogs on Welfare" "joke" sent to her by a friend:
"This morning I went to sign my Dogs up for welfare. At first the lady said, "Dogs are not eligible to draw welfare". So I explained to her that my Dogs are mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can't speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddys are. They expect me to feed them, provide them with housing and medical care, and feel guilty because they are dogs. So she looked in her policy book to see what it takes to qualify. My Dogs get their first checks Friday."
"So true!" she replied.
The Washington Post, citing the D.O.J. report, says that in June 2011, Ferguson officials (positions unnamed) shared an email about a man "seeking to obtain “welfare” for his dogs because they are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddies are.”
It took a subpoena in a criminal investigation to bring the Walker staff email to light, and it took a federal investigation into a police killing to bring the Ferguson email to light.
This is what happens behind closed doors in conservative circles when they're confident nobody is listening. The giggles in Scott Walker's office and Ferguson's courts and police stations are from the same giddy, cruel sense of superiority, about race and class and simple power.
As happens often, Ta-Nehisi Coates puts the point squarely: "This humor—given the imprimatur of government email—resulted in neither reprimand, nor protest, nor even a polite request to refrain from reoffending. "Instead," according to the report, "the emails were usually forwarded along to others.""