UWM study details Milwaukee’s racial inequity
Milwaukee is “the epitome of a 21st century racial regime” with racial rules that “undergird the persistence of caste-like conditions for vast numbers of Blacks in the metropolitan area.”
That is the bleak assessment reached by Marc Levine, an emeritus professor and the founding director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Development, in a recent study on the status of Black Milwaukee.
In the study, Levine examines the history and policy behind racial disparities in various sectors in Milwaukee, including in income, employment, hiring practices, incarceration, education, health and homeownership.
One theme that emerges: segregation — first through racist housing policies and redlining and then mainkee’s tained by poverty and social behavior — helped amplify policies that created racially disparate outcomes in incarceration, education, and other areas.
NAACP Milwaukee Branch President Fred Royal said the stark analysis is hardly surprising.
“That fit what the NAACP has been saying for some time now,” he said. “There are systemic racial issues that have been impacting the socioeconomic ability of the African American community for the past 40 years.”
Education
Levine noted how “hypersegregation” in schools has risen over the past few decades. Metro Milwaukee’s Black children are “as likely to attend an intensely segregated school — a school in which enrollment is over 90% minorities — as they were in 1965.”
Today, he said, 72.2% of MilwauBlack schoolchildren attend intensely segregated schools, “the highest rate in the country.”
Employment
The labor market fell off a cliff for Black males after the 1970s as deindustrialization hit the city. A brutal recession in the early 1980s, a trend of corporate disinvestment in places accessible to Milwaukee’s Black workers, persistent racial discrimination, and the early impact of mass incarceration led to employment among Black males dropping 20 percentage points.
The Black-white gap in male employment is one of the largest in the nation, second only to Buffalo.
For those who blame education for employment disparities, there is a racial gap there as well. Among
Milwaukee’s high school dropouts, 33.1 percentage points separate the Black and white male employment rates; only San Antonio (33.3) and Pittsburgh (34.3) posted larger gaps.
Moreover, according to Levine, “White high school dropouts post a higher employment rate than Black high school graduates in Milwaukee.”
Income
Poverty, income, wages, and earnings statistics reveal wide disparities.
• Black children born in low-income households in Milwaukee have estimated young adult income 80% lower than their white counterparts.
• The median Black male worker in Milwaukee makes only 59.7% of a white worker’s earnings, the worst racial disparity in the U.S.
• In 1979, the annual median income for Milwaukee’s Black households was 58.3% of a median white households; by 2018, that figure had fallen to 42%. Nationally, that ratio has improved to 60.9%).
Homeownership and segregation
Homeownership is particularly low among Black Milwaukeeans, while segregation remains as bad as it has ever been, Levine found.
• Milwaukee has the second-lowest Black homeownership rate among the nation’s largest metropolitan areas (27.2%).
• Black homeownership is lower in Milwaukee than it was 50 years ago, and the disparity in Black-white homeownership (41 percentage points) is the widest it has been since 1970.
Using the dissimilarity index h (where a 60 indicates high racial segregation and an 80 represents extreme segregation), Levine found that since 1970, metro Milwaukee’s segregation index has been 80 or higher and today, ranks just below that at 79.4.
Incarceration
Levine described Milwaukee as becoming “a more ‘carceral’ county across the board,” with impacts disproportionately hitting the area’s Black population:
• Milwaukee had the third-highest rate among the nation’s 50 largest metro areas of Black incarceration in state prisons, which is 10 times the white rate.
• The Harvard Opportunity Insights project revealed 15.8% of Black males born in Milwaukee in the late 1970s or early 1980s were incarcerated in 2010, the highest percentage among the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. For Black youth born into low-income households, the incarceration rate was over 17% compared to 1.4% for their white counterparts.
Health
Some progress has been made in health insurance, Levine notes, where Milwaukee is “middle-of-the-pack” among 50 metro cities and in 2018, was in the top five metros for the number of Black children with health insurance coverage.
However, Levine wrote that Milwaukee still suffers from high rates of infant mortality, ranking fourth-worst out of metro areas, said Milwaukee is also “in the bottom 10 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas when it comes to deaths by homicide and ‘deaths of despair’ among African Americans.”
Policy changes could be teased from the study
Royal of the NAACP said Milwaukee’s level of racial inequity helps explain the current groundswell of support for Black Lives Matter. The problems go well beyond police brutality and include questions of economic justice and systemic equity.
“It’s the same energy that was exhibited when there was the uprising in Sherman Park,” he said. “It wasn’t just because Sylville Smith had been shot ... it was because of the frustration of the lack of attention that has been given to this community.”
There are policy changes that could begin to counteract some of these problems, he said, such as using more TIF (tax-incremental) financing to redevelop neighborhoods that have been hit by historical disinvestment from the loss of manufacturing jobs.
Royal is disappointed that the city has been slow to address the disparities, many of which have lasted — or even worsened — over the past decades, according to Levine’s research.
“The thing that sticks out the most to me is that we have seven Black elected aldermen who seem oblivious to the systems that have perpetuated the socioeconomic conditions of racism. There has been no immediacy on trying to bring some inclusion or positive impact,” he said.