Salon: Milwaukee’s violent protests are no surprise: Even by American standards, the city has long mistreated its black community

To wit: the city of Milwaukee is the most racially segregated city in the United States and has been described as a “living hell for black people.” The neighborhood of Sherman Park is one of the poorest in the state of Wisconsin. In 2014, the median income for blacks in Milwaukee was $25,600, as compared to $62,600 for whites. Milwaukee is among the worst five cities in the United States on measures of racial equality. As detailed by reports from the Department of Justice on Baltimore and Ferguson, the black denizens of Milwaukee, like most other black and brown folks who live in similar communities, often see their rights and liberties violated by police and are treated as second-class citizens in their own country. [...]

Racism and class prejudice intersect in many ways in communities such as Milwaukee. Because of the enormous gap in wealth and income across the color line in the United States, racially segregated housing creates disparate outcomes in the quality of public schools, access to health care and public services such as mass transit. Racially segregated housing also increases poverty and violence by concentrating it in one community. It also limits intergenerational upward class mobility by creating social networks that are homogeneous by race and class. Consequently, racially segregated housing limits access to social capital and access to job opportunities that could enable poor and working-class people to improve their life circumstances. [...]

As was seen in the aftermath of the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions, the corporate news media (especially the right-wing echo chamber) would rather generate a sensational and exaggerated narrative about the recent unrest in Milwaukee than engage in a substantive discussion of the structural and institutional factors that nurtured it. There are many reasons for this. Most Americans are socialized from birth to believe in the twin myths of meritocracy and individualism. This makes systemic or systematic thinking about how social institutions and power interact to determine a given person’s life outcomes and life chances very challenging. In the post-Civil Rights era, a regime of “colorblind racism” deems that racism is narrowly defined as either something extreme and obvious (the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis) or alternatively as words, actions and intentions rather than outcomes and social structures.

read the article