‘Unlearning Racism’
Milwaukee’s best-kept secret for talking about race? A YWCA course.
When I signed up for the six-week course “Unlearning Racism” at the YWCA, I didn’t expect to learn anything new about race relations in Milwaukee.
As a Black man living in one of the most segregated cities in the nation, I’ve experienced racism all my life.
My parents faced worse. It’s the reason they fled the South in the 1960s for the promise of better opportunities in Milwaukee. They, along with nearly 5 million African Americans, moved from rural areas in the South to northern industrial cities from 1940 to 1970.
When they arrived, racism was waiting for them. Discriminatory housing laws restricted Black families to the north side of the city. When African Americans found work in factories, they were accused of stealing jobs from whites.
“Too often blacks were given the hardest, dirtiest jobs, too, but many were able to make a living,” said Clayborn Benson, executive director of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society Museum.
Now, nearly six decades after my parents moved here, Milwaukee seems to be acknowledging that its promise never addressed racism.
Last year, Milwaukee County was among the first in the nation to declare racism a public health crisis. Earlier this year, David Crowley, Milwaukee’s first Black county executive, shared his vision of addressing racial wage and education gaps, unequal access to health care and rampant housing insecurity.
Meanwhile, business groups, community foundations and individual leaders have pledged to do better, noting that racism is at the root of many of the region’s most troubling problems.
Yet race relations between Blacks and whites sunk to a new low this year, according to a Gallup poll taken in July, after protests sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The poll found that 55% of Americans consider race relations between Blacks and whites to be either “very or somewhat bad.” The percentage is the worse in any year Gallup has tracked Black and white relations since 2001.
The YWCA believes the only way we can improve that is to help people educate themselves by listening to one another and having conversations with people of different backgrounds.
I wanted to see how its course — “Unlearning Racism: Tools for Action” — worked.
The course may be the best-kept secret in Milwaukee for getting people to talk about race and become change agents for a better future.
A wide range of backgrounds
The Unlearning Racism class I took in the fall of 2019 had 43 participants. A majority of the class was white, but their backgrounds were diverse.
The age range was 25 to 82. Participants came from different faiths and both the public and private sector. There were retirees and people just starting careers. Some had lived around people of color all their lives; some came from small towns where they did not interact with people of color at all.
Some had specific goals — how to deal with racist relatives or how to get their employers to attract more people of color or at least acknowledge they were failing at retaining them. Some just wanted to educate themselves.
We met on the second floor of the YWCA at 1915 N. King Drive.
The four-hour sessions are held six times over the course of 12-weeks. Since the pandemic, classes have gone virtual.
Classes cover the roots, impact and manifestations of racism; understanding whiteness and white privilege; how to address racism when faced with it; and much more.
Martha Barry, racial justice director at the YWCA Southeast Wisconsin, and Dynasty Ceasar, the Y’s racial justice trainer, lead the course. Barry is white; Ceasar is Black.
In one of the first exercises, people paired up, with one talking, the other listening. The speaker was told to spend three minutes sharing his or her personal journey with race. The listener was told not to interrupt, nod, smile or make any facial gestures.
It proved extremely difficult. Speakers struggled when they didn’t get some form of validation; listeners struggled not to jump in, or at least nod.
Ceasar said the difficulty came from the fear of making mistakes. With a subject as difficult as race, people want some cue that what they are saying is acceptable. Without it, they falter.
In another session, Clinton Dodds, 36, admitted that he grew up in a racist setting.
“I was raised in Tolono, Illinois, a small town that was 100% white until I graduated from high school,” he said. “I still remember when I was in elementary school and a family of color moved into our tiny village, but they didn’t last a month due to the racism. I was 9 when I remember hearing that they were run out of town.”
Dodds said he never forgot the time his father told him there were two types of people of color — the N-word and “good Black people.”
It wasn’t until Dodds went off to the University of Illinois in Champaign in 2002 that he began to deconstruct all the racist things he was taught growing up.
“Everything I was taught to believe was bullshit,” he said.
Dodds and his partner recently moved to Milwaukee County in order to be able to add their votes to legislative changes to try to help people of color.
“If white people really want things to change we have to be part of the solution,” he said.
How privilege can be invisible
For an exercise in learning about privilege, Barry put us in a circle and gave us an activity worksheet with 23 questions. We were asked to check those items that were true to us.
Barry started reading the questions:
1. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people who look like me.
2. I have a relative or ancestor who was beaten or lynched or I was a victim of violence related to my race or skin color.
