A tour to teach young Black students from Milwaukee about the civic process turned sour after teachers and students say they experienced a string of racial incidents during a tour around the Capitol building on Thursday.
As a part of Tech Advocacy Day, an event of Wisconsin Tech Month, middle school students from New Testament Christian Academy (NTCA) were invited out to tour the state’s Capitol, and learn more about how the government operates and how to be involved in civic processes. While the plan did remain the same and students did receive the information that they had come out to learn, the experience was marred when a tour guide actively picked on and mistreated the group of students in a racially motivated manner.
From the jump, the tour guide — later identified as “Tom” by tour desk personnel when NTCA asked — tried to turn the students away from their scheduled tour, claiming they weren’t registered.
“From the beginning he did not want us to be a part of the group. He kept giving us reasons why we couldn’t go on the tour,” Michelle Childs, a teacher at NTCA said.
NTCA staff say the school was registered for the tour through the Milky Way Tech Hub. After a bit of deliberation, the guide reluctantly allowed them to join in on the tour.
Students from NTCA were bulked into a tour group of white students from another school there to see the Capitol too. Throughout the tour, the guide routinely went out of his way to treat the Black Students from NTCA and the white students differently.
Students and teachers from NTCA say they were met with contempt for repeating the same actions as the white students. “Tom” was frequently snippy and called out the Black students for making any volume of noise or asking questions on the tour — both things that the white students did with free rein.
The tour guide had often referred to the Black students as “those in the back,” according to Childs.
He also attempted to split the Black students out from the white students. In spaces where there were plenty of seats for the entirety of the tour group to sit, he would direct the white students towards seating and push the Black students to the back of areas to stand.
“He kept saying to us ‘those in the back,’” Childs said. “The other kids, he would tell them to, ‘come first and you in the back can follow.’”
The tour guide’s body language towards the Black students also showed his contempt towards them, according to teachers from the academy. He would posture himself to be only heard and viewed by the white students, and would frequently keep his back turned to face away from the Black students. He refused to be engaged with the group of Black students unless to call them out for engaging in the exact same behavior as the white students in the tour group.
“He was constantly engaged with the other students. Our students, he was not engaged with them unless he heard a peep from them, and say ‘Do you have a question?’ In other words, ‘shut up,’” said Tamika Johnson, the other teacher from NTCA who was with the students.
The treatment continued until the two teachers, Childs and Johnson, got fed up near the Supreme Court hearing room. The teachers explained the issue and requested a new tour guide with the desk to finish out the tour. The tour desk provided a new guide, but the damage had already been done.
“It was really uncomfortable because there were a whole bunch of other people in there who were talking loud and he was singling us out,” a student from NTCA said. “Everybody would turn at us and look at us weirdly. I wouldn’t say I haven’t experienced something like that before but it’s really weird because you’re around a bunch of other kids you already don’t know and to be called out like that is uncomfortable and a weird experience to have.”
“It made me feel like I was less than,” another student said. “I saw him kind of like picking on us and singling us out to try and make us leave because he didn’t really want us from the beginning.”
Despite the unfortunate result of the tour, Milky Way Tech Hub founder Nadiyah Johnson, who’s also an organizer of Wisconsin of Tech Month, along with Milwaukee state representatives Supreme Moore Omokunde and Dora Drake, assured the students of their importance in the democratic process.
“This house belongs to you,” Representative Omokunde said in reference to the Capitol building.
The two state representatives profusely apologized for the experience NTCA’s students faced in the tour. Johnson and Bianca Shaw, president of Black Equity and Policy Institute, spoke to the students more about their importance being at the Capitol.
“I apologize, but in the same regard, it’s all the more important why you need to demand respect for yourselves,” Representative Drake said. “The reason why it matters, why Supreme and I are in this building, is because there are people who don’t see you who you are as we do.”
Shaw requested that the students each write about the experience with the tour guide and how it made them feel. Students were working on those letters in the Capitol on Thursday. She aims to submit each letter the students write as testimony over the issue to have it chronicled in the state’s public records.
“I want you to write down your experience in that moment, not the whole day because I want you to have a good time the rest of the day, but… we do want to have him removed,“ Shaw said to the students. “He does not need to be in that position if he is not able to treat all of our youth — I can’t. I had to pray to calm myself down.”
Shaw, angry with the situation, was unable to finish her thought on the matter. She hopes that every student will be willing to come forward with their letters to express how the tour guide had made them feel.
Tech Advocacy Day ended with students getting back on track with the program to hear about the importance of voting. They sat in on a hearing for SB 325, a proposal on broadband expansion.
The students have a planned trip back to the Capitol building in February.
Tour desk personnel were not able to comment on the issue nor to identify the guide due to Department of Administration policy.
