Teaching hate, for credit!

Just blocks from the Potter-Carre residence, a 42-ton boulder served as a landmark on the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus and as a teaching tool for geology students, having washed up with the last glacier some 12,000 years ago. Until the local BLM chapter chanced upon a newspaper article from 1925 that reported the rock was sometimes referenced with a variation of the N-word. Yielding to their demands and forestalling the race card, the university chancellor ordered the big rock loaded on a flatbed truck and carted away.

Three years earlier, in 2018, the name of academy award winning actor Fredric March was removed from the student union theater for mistakenly labeling, as an undergraduate 100 years ago, an impromptu student club after the KKK. The national NAACP objected, pointing out the acclaimed actor’s lifetime of civil rights advocacy when racial segregation was a real and present danger. To no avail.

Indeed, the very curricula of the nation’s K-12 schools was nothing more than “a culturally specific artifact designed to maintain a white supremacist master script.” So declared UW Education professor Gloria Ladson-Billlings in her 2015 textbook, Critical Race Theory in Education. 

In his own book, Black Racism, Columbia University professor John McWhorter describes describes CRT as “See[ing] white people as potential oppressors and black people as perpetual victims of an inherently oppressive system.”

Credit the university for cutting to the chase in a for-credit course offered in 2016: “The Problem of Whiteness.”

Criminal record a must

A Madison candidate for state senate in 2020 encapsulated the thinking: “We must start by acknowledging that our police and criminal justice system are directly tied to the legacy of slavery and slave patrols in our country.” The candidate was endorsed by the Madison teachers union and university teaching assistants. She is now chief of staff to State Rep. Francesca Hong, D-Madison. 

That was the problem with school resource police officers. Not that they were white. Three were, in fact, black. The fourth was an hispanic woman. Yielding to the intimidation tactics of an outfit called Freedom Inc., Madison schools in 2020 expelled police officers from its four main high schools. Madison alders concurred by a 19 to 1 vote. (Another irony, Dr. Beth Potter — good-hearted liberal that she was — donated money to Freedom Inc.)

Keeping pace with Wokeness, the city created a citizens board to, essentially, second-guess police. Half its members had to be black. At least one member was required to have a criminal record.

Prosecution & accountability, deferred

Khari O. Sanford was being prosecuted in criminal court while he interned for city government. Eleven months before he murdered Dr. Potter and Mr. Carre that late March night in 2021, Sanford was charged with auto theft. The criminal complaint states while Sanford’s foster parents were away from their Middleton home and in Africa, he stole their car after disabling some of the home’s surveillance cameras. Days after the theft, the complaint says police found Sanford sleeping in the car. 

“He was upset with his foster parents when he took the car,” police say in the complaint.

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About that girlfriend

Miriam Carre-Potter is not being prosecuted. The criminal complaint against Sanford references her “untruthful statements.” She repeated on the witness stand that Sanford had been with her at their AirBNB residence at Sunny Meade Lane the entire night of the murders — refuted by her own cell phone traffic.

“Although Miriam may have not been physically present during the murders of her parents, that does not absolve Miriam from accountability,” allege Potter-Carre’s two other children. They have petitioned to exclude Miriam from her parents’ will. (Reported here.)

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District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, a Democrat, deferred prosecuting Khari Sanford. The program requires participants to meet conditions such as counseling and community service in exchange for the charge being dismissed upon the program’s completion — which would have been in November 2020. (Another irony: Ellen Berz was the presiding judge in Case Number 2019CF000902.)

Reminded that Sanford had posted his pointed Glock firearm to his Facebook page in the Carre-Potter murders, Ozanne responded, according to a newspaper account: “To my knowledge…there was nothing restricting Mr. Sanford’s ability to possess a firearm.”

Had the case been prosecuted as a felony instead of a misdemeanor with deferred prosecution, it would have. Not that any gun ban deters a determined killer. Prison does that.

Khari Sanford and his accomplice Ali’jah J. Larrue are being sentenced today for first-degree intentional homicides of Beth Potter and Robin Carre. Criminal statute mandates life in prison,