3. I often see people of my racial/ethnic background playing heroes or heroines on TV or in movies.
4. I have at least one parent who earned a master’s, law or Ph.D. degree.
5. I grew up in a home where English was the primary language spoken.
6. I feel protected when police are present in my neighborhood or community.
7. Most of my teachers were from the same racial background as me, my school textbooks reflected mostly people who looked like me and I was taught the in-depth history and culture of my ancestors in school.
8. If I walk into a store or mall I can expect to be treated with dignity and respect.
9. My parents owned their own home and qualified for the home mortgage interest deduction and the property tax deduction.
10. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing a home in an area in which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
The questions continued. When she was done reading, we were asked to tally how many items we checked. We looked up when we were done and Barry had all of us stand in a circle so we could see each other.
If we checked one to six statements, we were asked to sit down.
Then people who checked between seven to 10 statements were asked to sit down. I was in this group. All of the people of color were sitting down before Barry asked those who checked between 11 to 14 statements.
Only a few white participants were sitting down when Barry got to the end.
“The playing field is not level,” Barry said. “Race continues to have significant influence on people’s access to opportunities.”
Some of the white participants felt guilty. One said it made them look bad.
Ceasar explained that privilege should not be such a stumbling block for people.
When she was younger, she didn’t understand why some kids would have bad dental hygiene.
“I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t go to the dentist or get braces when they needed them,” she said.
Ceasar said she didn’t understand at the time that her parents had good dental insurance and so she never had to worry about her teeth.
“We are not saying white people don’t have to work for what they have,” she said. “What we are saying is that you can’t ignore that the groundwork was laid out for you, making your path a lot easier.”
The need to ‘actively interrupt’ racism
Throughout the class, facilitators knocked down stereotypes about race.
Using the 2003 documentary series, “RACE — The Power of an Illusion,” they gave us a handout called “Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Race.” Some of the facts from the handout:
Race has no genetic basis. Not one characteristic, trait or even gene distinguishes all the members of one so-called race from all the members of another socalled race.
Human subspecies don’t exist. Humans haven’t been around long enough, or populations isolated enough, to evolve into separate subspecies. We are one of the most genetically similar of all species.
Slavery predates the concept of race.
Race isn’t biological, but racism is real. Both the government and social institutions have created advantages that disproportionately channel wealth, power and resources to white people.
Saying you are colorblind will not end racism.
Barry said that for white people, it can’t be enough to just say they are not racist and they don’t deal with people who are racists.
“You need to actively interrupt racism,” she said.
When possible, buy from businesses owned by people of color; donate to organizations that fight racism; and at work, review your company’s hiring and retention policies. If your business is made up of mostly white males and you have very few people of color, you need to ask why, she said.
It can’t be enough for the leaders of your organizations to say we can’t find people of color, Barry said.
“This message is for the white people in here today: You can’t give up. We give up too easy when we see people who are racist,” Barry said.
“We have to fight for those who are not in the room,” she said.
Ceasar hoped Unlearning Racism would prepare the people taking the
class to become change agents at all levels.
That can be as complex as trying to change entire institutions, Ceasar said, or as basic as dealing with the relative who spouts epithets around the holiday dinner table.
“Instead of saying, that’s just the way he is, we want to get you to the point of not allowing that person to ruin your holiday,” Ceasar said. “And that could mean cutting that person off if they don’t change their ways.”
‘We don’t know each other’
For Ardene Brown of Brookfield the class was a chance to keep learning about a subject that continues to divide people so deeply.
“We are too segregated, and we don’t know each other,” said Brown, 82. “We don’t understand each other, and we will never get anyplace like this.”
Brown didn’t think it was unusual to have a class that deals with racism because she said, over her lifetime, people
have failed to figure it out on their own.
“This is a safe setting to learn what you need to do to go out and put this work to action and look at our own bias,” she said.
“I’m a believer in being a lifelong learner. I still take classes at Marquette (University) when I can. You can always learn something new, and that goes for all of us,” she said.
The classes are not designed to beat up on white people or make them feel guilty for racism or slavery. The course is designed to open their eyes and turn them into advocates so when they see racism they act to stop it.
People of color need white people to be part of the solution if things are going to change. For people of color, it was good to hear that we are not alone in the fight.
Fighting racism can wear you out. Experiencing and living through racism takes its toll on people of color. Talking about it is draining.
But we don’t really have a choice. In order to move from conversation to action, we must acknowledge not just where we are, but we are where we are.