Hear how race affects people
Storytelling event brings issue front and center
In the Milwaukee area, one of the most segregated regions in the nation, there is plenty of talk about race.
The problem: Most of the conversations are as segregated as the community. That is, blacks talking with blacks, whites talking with whites. Even then, the conversations are predictable.
“We mostly talk about it when it’s individual acts of racism, like police mistreating black people,” said Reggie Jackson, head griot at America’s Black Holocaust Museum. “But we fail to talk about how these acts are embedded into our instructions and passed down from generation to generation to create this atmosphere to allow these things to happen in the first place.”
There were two more flashpoints in recent days, including the release of a video showing the arrest and tasing of Milwaukee Bucks rookie Sterling Brown by a group of Milwaukee police officers.
The video showed the first officer to interact with Brown was confrontational from the moment he walked up to Brown’s car, which was parked across two spaces in a Walgreens parking lot on the south side. An officer and two supervisors were suspended for their actions.
In a statement, Brown said “black men shouldn’t have to have their guard up and instantly be on the defensive when seeing a police officer, but it’s our reality and a real problem.”
The same day the Brown video was released, an outside review found the actions of a Wauwatosa police officer who punched a black teenager in the face during a May 11, arrest at Mayfair Mall to be “justified.”
The video of the incident went viral and led to a march on the police department and mall by the Original Black Panthers.
The male teenager who was punched was not injured, and he was issued a municipal citation for battery, resisting an officer and disorderly conduct.
Jackson said having a no-holdsbarred conversation about race and class is overdue in Milwaukee — and across the nation.
But what would such a conversation look like?
He and others say it’s important for people to understand the everyday struggles people face with issues of race and bigotry, and the resilience needed to overcome them.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will focus on those questions in an oral storytelling event Wednesday evening. The event is part of the 50-Year Ache series, which examines where the community stands a half century
after the civil rights marches of 1967 and 1968.
Jackson, whose role at the Black Holocaust Museum is head storyteller, said the conversations can be difficult because whites and people of color tend to see the world through different lenses.
And the conversations can be frustrating: While the minds of individuals can change on the issue of racism, achieving progress on a broader scale is a much larger task.
For example, while the Fair Housing Act was passed nationally in 1968, along with local measures, African-Americans and Hispanics are still denied mortgages at much higher rates than whites in Milwaukee and across the nation.
Jamaal Smith, racial justice community engagement manager at the YWCA Southeast Wisconsin, agreed that more conversations are needed around race but said people must be open to hard truths.
“People are uncomfortable with the conversation of race and racism because it forces them to recognize the existence of race,” he said. “And to recognize it, means that you have to acknowledge it; and to acknowledge it, means you have to change it.”
The YWCA sponsors a six-part seminar called “Unlearning Racism” that examines the biology and genetics of race; institutional racism; white privilege; and how one can end racism in their personal life and workplace, Smith said.
Smith said creating safe spaces for people to have those conversations is key to tackling the issues of racism, sexism, bigotry and classism.
“Bottom line it will never be fixed until we talk about it,” Smith said.
The storytellers at Wednesday’s event include:
• Earl Ingram Jr., the voice of Resistance Radio 1510-AM. Ingram, who participated in the civil rights marches and has lived in Milwaukee his entire life, will talk about how the city has changed in his eyes over the past 50 years.
For Ingram, Milwaukee has always been segregated, but as a child growing up, his segregated neighborhood was safer than the one he’s living in today.
• Tina Nixon, a spoken-word artist and founder of My Sista’s KeepHer, a program designed to help heal and reach young girls of color through poetry, Nixon will share her story of breaking away from an abusive relationship and finding love for herself and her art.
She feels that art gives young people a way out of their circumstances and helps them grow their minds, so they are not trapped by poverty, race and segregation.
• Andre Lee Ellis, founder and executive director of “We Got This,” a program that teaches black boys how to garden, lives in what is considered the most disadvantaged ZIP code in the state — 53206.
He will share a story of how cleaning up his neighborhood with youth one day led to a sudden confrontation with police officers.
• Nicole “Darlin Nikki” Janzen, a spoken-word artist and Milwaukee Public Schools instructor, will share her story of overcoming bullying and raising a biracial child in a society that still judges people based on the color of their skin.
• Gary Hollander, an LGBT activist and retired University of WisconsinMilwaukee instructor, will talk about the difficulties he faced growing up poor and gay and how that “got tied into religion.”
He also will share how he fell in love for the first time, but after being with his partner for 32 years, laws made it difficult for them to be together when they needed each other the most.
• Pardeep Singh Kaleka, who lost his father in the deadly 2013 Sikh temple attack, will talk about how after the shooting, he found understanding in one of the most unlikely places — by befriending a former white supremacist.
“When we are hurt, we need to heal,” Kaleka said. “Talking about how that makes us feel is part of the healing process.”