Baraboo is a picturesque town of about 12,500 people in central Wisconsin.
It’s a famous circus town. It’s the birthplace of the Ringling Brothers Circus, and home of the Circus World Museum.
The town is 88% white, about 6% Hispanic, and only 1.3% black, but isn’t known for racism.
Its high school, though, became a focus of controversy beginning in 2018 with the photo below, described by media as a “Nazi salute” (see story here), although the boys said the photographer told them to wave to their parents.
Fairly or not, the incident put Baraboo on the racial map.
The school district treated the photo as ambiguous, pointed it didn’t happen on school grounds (the photo was taken at the courthouse), and didn’t discipline any of the boys; but took remedial actions (see story here).
Reactions of townspeople varied, from we’re no more racist than neighboring towns to the boys don’t know better, so don’t blame them. Baraboo does seem to harbor some racism and antisemitism that leaks into the high school’s corridors and classrooms (see story here), but probably no more so than other places.
Three years later, in 2021, the school district settled a student’s sexual harassment and racial discrimination lawsuit for $862,500. The lawsuit alleged school officials ignored her complaints, and turned a blind eye to students flashing Confederate paraphernalia (see story here). That happens in other places, too, although you expect more of it in southern states with Confederate “traditions.”
Around that same time, in July 2021, the district’s white female superintendent was succeeded by Rainey Briggs (profile here), a black man. As far as I can tell that wasn’t controversial at the time, because I can’t find a single news story about it. In the spring of 2024, though, a group of residents launched an effort to recall the school board president, partly for raising Briggs’ salary, although school finances in general seem to be the larger issue (see story here).
Then, at Baraboo High School’s May 31, 2024, graduation ceremony, a white father came up on stage shoved Briggs away from his daughter because he didn’t want her shaking hands with him (see story here). So Baraboo is back in the news for wrong reasons again.
On the surface this looks like blatant racism, but news commentary accompanying a video of the incident (here) alluded to social media comments saying the father “did this in protest of how the superintendent and the district handled bullying incidents related to his daughter” (for update, see video here).
As the prior lawsuit suggests, this school district does have a history of ignoring bullying, but that’s a lot of other schools, too. You do wonder, though, whether this father would have acted the same if the superintendent was white.
This may not be a race incident, per se, but one thing is clear: Racism and antisemitism, for years suppressed in America’s social culture, are coming into the open again. I think it never really went away, but social pressure kept it under wraps, until “white fear” of demographic change (see story here) bubbled to the surface after Trump was elected president. In effect, he gave white people permission to be openly racist again.
This fear of being displaced is behind Republicans’ hostility to immigration, even though America’s economy needs immigrant workers. It’s also behind a surge in white supremacy and white nationalism movements fueled by nostalgia for the white-dominated American culture of the past. Trump has coddled, not repudiated, these movements; and Republican primary voters are now willing to nominate their adherents as GOP candidates.
But something else happened, too: America elected a black president, and that sparked a white backlash that “paved the way for Trumpism” (see story here). It’s not Trump’s fault that America is still a partially racist society; he’s only at fault for harnessing and exploiting that racism for his personal benefit, instead of turning his back on it and repudiating racism as respectable people do.
